17/03/2026
Some musings on trainings for you this week...What is the difference between a 1 year foundation training in Open Dialogue and a longer (3 year) training? In our institute we have chosen to offer both. There is a history to this – in Western Lapland, the one year was understood to be the introduction, the year that allowed everyone joining the organisation to “get on board”. The core training was the three year training, that qualified you as an Open Dialogue dialogic therapist. If you chose to be a trainer, it was an additional two year training on top of that.
International implementations often use the one year foundation as the minimum standard for Open Dialogue implementations and research. For this reason, in the foundation trainings we tend to focus on skills and experiential practice – helping people explore the practicalities of open dialogue in their context, and what we “do in the room”. For me, I think of this as a map (or nowadays an app) that helps us structure where we need to go and how to be. As anyone who travels knows, this can be phenomenally helpful (I’m a google map devotee) and also, sometimes, impacts on our opportunity to explore and learn our own way around.
In the longer trainings, we have the opportunity to delve deeper, into the work and into our own relational networks and practice. This is something we as a training team deeply value, and we are one of the few institutes still offering this three year training. Within this we hold it as a priority to keep a tight trainer – student ratio (1 trainer to 9 trainees) so that we can offer a truly supportive and need adapted pathway for our students to explore the dialogical way of ‘being with’. This is a longer, slower, winding path, and I like to think we are moving from using a map to developing our own dialogical compass – so that we can start to get a feeling and experience as to how we can draw on these values and practices no matter the context.
We’d love to hear from you all – what have you gained from the shorter or longer trainings you have done? What are the challenges of the different approaches? What metaphors best capture the different offerings?