In this episode, Cinnie discusses: 

• How executive coaching inspired her to create conflict management coaching (a.k.a. conflict coaching)
• Being a better version of yourself when it comes to being in conflict
• What triggers us and what happens to us when we’re triggered
• Why participating in conflict and communication training can only get us so far 
• The organizational impact of leaders who avoid or are afraid of conflict 
• Designing a conflict management coaching program for airport security in the United States post-911 regarding how to respond to public pushback about increased security measures and how to support each others as peers
• The importance of normalizing conflict in organizations and figuring out a way to prevent unnecessary conflict and a way to deal with necessary conflict in constructive ways
• The value of effective conflict management becoming a core competency
• That many leaders aren’t aware of the financial costs (and other costs) of avoiding conflict and inadequate conflict resolution systems 
• What a conflict-competent culture looks like in an organization 
• The Conflict Dynamics Profile (via Eckerd College): what does it take to be able to behave in conflict in constructive ways so that when faced with a conflict, people don’t go for making it a personal attack on people – they look at what’s the task, and what needs to be done here in order to have an organization and relationships that look more to task than attacking each other?
• How coaches can facilitate conflict as a better experience so people will stop avoiding it and focus on what they can gain and learn about themselves and contemplate where the other party is coming from 
• Normalizing conflict in organizations through leadership 
• The value of a conflict-competence organization 
• The issue of leaders treating other leaders with dignity and respect, but not treating non-leaders the same way
• The growth she’s seen in the world of conflict management coaching
• The importance of preparatory meetings and discussing what it’s like to be in conflict before going into a formal conflict process such as arbitration, mediation, or trial — as well as post-mediation coaching
• Why she won’t do “quicky” training in conflict management and has a minimum time requirement to allow for pre- and post- training
• How to manage the difficult situation when an employee complains about someone to a manager but isn’t willing to share that person’s name 
• The value of organizations being proactive about conflict so that people in conflict don’t wait until a conflict has blown up then write each other off
• Why it’s unwise to have a default response of putting together parties in conflict to talk it out; a face-to-face dialogue isn’t necessarily the best way to deal with a conflict
• Making conflict systems tailored to an organization 
• The link between resiliency and conflict
• Various ways that covid-19 has affected organization conflict and perhaps pushed some conflict under the surface
• How to introduce with a coaching client the idea that conflict is an opportunity for profound growth as a person 
• Exploring conflict management options in high- and low-context cultures, individualistic and collectivist cultures, organizations with diverse subcultures, and international organizations

A summary of Cinnie’s model, CINERGY: 

• C: Clarify the goal – to determine what the client wants to accomplish in coaching
• I: Inquire about the situation – to find out what lead the client to want or be referred to coaching
• N: Name the elements – to deconstruct the conflict and help the client analyze what happened for him or her and the other person (Cinnie uses a construct she created called the Not So Merry Go-Round of Conflict)
• E: Explore the situation – to consider what optional plans of action may suit the situation and conflict dynamic
• R: Reconstruct the situation – to make the plan a reality by visioning, practicing, etc. – depending on the outcome desired
• G: Ground the challenges – to consider what barriers preclude goal achievement
• Y: Yes, the Commitment – to commit to when, where, etc.

More About our Guest

Cinnie Noble, a former lawyer, is a Professional Certified Coach and a Certified Mediator with a Masters of Law in Dispute Resolution. In 1999, after extensive experiential research, Cinnie developed the CINERGY model of Conflict Management Coaching, and since then has provided this coaching process worldwide. She and her team also train mediators, coaches, lawyers and others in various parts of the world, in this unique model. Cinnie is the author of two coaching books: Conflict Mastery: Questions to Guide You and Conflict Management Coaching: The CINERGY Model. In 1991, Cinnie was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada for her pioneering work in the travel industry for people with disabilities.

Cinnie’s Resources

• Website
• Blog
• Twitter: @CINERGYCoaching and @ConflictMastery
• LinkedIn
• Books:
  • Conflict Mastery: Questions to Guide You 
  • Conflict Management Coaching: The CINERGY Model 

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• The Conflict Dynamics Profile, through Eckerd College in St. Petersburg 
• Controlling the Costs of Conflict: How to Design a System for Your Organization by Karl Slaikeu and Ralph Hasson
• Designing Conflict Management Systems: A Guide to Creating Productive and Healthy Organizations by Christina Sickles Merchant
• Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict by  William Ury, Jeanne Brett, and Stephen Goldberg
• The Third Side by William UryCinnie mentioned a resource about resilience that a woman in Australia started and someone in BC has spoken with people from Ecker about it. That person is Catherine Carr

Quotes and Highlights

[3:42] “I’m not getting as many people in interpersonal disputes as I am leaders taking the opportunity to say, ‘I’ve got to figure out how to work better with conflict.’”

[10:20] “it’s all about tailor-making a process that facilitates a shift that somebody has in maximizing their potential to be a conflict masterful person.” 

[11:35] Gordon: “There’s something really fundamental that you said about the practice of conflict coaching. People can take all the training they want, but it has a generic quality to it in that it’s designed to apply to almost anyone who would come to a class on conflict. What you’re saying is that we’re all individuals and we all have these deeply, almost psychological ways that we respond to conflict, and we need a more tailor-made kind of conversation or interaction with someone to learn and become more familiar with those sides of ourselves and start to make changes that we might want to make.” 

[14:50] “If [an organizational leader doesn’t] have a core competency of effective conflict management to begin with, and you yourself are not conflict competent, then the message to everybody is that it’s not worth addressing until it’s too late.”

[20:18] “If I were to give advice to leaders, it would be starting at, do you have some systems in place? Whether it’s as dramatic as TSA [the airport security program she designed] — that was a big deal. That cost a lot of money and it was national. But if you look at, how do you make conflict and dealing with conflict accessible? It starts with the leader accepting that it’s going to be part of life, and showing that they are able to engage in conflict effectively. That starting point to me is if you haven’t got coaching, you need to get coaching. You need to even understand the concepts of that, the importance of it, to be able to then develop some sort of system and systematic way of looking at, how do we ensure people within our organization accept when  there’s an issue and ask, What do we do about it? That could be everything from offering individual coaching, offering group coaching, anything to do with mediation…”

[27:42] “The whole idea of a conflict-competent culture, to me, starts with the idea of what constitutes conflict competence generally in that organization.”

