The challenge of the unspoken in organizations: Caring container as a dialogic answer?

This article reports on a combined research and training project that we conducted with a group of managers and directors in a large Danish industrial company. The article presents a model in which dialogues are seen as conditioned by particular dialogic competencies, defined as particular ways of being. Together they create a combination of a dialogic room and rhythm, which we call a caring container. This article focuses on how our own communication as researchers and trainers contributes to a dialogic praxis in organizations, but also functions sometimes to prevent it. The unspoken is not only a challenge to the members of the organization, but to ourselves, too. The article demonstrates that part of the unspoken can be said between a manager and an employee across differences in organizational status, when we all succeed to create a caring container in the training context. The perspective of the article is that dialogues contribute to establishing more transparent and symmetrical relations in organizations.