A shared vision for Dialogue in prisons

The challenge

Spark Inside is a UK charity that uses coaching to unlock potential in people caught in the justice system. In 2023 it was exploring a partnership to bring Bohmian Dialogue into prisons, and commissioned us to design and facilitate the first gathering of the practitioners involved, and to follow it up. The objective: "To build a shared vision of the outcomes of our work together in prisons."

What we did

1. Shared vision. Each person built "the most desirable outcomes that result from Dialogue thriving in prisons", then the group built one shared model.
2. Agents. A breathtakingly honest round of building named around 33 forces, from prison culture and government policy to overwhelmed staff and the "saviour complex" practitioner.
3. Organisation and connections. The group arranged the agents, tagged those to engage with and those to live with, then built the connections the project must attend to.
4. Where are we in this system? Each person built a model of their own role and connected it to the system, revealing missing roles and conflicting assumptions about who does what.
5. Re-Vision© and Dialogue. The group refined its vision, then moved into Dialogue, with long, comfortable pauses and no one defending a position.

What changed

The refined vision moved from helping individual prisoners to transforming the whole prison: a new culture, a safe setting, high-quality listening, the senior team in support and the governor championing the work, with more honesty about risk.

Three years on, Tom Currie, Head of Impact and Innovation, said building the model "concretised" the group's thinking into something "colourful and multifaceted". The team is now in its second pilot, supporting an incentivised substance-free living unit, and plans to use LEGO® Serious Play® to co-design the next project.

What we learned

When Dialogue follows system modelling, it reaches a depth that conversation alone rarely achieves. This workshop is where the Systems Synergy began to take shape.

The full case is told in The Systems Synergy, chapter 8.