[29:02] “My dream has always been that every time [someone is named as] a leader, they automatically get conflict management coaching on the basis that they’re going to have challenges with conflict. It’s inevitable! So let’s make sure that you know how to do it. So here’s your coach. That’s one way of normalizing it.”

[40:00] “I think organizations need to know that there are lots of [conflict] services that are out there that are preventative, which is much more proactive than other ones…”

The post Episode 44: Cinnie Noble — Coaching Your Way to Collaboration appeared first on On Conflict.

In this episode, Bill Eddy and Michael Lomax discuss: 

• How Dr. Eric Berne’s book Games People Play can help us recognize and deal with high-conflict behaviour
• Four characteristics of high-conflict behaviour (preoccupation with blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviours)
• How high-conflict personalities (HCPs) can cause unnecessary doubt in mediators (and everyone else)
• The inspiration behind the High Conflict Institute opening in 2008
• Why the guests think high conflict behaviour and situations are increasing 
• The percentage of the adult population that the guests think have HCPs (it’s 10%)
• When someone’s default is to escalate conflict instead of resolve it 
• “Disruptive physician behaviour” – one of many options on the high-conflict personality palette 
• How people feel crazy when they’re around HCPs for awhile
• The difference it can make in people’s lives to be able to recognize high-conflict behaviour and adjust their responses
• High-conflict personalities in politics 
• How unrealistic movies can be when they portray HCPs drastically changing in a short period of time
• Mistaken beliefs of people who think they can change high conflict behaviour 
• How to effectively screen for HCPs during the hiring process 
• Steve Jobs as an example of how high-conflict people can help organizations thrive
• Managing the dilemma of a highly productive HCP in an organization 
• Enrolling employees with HCPs in coaching to see if they adjust their behaviour 
• How leaders can effectively communicate and work with HCPs in the workplace
• “The four forget-abouts” – what NOT to do with HCPs
• Why it’s generally not helpful to tell someone with a HCP that they have a HCP
• The CARS method for resolving high-conflict situations (connecting with them, analyzing options, responding to hostility or misinformation, and setting limits on misbehaviour)
• The unnecessary discarding of people with HCPs
• How working with HCPs requires genuine care and concern for them, and recognizing that they live in a world of distress and they actually want relief from that distress
• How mirror neurons can be of assistance (or work against us)
• Ways to ground yourself when preparing to engage with HCPs
• The importance of lowering our expectations of ourselves, such as being able to change a HCP
• Red flags that leaders should make a note of, and their responsibility to address it
• Their email method, BIFF: brief, informative, friendly, and firm
• The New Ways for Work coaching method
• You can’t control another person’s behavior, but you can control your responses to their behavior
• Two questions to ask yourself regarding whether you have a personality disorder: 1) what’s my part in this problem (people with personality disorders can’t ask themselves that question and that’s why they remain stuck), and 2) what can I do differently next time? If you can ask and answer those questions, then you don’t have a personality disorder and you can be a problem solver
• The similarity between HCPs/personality disorders and addiction in that some people may jump to a conclusion and label them as “bad people,” but it’s more a matter of raising awareness of what’s really going on under the surface and seeing it as a practical problem rather than a moral judgment or deficit
• How the competitive media encourages and normalizes extreme behaviour 

More About our Guests

Bill Eddy is a lawyer, therapist, mediator, and the Chief Innovation Officer of the High Conflict Institute based in San Diego, California. Mr. Eddy provides training to professionals worldwide on the subject of managing high-conflict personalities and situations in over 30 states and ten countries.

Mr. Eddy is the author of several books, including:

• It’s All Your Fault at Work: Managing Narcissists and Other High-Conflict People
• Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop!

He is on the part-time faculty at the Pepperdine University School of Law and is the co-developer of the New Ways for Work coaching method for potentially high conflict employees and managers. His website is: www.HighConflictInstitute.com.

Michael Lomax is a highly experienced mediator/conflict resolution trainer who has assisted many government, corporate, military and law enforcement agencies, as well as human resources and union organizations on how to manage high conflict behaviour. He also has significant experience leading the design and implementation of workplace conflict management programs for large organizations. Michael is an Associate Speaker/Trainer with the High Conflict Institute based in San Diego, CA, and regularly delivers trainings across Canada and the United States. Michael is a lawyer by profession and is a non-practicing member of the Law Society of BC.

Bill’s Resources

• Bill’s books: 
  • High Conflict People in Legal Disputes
  • It’s All Your Fault at Work 
  • Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths―and How We Can Stop!
  • Five Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life
  • Find more here at the High Conflict Institute’s online bookstore 
• Website: www.HighConflictInstitute.com 

Michael’s Resources

• Websites: 
  • www.HighConflictInstitute.com 
  • www.MichaelLomax.ca 

Shared Resources

• A Respectful Meeting Policy
• Building a Team Against the Problem
• Setting the Agenda
• The CARS Method for Resolving High-Conflict Situations
• When Storytelling Hurts Conflict Resolution 2019

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Dr. Eric Berne’s book Games People Play 
• The DSM / Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 
• Megan Hunter of the High Conflict Institute 
• “Disruptive physician” behaviour 
• Steve Jobs as a high-conflict personality
• The CARS method for resolving high-conflict situations 
• Mirror neurons
• Georgi DiStefano
• The New Ways for Work coaching method
• Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can
• First Lady Betty Ford and addiction 

The post Episode 42: Bill Eddy and Michael Lomax on High-Conflict Personalities appeared first on On Conflict.

