demand boldness and courage, and we must take into account that our behavior may influence our counterparts to perceive us as less trustworthy. Another question is whether it was the developer-side that held the key to the initiative of inquiring practice.
Addressing the first question, we acknowledge that West Bank openly expressed that it was looking for a complete FX-system and that it would not buy a turn-key delivery.
Yet, we maintain that the possibility for succeeding with an inquiring approach depends on the perspective taken by the counterpart, whether that be a developer or a user.
Therefore, if West Bank had responded positively to an inquiring approach taken by Unique, we submit that the firm would have succeeded with this approach.
So, why did an inquiring approach not develop earlier on? Of course, the developers were quite street-wise in the initial phases, but on the other hand, the users did not act intelligently. They did not pose critical questions, and thereby they did not insist on engaging in an inquiring practice. In a Socratic dialogue perspective, neither the developers nor the users took responsibility for their own organization. We thus maintain that inquiring practice is always a two-way responsibility, which however might be provoked by one of the involved parties. Every stage must include inquiry, reflection, and active listening, with active listening including both listening to the counterpart and, perhaps even more important, listening to oneself.
Until now, we have argued for the Socratic dialogue method, but little has been said about how to initiate this method. From an information systems development point of view, we believe that the initiative must come from the developer-side, and in a sales context, it is probably the seller who has the greatest interest in implementing this kind of dialogue.
We are aware of the problems arising when one party explicitly tries to introduce a philosophical tool in this situation, mainly, because tradition and norms tells us that this is not the way of conducting business. Therefore, we suggest that the developer-side initiates this in a manner that tells the user-side that it is important to open up ones basic thoughts and values without experiencing that these issues are too simple to highlight.
Hence, the developer-side must state early on an example that is in line with the Socratic dialogue method.
When organizations apply Socratic dialogue in the developer-user communication, there is a high possibility that both parties will display exformation of a far more substantial kind than the information usually being developed and exchanged. Also, viewing developers and users from the point of view of inquiring communities of practice could, in fact, produce more open flows of information in organizations and thereby provide for more innovation in organizations. Therefore, we suggest that Socratic dialogue is useful beyond the area of application dealt with in the present chapter. It could be applied both among sellers and buyers of high-tech products and in the process of creating new management practice in organizations. Because this philosophical approach opens for a new way of viewing cross-disciplinary communication, regardless of business field or vocation function, Socratic dialogue can bring about exformation being held inside people—exformation that is crucial in order to understand and share knowledge between communities. Hopefully, this dialogue can help us not only to facilitate understanding but also to develop a new type of language in management and organizations (Lundin
& Rasmussen, 2002). As with information flows, flows of often used words and phrases in a community make us unaware of their meaning for other groups of people. We simply forget to reflect on it and then take it for granted. By learning and developing our choice of semantics together with others in a Socratic dialogue, we can become more aware of what we actually communicate in and between these inquiring communities.
We realize that our attempt to apply the Socratic dialogue in an information systems context is only the first move in a new endeavor aimed at formulating a new methodology for use in this context. Hopefully, further research will help refine and modify the methodology and also through experiments in real-life environments, as it is important to remember that the Socratic dialogue method was originally developed for a different context with the aim of creating a methodology that facilitates critical reflection about issues that, at the first glance, may seem obvious to us. Yet, it is by reflecting over precisely those kind of questions that we can discover exformation and thereby arrive at a better understanding of our counterparts.
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