If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.
For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.
I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.
Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.
There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story. Use them.” And that was it.
When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.
When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.
By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved ones who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners. We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.
After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make.
During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation.
That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes. It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationality was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.