In this episode, Elton discusses: 

• The kind of leadership required from political, organizational, and corporate leaders in this time of COVID-19
• Leaders being guided by values during a crisis
• The need for increased transparency in times of uncertainty
• Consequences of errors in crisis versus non-crisis
• Key principles for leadership during chaos
• Making creative, collaborative, and democratic rather than authoritarian choices
• Real versus perceived uncertainty
• How time crunches impact leadership decisions
• The importance of leaders being able to say “I don’t know”
• Taking advantage of diversity
• The skill of cultivating buy-in 
• How to have a good relationship with power 
• The wealth of energy and information released by conflict
• Transparent communication leading to more creative productivity 
• How the “feedback culture” in a separate career helped him make peace with conflict
• The importance of focusing on the problem, not the person 
• Similarities between organizational leadership and an orchestra
• Why leaders need to be secure about people disagreeing with them 
• Viewing conflict as transcending, not threatening 
• A scene from A Bug’s Life that teaches us rule # 1 about leadership: it’s not your fault, but it’s your problem
• How the higher one moves up in an organization, the more isolated they are, which decreases their access to important information
• Why there’s no such thing as a rational decision

More About our Guest

Elton Simoes practices arbitration, mediation, and Med-Arb in complex commercial disputes involving shareholders, intellectual property, technology, entertainment, and sports.

Elton has lived, worked, and studied in Canada, the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, where he held senior leadership positions such as:

• Vice President at Disney TV International (U.S.)
• Board Director at HBO Latin America (U.S.)
• Managing Director Sports at Globosat (BR)
• CEO and Chair of the Board at Playboy Brazil (BR)
• International Business Development at Nethold B.V. (NL).

He currently serves as President and Chair of the Board of Directors at ADRBC and is Vice President, President‐Elect, at the ADR Institute of Canada (ADRIC).

He completed degrees in business and law concurrently from two universities in Brazil. He has a Masters in Dispute Resolution from the University of Victoria and is currently a PhD candidate at Royal Roads University in British Columbia.

Elton’s Resources

• ADR Institute of Canada profile
• LinkedIn profile

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• A Bug’s Life (movie) (here is the clip that Elton refers to)

Riffcast

To hear Julia and Gordon’s riffcast about this interview, please click here.

The post Episode 40: Elton Simoes – Leadership and Power in Challenging Times appeared first on On Conflict.

• The deep patterns in nature that we can learn from
• The business model of the seashell
• How the expert on climate change is nature
• The value of healthy feedback loops in organizations
• How to reframe a challenging mediation using two extremes in nature
• Why leaders should tap into the expertise of those around them 
• How we all have a piece of the puzzle, even if it’s not completely clear to us yet
• How working in teams is where we derive the biggest amount of power

More About our Guest

Anne-Marie’s specialty is delivering experiential agendas and curriculums that cater to a variety of learning styles. She brings a creative approach to helping people solve problems through her experience as a theatre designer, educator, mediator, entrepreneur, and biomimic. As a partner and founder of Roy Group, Anne-Marie led the firm’s conflict resolution offering until the launch of innovation arm NatuR&D in 2018. She is passionate about building resilient organizations and communities. Anne-Marie holds a BFA in Theatre Design, a Graduate Certificate in Mediation, a Masters in Biomimicry, and is a Certified Biomimicry Professional.

In Anne-Marie’s words: At 16, I knew that the world was repeating destructive patterns despite lessons like the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, the destructive effects of residential schools, senseless wars, the cold war, Chernobyl and other pollution disasters. Acknowledging the problems is important, but then I need to focus on solutions or I get depressed. Mediation has taught me how to focus on interests and build understanding around values. Finding the practice of biomimicry has been a huge relief, because Nature has evolved elegant designs to protect itself and thrive. Nature’s innovations are adaptive, locally responsive, life friendly, resource efficient, high performing, and evolve to meet present and future needs. Nature has solved just about every problem there is. Nature is the expert in the room — serious Level 5 leadership.

Anne-Marie’s Resources

Roy Group profile

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Janine Benyus, author of the book Biomimicry
• The book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart
• The Natural Step organization 
• The book The Rights of Nature by David Boyd
• The company Interface (and their story of being more environmentally friendly through biomimicry)
• Life’s Principles

Quotes and Highlights

[5:08] Biomimicry is the practice of looking to nature for answers. Since nature has 3.8 plus billion years of design experience and has solved almost every problem there is, what can we learn from nature? And that shift allowed me to really find an expert in the room.

[5:46] Nature’s got all the ideas for solving all these problems we’re facing. As I went further to learn about that, I just can’t believe how true it is. So when it comes to conflict and leadership and the practice of biomimicry, not so much looking at a specific organism – how does this organism solve a problem when it comes to leadership-type social issues – but rather, what are the deep patterns in nature that we can learn from that are going help us reorganize our systems and make sure that our interactions air leading somewhere productive. 

[6:27] You can practice biomimicry at the forum level where you create an improvement to a train or a wind farm, or some kind of shape, because of the way nature does shape so beautifully, elegantly, gorgeously. You can do biomimicry from a process point of view where you might redesign a process in an organization by looking at one of nature’s processes. Or you might redesign a glue or something like that based on one of nature’s recipes. And then you can practice biomimicry at the system level by looking at what are the deep patterns that we could be, should be, employing here in order to get where we want to go, in order to adapt to changing conditions, in order to be locally attuned. 

[7:50] Gord paraphrases the four different ways of looking at nature: shapes/geometry, processes/flows, chemistry/the way things are assembled, and patterns/systems. Anne-Marie comments “The chemistry is kind of part of the processes, but I’m kind of glad that you put it in its own category because it’s actually the hardest one. Nature does everything with 26 elements on the periodic table, where human endeavors use…I think there’s even up to 120 elements now or something. So these elegant combinations – if we can learn nature’s chemistry, we can solve a lot of problems. And there are people working on it, but we need to get busy pretty quick.”

