What is Fruitful Dialogue?

Talking about civil discourse is all the rage.

Mouth Fruit discusses something that has a shape a little different from civil discourse.

Persons might limit the scope of what they talk about related to civil discourse to some levels of constructive discussion. A professor might say, "I want to talk about the lowest sphere of constructive discussion, what I call introspection and growth."

Others use a phrase that zooms in on the target topic:

There might be differences among topics when we look at focus and at scope, yet we see an engaging overlap.

Mouth Fruit uses the phrase fruitful dialogue.

Why fruitful dialogue? How is that different from civil discourse?

Dialogue, to me, implies a back and forth in discussion, yet discourse can feel like an exchange of papers, scheduled speeches, or formal declarations where participants talk past each other. Dialogue allows a working together. It is collaborative, perhaps, like the discussion between a programmer and an engineer in building something cool. There's a lot of interaction.

Fruitful, to me, means that good things might come out of it. At the end of fruitful dialogue, participants might say, "I am glad we talked."

Dialogue being fruitful enhances the scope and changes the shape of the topic.

For many people, the word civil refers to government policy—whether viewed as coordination or enforcement. Mouth Fruit steps away from this conflation and distraction. The Mouth Fruit blog encourages solutions that do not involve perceived violence.

For others, civil might mean public in the sense that the speaker would like to inspire change in crowds of others. This type of communication can be built on core fruitful dialogue. (Mouth Fruit will kick off exploring public speaking after the blog introduces message models.)

Fruitful dialogue is simply dialogue that is fruitful or has the potential of being fruitful. Let's not make it a banner or part of some Pythagorean secret language. O may it never ever be the name of some clique or a pyramid scheme.

Perhaps fruitful dialogue is a foundation for benevolent civil discourse. And perhaps some who come looking for civil discourse find they are seeking fruitful dialogue.

There are a lot of blog, video and podcast creators out there who create good content on this topic. I am not here to compete or displace; I want to augment, build upon, consolidate, discuss, and exploit valuable content going in the same direction. If a resource explains it better than I, look there!

If you feel your use of the term civil discourse is essentially the same as some or all of this, then use it. What are other good terms?