Complex relationships have interfaces. These are places where people must work together across boundaries (functional, geographic, organizational) to get things done. Interfaces host the conversations that need to take place for the relationship as a whole to succeed.

For example, in July 2010, the city of Denver (in Colorado, USA) held an international event called The Biennial of the Americas. It was described as a “celebration of the culture, ideas and people of the Western Hemisphere” with the grand aim of “facilitating the development of a unified vision for the future of the Western Hemisphere”. 



“The Americas Roundtables” were the primary component of public dialogue - the interfaces.

Topics included:

Education: The Achievement Gap
The disparity in education attainment based on socio-economic status, ethnicity, and/or gender. With so much effort placed on education reform in the Western Hemisphere, is the gap getting better or worse? Where can success be shared and replicated? What more can be done?

Women: Drivers of the New Economy
Women own or operate one third of all private businesses. Such enterprises tend to grow faster than those owned by men. How might women-owned and operated businesses continue to grow and thrive? What actions could lead to the acceleration of women’s economic development?

Health: Transnational Threats
Chronic diseases now replace communicable diseases as the leading causes of illness in most of the Americas. Obesity is an underlying condition. Even so, communicable diseases such as the H1N1 flu virus and drug-resistant tuberculosis persist. What incentives can governments and companies provide to combat the transnational threats? How can we use what works in one health care system to improve others?

Poverty Reduction: Politics and Strategies
Nearly 200 million Latin Americans (or 37 % of the population) live in poverty. Responses include: supporting conditional cash transfer programs; improving social services such as education, health, and housing; spearheading social entrepreneurship, micro-credit, and other banking services; protecting and promoting human rights; increasing access to technology; and encouraging greater political participation. What has worked and why? What more can be done?

When people come together at such interfaces, they begin to form a community, name their group, define its aims, share stories and build a common vocabulary. The Yala focuses such conversations on results by inviting contributors to spell out their aims, issues and views.

Yalas consist of Interfaces, Aims, Issues and Views. These fit together like the trunk, branches, twigs and leaves of a tree. Just as a trunk can support many branches, a branch many twigs, a twig many leaves, so an interface can have many aims, an aim many issues, and an issue many views.

Aims
Aims are often unclear or misunderstood. Each contributor comes with their own agenda and priorities. However if they don't together share one or more aims, the interface will cease to exist - its members can find no common ground.

Issues
Issues demand attention. They are the challenges we must surmount to achieve our aims. We find our way by overcoming them. The Yala helps its contributors to elevate concerns safely, discuss them openly, assess them correctly and respond appropriately

Views
Views should embrace a wide range of vantage points on an issue.  They must not be over-simplified because successful dialogue requires that we find the courage to explore the complexities of the issue being discussed. In particular, contributors must feel safe to question the dominant public discourse, that is to test "the limits of acceptable speech" on the issue. Thought-provoking views improve the way we explore issues by legitimizing the frank exchange of dissimilar ideas.

Mapping interfaces, aims, issues and views creates a framework for dialogue.

Participants in the Biennial of the Americas did not use a Yala, so those at each Roundtable (interface) never got round to mapping their aims, issues and views in such a logical way. If they had, a portion of the resulting "tree" might have looked something like this:



However encouraging lots of interaction is not enough by itself. It matters how such connections are organized.

A small group works best when everybody knows everybody else, but this becomes impractical in a large group. We know from experience that a group’s complexity grows faster than its size. Suppose you and a friend want to go to a movie. Before you buy the tickets, you have to agree on the film; whether you want to see a comedy or a romance, perhaps. Then you have to agree the time: early or late show? And agree the venue: near to work or closer to home? Add a third person and decisions become harder because preferences are less likely to overlap. Add a fourth and they become much harder. Two of you love action films; two of you hate them. One wants to go to the early show, three the late one, and so on. Other things being equal, coordination with four people is not twice as hard but six times as hard as with two people.

Nevertheless vast social networks (like Facebook and LinkedIn) work very well. This is possible because "small-world networks" emerge: small groups are densely connected, large groups sparsely connected.

A small-world network: 

The Yala uses "role-based security" and "permissions" (both fully explained in the Yala documentation) to connect contributors tightly at interfaces and loosely between them, balancing dense and sparse connections at different scales. This guides who talks to whom, what they talk about, how they talk about it, who else knows and why they should talk to each other at all.