[9:14] Gord highlights the different areas that Anne-Marie has explored in her lifetime, including conflict resolution, leadership, and biomimicry. He asks, “Is there a place you’d like to start in speaking about how those are linked and meaningful and practical for you?” Anne-Marie says: “One of the ways it’s practical right now is that all of our communities are developing climate action plans, and I’m helping develop the one for North Saanich. And so there is the biggest problem, we think, facing humanity. And it incorporates a lot of social questions. People not only changing their lifestyles but also, given that we’ve messed things up so much for people in low-lying areas, and, you know, how do we create welcoming communities and provide for all that? So there is the biggest question: Who’s the expert on climate change? Turns out nature. The only reason we’re here is because nature knows what to do with greenhouse gases and has created these carbon cycles. So there’s a ton of answers there, both in terms of mimicking nature, which is what biomimicry is – not using nature but mimicking nature – and then also just supporting nature in her best work. 

[11:17] Gord asks “So as you advance that vision, what kind of conflicts arise that you have to work with and what kind of leadership is needed to work effectively with those conflicts?” Anne-Marie says:

• “The person who really put bio mimicry on the map is Janine Benyus, in her book Biomimicry. As far as it relates to leadership, one of the things she says is that we need to quiet human cleverness. So from a leader point of view, are you able to park the ego to some extent and realize that there’s a greater answer? There’s actually some deep listening that needs to go on.”
• [12:21] “It’s lonely at the top because you feel like you’re stuck with all the decisions. And the nice thing is, nature’s always there, open, offering something to look at. One has to quiet the cleverness in order to actually see it. Can I perceive an answer here? Can I ask nature for solutions?”
• “If I’m a leader and I’m working locally, some of nature’s deep patterns might be cultivating cooperative relationships.”
• Making sure you have feedback loops in your organization so that people do know how they’re doing. That’s a very hard one for leaders, especially in a Canadian culture where we’re so polite. We’ll think about how much someone is driving us crazy for the longest time, but we have a very hard time getting it out in a way that’s helpful to them. When leaders have feedback on their own performance, it might hurt a little bit or be nerve-racking to begin with, but then it’s absolutely the thing that settles the soul, if it’s good feedback.
• Another one of nature’s design principles is that nature leverages cyclic processes. So the neat thing about nature is that nature designs for extremes. So you know how in mediation, if you’ve got a problem frame, then you feel like the interests are too far apart, you think, Oh, no, I can’t deal with that one. Let’s find something where the interests are closer together. In nature, nature has to design so that it can be submerged for half of the day at the beach and completely exposed in the hot, hot sun for the other part, or in complete darkness at one point and complete daylight the next, or windy and still, or wet and dry, cold and hot. So these extremes are important.
• [15:39] Thinking about the human experience and feedback, leveraging cyclic processes is the design principle. So when do people need to be getting feedback? How can I, as a leader, ritualize to make sure that there are cycles that people can find predictable. And then they start to get into the habit of Okay, there’s gonna be feedback here. So having not only a timing for feedback, but also a model for feedback that people can get used to, that’s simple, that doesn’t go on for an hour and a half.

[16:45] Gord asks Anne-Marie if she has an example of a model, and Anne-Marie describes one in Russia that consists of three questions: what went well, what was tricky, and what would I do differently? Whoever “did the thing,” e.g. whoever just ran the meeting, gets to answer first, then others ask that person if they’d like feedback, and the person has a choice to receive it. 

[19:04] Gord asks “From a leadership perspective, what kind of things work in shifting a culture to more feedback? Because more feedback is going to potentially create more conflict.” Anne-Marie says: [20:08] “Nature has balancing and reinforcing feedback loops. So you can have too much feedback, like too much snow or too much water, and then it does create devastation in a system. So keeping the balance of that feedback and making sure it’s happening in a way that the system can handle is absolutely something that a leader should pay attention to. And feedback that is both balancing, like, This could have been a bit better, and reinforcing, to say Keep doing what you’re doing.”

[23:41] Gord asks Anne-Marie if she can talk about some lessons she’s learned along the way or seen others learn, especially situations involving reevaluation and changing directions. Anne-Marie says, [24:19] Change is really incremental. Rather than creating the perfect strategy and then launching it, this incremental piece is better. When working with leaders, what’s the easiest next thing they see as possible, and working with that rather than creating these massive strategies with millions of moving parts. The other nice thing in nature’s design principle is being locally attuned and responsive, which is what you want to be as a leader. The last principle in that section is about using readily available materials and energy. When you think about communication, that’s kind of the free energy of the organization. It is an energy flow, and so managing that energy flow in a way that feels comfortable, predictable, takes the anxiety out of it. I think leaders can also appeal to the expertise of those around them and really tap into this free energy of communication. 

[27:18] Julia asks Anne-Marie to share more about her work in climate change and what might be required from individuals and leaders. Anne-Marie says:

• “My favorite bumper sticker is When the people will lead, the leaders will follow.”
• “What is required of leaders? Well, first of all, a serious grokking of the problem. You know, there are studies that show that if you live underneath the dam that’s about to break, you think less about it than the person who lives 20 kilometers away. We’re underneath a dam now that’s about to break. When we were 20 kilometers away, we weren’t thinking that much about it. Now it’s hard to wrap the mind around it.”
• “I think if I hadn’t run into biomimicry, I would be hugely depressed by now.”
• “A lot of anxiety is possible in staring this problem in the face. But I think again, if you look back to interests, interests are what is going to solve this problem. What are nature’s interests? If you were gonna throw a piece of garbage out your window, what would it be made of that nature would thank you for? So I think we need to start thinking in terms of nature’s interests. Nature’s interests and our interests are a lot the same. We want clean air and clean water. We want to cool climate. We want healthy food. We want less recycling and garbage. So I think starting to align our own interest with what nature’s interests are is super important.”
• “I think we really need to get curious as leaders, and I went through a period where, I can’t understand nature, how can I perceive what’s going on? But even the effort of relaxing the mind and being open delivers a lot of results that way.”
• “We can’t help the fact that we’re creative beings.”
• Cradle to cradle is a philosophy that we want to create things in cycles. Natural Step, biomimicry, and cradle to cradle all hit the scene in the same six year span. They talked about how the cherry tree throws down way more than it needs. There’s a sense of huge abundance and beauty and generosity. So that is who we are as nature, and that if there’s a slow leak of a drip, it can cause much more problems. So to be less bad makes the problem harder to detect. So we really need to find out what is the shift all the way to good. What is the good I can do here?
• Back to business, Am I replicating a strategy that works? Like all our decisions that we’re making everyday in business are so urgent and time sensitive. But am I actually making this incrementally better? Am I replicating a strategy that’s gonna work, like you see so many patterns across nature? Or is this actually going in the wrong direction? So what’s required from people in the face of climate change, I think, is to start to think about what nature’s interests are and how that allies with their own, and then, How can I support nature in her best work of supporting me? And how can I do that in a creative way? 

[33:32] Julia says “I’m just wondering from your own experiences with engaging with community […] what you might say to that person who is sitting in their own home or their own car, listening to this podcast. It’s one thing to say to start thinking about nature and being open to it, because, in fact, you’re gifting them the opportunity to be. Simply to be. And I’m curious about relating with others, what your thinking is about how somebody can shift their thinking to relate with other people around this issue.” Anne-Marie says:

• It’s amazing how the mediation training has been helpful because I do see looking for interests in the same way as identifying what the function of a design is. 
• I think it’s still about looking at What is that other function that seems so extreme from mine? What is that other interest that I need to put alongside in order to accurately solve this problem? What are these extremes? 
• My husband and I – he’s from Saskatchewan, where the lines are very clear on the crops. And I’m all about the habitat, you know? Permaculture. And so the two functions, when it comes to the arguments about our yard (which we’ve had for many years but have now suddenly cracked) is, how do we create manicured habitat? So I think it is about putting those extreme interests alongside each other. Just like economy and environment. I think we have to really ask that question 10 times more deeply than we have. That question being, how do we create a system that creates good economic livelihood for everybody while supporting natural systems in the process?

[39:45] Julia asks if Anne-Marie can comment on any practices she’s seen that are supportive of the joint interests between people and nature. Anne-Marie shares the inspiring story of a business called Interface that used biomimicry to drastically change its impact on the environment for the better. 

42:08: Julia says “if you had some principles, Anne-Marie, that you could share with listeners around – if they perceive themselves as leaders, what would you want your core takeaway messages to be to them?” Anne-Marie says:

• One of the things that I realized is how important it is to understand that you have a piece of the puzzle, even if it’s not completely clear to you yet. That working in teams is where you derive the biggest amount of power. 
• When you look at nature and cooperative relationships, and also the speed at which these problems need to be solved, I think we need to get much better at knowing, trusting, that we have a piece of the puzzle, but then also looking around for who has the other pieces that we need. How can I surround myself with the people who are going to really give me the feedback and help me think through the things that I need to think through?
• I did a short stint at the Premier’s office and the Head of the Secretariat would bring a question and throw it down on the table and then just listen for twenty minutes as everyone pitched in on what they thought about it. It was always clear that she had the decision making power of what she was going to take forward, but she knew she wasn’t alone, and was very grateful to appeal to the expertise around her.
• “I always feel so much more powerful when I think of all my friends and who I can ask to better understand something.”
• I would just encourage people to check out biomimicry, to check out life’s principles in particular, which is a collection of nature’s deep design principles created by biomimicry 3.8 that are hugely helpful to thinking about leadership. 

[46:38] Gord asks Anne-Marie to summarize how biomimicry informs how we should respond to conflict, and how a leader wanting to help others in conflict can make use of biomimicry. Anne-Marie says:

• “For me, the relationship to conflict is around interests. How do my business interests align with nature’s interests?” 
• Gord: “You mean that alignment will be there if I can look for it?”
• “It will be there or it won’t be there.” 
• Gord: And if it’s not there, then it suggests something else.
• “Yeah. How is my business related to creating community? And how does my business support nature? How does nature support my business?”
  
  
• [47:33 ]“As a business model, take the seashell. It creates itself in ambient conditions with the materials that are right there. There’s a low energy process happening. And so in business, we could learn a lot by What’s the easiest way to do things here? What’s the path of least resistance? Which, we’re gonna have to check ourselves at some point, because sometimes the easiest thing is just to do the wrong thing.” But we’re really thinking about What’s the easiest way to do the right thing? What’s the easiest way to align here? What’s the easiest way to leverage the energy and materials around me? 
• And there’s a lot of conflict in this. There’s a lot of people who are, I think, first of all, really not clear about what the scope is of what needs to be done, and then quite unsure about whether they’re up for it. So advancing those conversations is necessarily going to be fraught with challenge and conflict. People’s sense of whether they belong or not.
• When you advance an issue like this – I don’t know if you guys have founded as mediators, but – you’re often the unpopular one until they get used to the fact that you’re just listening, and then they forget you’re even there, and think you’ve done it all yourself. But you’re necessarily putting your finger right on the nerve, and that’s tough work. So maybe having a sense of, I’m advancing this conversation because in the bigger picture, aligning these natural and human built systems is really going to serve me in my business, in my day to day life. It’s not just abstract – it’s a big idea, but it’s not abstract. And so how I put my finger on that nerve in a way that doesn’t just shock people. But hopefully there’s a rich will around that with feedback loops and some good cooperative relationships. I think it’s gonna use up all of our skills, and that’s where everyone’s got a piece of the puzzle. We can’t go in there screaming at each other. We know that doesn’t work. We’ve got to go in there creating the space for these conversations and framing the problem again and again and again and again. 
• What I’m so grateful for is that learning about conflict resolution and mediation allowed me to see a solution space and to protect myself from being so hurt by these endless arguments. That was the first thing. And then finding bio mimicry has allowed me to understand a higher, more elegant level of expertise. So I think that’s it, that I would hope people would leave with a greater sense of a solution space to support them in the work they’re doing. That these answers are there, but that we do just need to set ego aside and quiet the cleverness in order to listen for them.

The post Episode 38: Anne-Marie Daniel – Nature’s Guidance on Conflict appeared first on On Conflict.

• The long history of adversarial politics and the recent rise of partisanship
• How elites need to start behaving themselves and stop making deals with the devil
• How to break path dependency at critical junctures in times like COVID-19 to create social change.
• The impacts of being separated from community and connection, and how this COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity to re-centre on community
• Equity versus equality, including some great case studies
• And so much more!

More About our Guest

David Moscrop is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, a columnist with the Washington Post, a writer with Maclean’s Magazine, and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones. He hosts Open to Debate, a longform current affairs podcast. David is also a political commentator for print, radio, and television news. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

David Moscrop’s Resources

• Twitter: @David_Moscrop
• Website: www.davidmoscrop.com
• Instagram: david_moscrop
• Podcast: Open to Debate
• Book: Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones
• Latest publication: “When is Deliberation Democratic?” Journal of Public Deliberation, vol.12, issue 2 (2016)

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Former USA president Andrew Jackson
• Sir John A. MacDonald’s fights in the House of Commons
• Dave Mesline’s book Teardown
• Elizabeth May’s review of Too Dumb for Democracy? in the Literary Review of Canada 
• Political philosopher William Connelly
• Artist Christopher Pratt
• Path dependence
• Book Why Nations Fail 
• Book The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions by Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg (free preview via Google Scholar!)
• Frans de Waal’s experiment regarding monkeys rejecting unequal pay (quick NPR article with videos; original article)

Quotes and Highlights

2:50: This [COVID-19] is a tragedy that nobody asked for. It’s also a critical juncture where we have no choice but to make a decision about how we want to do politics now and in the future. Not just what sort of politics we want, but also how we want to do them, because there are different options. There’s the easy way and the hard way, and the easy way is better. You don’t want the hard way. I used to joke about guillotines in 1789 and these days, I look around and say, well, I’m not saying that I’d bet on it, but we ought not to think that we’re beyond institutional breakdown and revolution, and we should be awfully careful about how we go forward because those things aren’t off the table. 

3:50: I’m a market socialist but I’m not a revolutionist. I don’t prefer upheavals of the revolutionary variety because I think they tend to eat their own and make an awful mess. But I start thinking about things like this, about ways of doing politics, because I think there are better or worse ways to get the things you want, and those ways actually make a big difference.

4:39: For people who are listening and wondering where I’m coming from, I’m a market socialist, a civic republican, and a deliberative democrat. One way of doing politics is through deliberation, through sitting down and recognizing the person across from you as a co-equal in governance and self-rule, and trading reasons with that person back and forth, for and against, different preferences, and ultimately coming to some sort of conclusion with which all parties can live, even if there’s not unanimous agreement. I don’t think that needs to be all our politics, but I’m making an argument that we can pursue our politics in a deliberative way that is constructive, even though we face both personal, psychological impediments to that, and institutional challenges that also incentivize a nastier, often stupider kind of politics. 

6:26: Gord asks how politics in the West, particularly the United States and Canada, become so adversarial? David replies:

• I think they’ve always been adversarial, and part of it is a recency bias, where we look and say, Well, boy, politics seems nasty today compared to the 1960s. Two things on that: 
  • The first thing to ask is who was included and who wasn’t included in the 1960s. And very quickly you start to see that for many communities, politics have been violent and full of nastiness. They’ve been racist. They’ve been violent for years and years and years. We just didn’t pay attention to it in the mainstream. 
  • And the second thing is, say you take Donald Trump, and say we don’t like his style. We could talk substance in a different conversation, but just the way he approaches politics, we find offensive. I would agree, that’s obviously true. And yet Andrew Jackson, an American president, was  probably worse. There have been bullies for centuries. Ditto Canadian politics. The House of Commons is probably more quote unquote well behaved or civil today than it was 100 years ago. I mean, John A. MacDonald, I’m fairly sure he fought somebody or wanted to fight somebody on the House of Commons floor. So the history of our politics are antagonistic.
    
    
• I think one of the big changes, especially in the United States in the last 30 or 40 years, is the rise of partisanship as an identity, which takes on a particularly strange and sort of a toxic form. Partisanship isn’t just how you vote or what you believe; it’s how you see the world and it’s who you are. It becomes an identity and a lens, and your inclination to defend that identity or to try to maintain that lens as the way you see the world leads you to all kinds of strange behaviors, nasty behaviors, but also bizarre behaviors.
  
  
• Take the current coronavirus as an example. Americans’ perception of the threat of the virus, the seriousness of the virus, very based on partisan identity. Republicans think it’s less serious. Democrats think it’s more. And you might say, Oh, they’re just sorting into parties based on that prior belief, but it’s not true. If you were to switch the presidents, that would probably flip.
  
  
• Politics has always been nasty, but now we’re getting a deep identity-based partisanship, which is sort of new, and we’re also getting the decline of liberal democracy, which we didn’t think of 40 years ago I think quite as much as we do now, and that is creating a situation I think that’s that’s new for us, and unprecedented. I don’t know what comes of that.
  
  

10:06: Gord says he’s very interested in this notion that people’s identity has become more invested in their political orientation and asks David, “Do you have any sense of what the social conditions have been that have invited people into that sort of psychological change?” David replies:

• Yeah, so we all have identities. We aren’t always aware of them, but we do have identities. And these overlapping identities form who we are, and sometimes they’re in conflict with one another and create cognitive dissonance that we have to manage. One of the ways you try to resist identities becoming toxic is through social, economic, and political equality. If you see yourself as being treated fairly, if you see yourself as in a common endeavor with other people who are like you, if you see yourself not as in battle with someone who disagrees with you and seeing that person’s a threat to you, well then you’re going to behave very differently than if you see it as a zero sum game war of all against all. And I think, especially in the American context, the decline of equality, both formal equality and informal equality, is extraordinarily dangerous because it’s going to encourage that battle. In Canada, it’s not quite as bad. I’ve got lots of critiques of Canadian institutions, but they’re better. And so I do think part of the question of how you address the challenges of partisanship as a toxic identity is how you create inclusive institutions, including economic institutions.
• That’s part one. Really quickly, part two is, elites need to behave themselves and not make deals with the devil.

16:35: Julia shares that as she’s listening to Gord and David talk about big-picture concepts, she’s starting to feel helpless and hopeless, and she’d like to ground herself and our listeners. She asks David, “I’d like to hear your thinking around How does that affect me? I’m not a president, I’m Joe, Julia, whomever. Yeah…help me!” David replies:

• My book is divided into three parts. The first part is sort of, here’s who we want to be,  here’s who we’d like to think we are, here’s who we probably should be. Part two is here’s why we fall short of all that. Part three is how we can get back to where we want to be, or get to where we want to be. There are sort of two streams: 
  • There’s the individual stream: self improvement and self practice about how you could sort of think about these things cognitively. How to avoid cognitive bias, how to be open to reasons, how to give reasons, how to think about others as interlocutors, not opponents. We need to accept that if we’re going to do something then we need to do some self work on how we think, what we know, what we’re open to hearing. Why, when we hear something, we cringe or get our backs up or want to attack rather than listen and think and reflect. The first thing I say to someone is, if you’re serious about wanting to do something, start with working on yourself to be a better thinker, to be a better reasoner, to be a better citizen, to be a better interlocutor; you have to start with yourself. I’m constantly doing the self-work of asking myself, Why do I want to lash out? Why do I feel vindictive? Why did that make me angry? Why is my impulse to make fun of someone instead of try to understand them? We all get these impulses. There are very few people who don’t get them. The people who are remarkable to me and to many are those who control those things. It’s not that they have the absence of these very human emotions; it’s that they know how to recognize them and control them and to focus them in a more productive direction. 
• Avenue two is institutional changes that support civic action, civic health, and we can debate what those are. I think they’re inclusive political and economic institutions. So you’ve got basic qualities that everyone can live with dignity and be an effective citizen and interlocutor. And then there are participatory institutions, whether it’s a deliberative assembly where you get ordinary citizens who come together and trade reasons back and forth, for or against some policy, or whether it’s a participatory budgeting exercise or process where ordinary citizens are given a part of the budget and they get to talk about how they want to allocate it and then ultimately allocate it. These are things that are done around the world, including in Canada, in some cases.

26:03: Julia and David talk critical junctures, taking the moment (opportunity), social change, and path dependence.

• David: Imagine you land yourself on a desert island and you gotta make your way inland. What do you do? You hack yourself a path. And the next day you’re not gonna get up and go hack another path; you’re gonna take the same path because it’s easier. We take the path of least resistance, and if it works well enough, we just keep on it.
• Julia: And our neural pathways work that way too.
• David: Exactly. Neurons that wire together fire together. And that’s true of institutions, it’s true of habits. But it’s also true that sometimes you reach a fork in the road, and for whatever reason, you can’t do things the same way you used to, and now you’ve got to pick a new way of doing things. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote one of my favourite books called Why Nations Fail, and they talk about this a lot. One of the cases they cite is the Black Death of the fourteenth century in Europe that decimated Europe and also decimated the feudal system. The path dependency on the feudal system started to break down, or at least broke down much faster in the aftermath of the black death, and what rose to replace it? Democracy. The collapse of labour had, to some extent, empowered the labouring class, who came back and said, Well, now we’ve got some leverage, and we’re gonna use it to extract institutional changes and rights and so on. So you can trace some of the origin, some of the consequence of the rise of European democracy, especially first in England, to the black death. It’s a critical juncture.
• David: I do think there’s an opportunity for us to look at this and say, liberal democracy is crumbling. The market system as we practice it is flawed. And if we’re going to hold this all together, we’re going to need structural changes, and that could take different all kinds of different forms. The argument that I’m advancing is for a democratized economy and a deliberative, inclusive, participatory politics to complement representative democracies. Our civic institutions, our political institutions, our economic institutions need to be thicker because you can’t really be a full citizen if you don’t have the means and the opportunity to be a full citizen. It’s coming from a place of a vision for a democracy that is thicker, more inclusive. That is based on the fact that the right to be a citizen and to participate in civic life is dependent on all kinds of needs that we don’t take as rights, that we might have to, going forward.

34:55: David says: 

• I think a lot of the crises, of liberal democracy, of capitalism, of different things, are crises of community. This is in fact a very conservative point; this is a communitarian old-school right-wing point that I very, very strongly believe in: that we don’t respect or protect or emphasize community enough, community-building – that might be through civic action, but it might just be through spending time with your family and your friends; that a lot of our pathology is due to the fact that our communities are strained that we don’t have those connections. Some of that is because of the market. If you can’t afford to live in a neighborhood, if you can’t afford to live in the city – we see that the market sometimes tears communities apart.
• Now we’re seeing people separated from communities, and we see how traumatic that is and how hard that is and hurtful that is, and alienating. And we say, Well we want that back. We want community back. We want to be able to sit beside people. We want to be able to hug people. We want to touch them. We want to be in the same room as them. Digital’s not the same. We miss being out among other people in the community and, well, boy, we want that, and we’re gonna go back, and we’re gonna reclaim it. And so there’s also an opportunity to recentre on community as well. So hopefully we continue to forefront that as we move through this crisis and its aftermath.

39:15: Gord asks David if he can offer advice for those in leadership positions, such as the executive director of an institution, in a time of breakdown or crisis. David responds:

• David shares a story of being the executor after his father died: “I was studying democratic deliberation at the time. For our family, it was a time of crisis and chaos, and there were quite a few of us. And we had all the old family pathologies that you have, and we had all the family alliances. 
• I decided to adopt what some call authoritarian deliberation, somewhat tongue in cheek. What I did was say, Okay, we’re in a stage of crisis. We’re in a stage of extraordinary difficulty. We’re in a stage of break down, to some extent. This isn’t the time for someone to be an authoritarian, to seize power and tell people what to do. But there is a time where we need to make decisions. We need to make them quickly, and people need to be accountable for them. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a series of meetings where we’re going to sit down and deliberate either in person or remotely, quick, and we’re gonna talk about what we want, we’re going to exchange reasons, and then I’m gonna make a decision because now isn’t really the moment to put it to a vote. 
• And what I found was I was able to build consensus. I was able to get buy in, and I was able to execute decisions that ended up being productive. 
• Now I’m not arguing for authoritarianism. What I’m arguing for is the fact that in a managerial structure – I’m not talking about democracy, I’m talking about managerial structures – there are people who need to be accountable. There are people who need to make a decision. They can do that in a way that brings people on board and creates buy in and understanding. My argument from a managerial perspective is that you ought to be bringing people in, meaningfully listening to them, explaining what you’re deciding and why you’re deciding it, giving reasons, and then being accountable for those decisions, and leaving them to what extent is possible open for revision so that you could come back and say, I made a mistake. Here’s why I made a mistake. Here’s how I recognize that. Here’s how we’re going to correct it. And I have found that, and lots of people, as you well know, who study this will have found that people will respect that. They don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to recognize shortcomings, to recognize error, and to recover. 
• Leadership isn’t saying I’m gonna go poll my constituents and do whatever they say. It isn’t, I’m going to do whatever is popular today, because what’s popular today might not be what’s popular tomorrow, and what’s popular today might not be just. Leadership is saying I have authority to make a decision. I have capacity to exercise judgment. I have responsibility to the people on whose behalf I’m making decisions. I’m going to think, I’m going to consult, and then I’m going to make a judgment call and do something, and then I’m gonna be held accountable.

47:57: Gord asks David to speak about the difference between equality and equity. David says:

• One of my critiques of liberalism is that liberalism is obsessed with equality, less obsessed with or even aware of equity. So imagine it this way. Imagine a platform with three different heights and imagine three people of three different heights themselves. With equality, you would say, Okay, well, we just level the platform and everyone stands up. So you’ve got one person who’s tall, one person who’s short, one person who’s shortest, and we say, Well, that’s equality. The platform was level. Everyone just stands. Some are tall, some are shorter, some are shortest still. Equity is saying, We’re gonna put the tall person on the short end of the platform, the second tallest on the second shortest, and the shortest person stands on the tallest. And then everyone is the same height, in terms of the platform. Equity is concerned with the just distribution, not of the same distribution.
• From an equity lens, democracy isn’t just about everyone having the exact same vote or the exact same share or the exact same theoretical opportunity. It’s about the fact that there are differences built into realities and communities and issues that need to be respected, and that sometimes people need a little more. Sometimes people need a little less. You adjust accordingly. Equity is harder because it’s not one size fits all. You’ve got to make judgment calls, you gotta adjust as you go. Equality is set it and forget it, and then you say, Well, some win. Some people lose. What you gonna do? Everyone was equal. Reality isn’t like that at all, right? We don’t start from the same places. We don’t have the same skills. We don’t have the same parents. We don’t come from the same cities. So equity allows us to rebalance according to need. It’s more difficult, but it’s also more just.
• One of my favorite examples from political science is from a book a couple years ago by Tali Mendelbert and Chris Karpowitz called The Silent Sex. They studied the dynamics of deliberation and they found a golden ratio of women to men in a deliberation to get quality deliberation, nonsexist deliberation, and so on. You might say, Oh, that must be 1 to 1. Not true. If you have too many men compared to women, the men misbehave because they are bullies and they’re louder, they’re more, whatever. But if you have too few men, the men try to peacock and they misbehave. So there’s a golden ratio of slightly more than…I can’t remember, like one point something women to men, but it’s reflective of a reality that we have these socially patterned types of behaviors and realities that, when you apply the equality lens, you get worse outcomes than if you apply the equity lens. We need to get over this idea that equality and fairness are the same thing. In fact, often it’s the case that equity is fair and equality is not fair, and that’s something we need to deal with.
• Julia mentions an experiment by Frans de Waal regarding monkeys rejecting unequal pay, and says that fairness is deeply embedded and encoded in us.
• David points out that sometimes we do want simple fairness in terms of equality, such as a coin toss (depending on the situation)

58:55: The big takeaway is, people have capacity. People can learn to be good citizens. They can learn to deliberate. They can learn to understand when equality is appropriate and when equity is appropriate. They can empathize with others. They can build what might seem like unlikely communities. But that involves some personal work, and it also involves politicians and other elites who have to behave themselves and not exploit cleavages for political gain. And it involves substantive institutional changes that allows there to be the fundamental requirements for people to do that, material requirements for people to do that, both formal and informal, legal and materially substantive; not only the right to participate, but also enough money to pay the rent or to have child care so you can show up. And if we can get those things, if we can get politicians behaving, individuals doing self work, and institutions providing means and opportunity for people to engage, that we can create the kind of institutions and the kind of society that can withstand crises in the short term and can stay standing and withstand general decline in the long term. That’s a choice that we could make. And we’ve reached a critical juncture today as we sit here now, as people will listen now, where we can make decisions that are going to affect whether or not those things are possible or not, and we ought to take that opportunity to do it. That’s by far the better way to do things because the alternative is decline and the sort of conflict that we don’t want. And to me, that’s just a no-brainer.

The post Episode 36: David Moscrop – The Pandemic Possibility for Social Change appeared first on On Conflict.

• The important distinction between difference, disagreement, conflict, and dispute
• What he thinks can be negotiated between parties and what cannot 
• The role of identity in conflict
• How crucial it is for conflict management systems being designed by the actual stakeholders
• Implications of professionalizing mediation

More About our Guest

Gordon Sloan is a mediator and teacher of conflict resolution and dispute resolution. For 35 years, he has been a national leader in a range of third party interventions and is known for interventions in larger disputes involving multiple parties, often with public issues at stake. Gordon teaches in government, private, and academic settings; designs conflict management systems; and is a founding partner in ADR Education, a national conflict resolution firm. His degrees are in Religion and Law. One of his fascinations is how to address intense, value-based conflict, particularly where identity is being challenged.

Gordon Sloan’s Resources

• His ADR Education page

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Chris Moore (mediator, author)
• The Carter Centre
• Ben Hoffman
• The Cyprus situation
• Chris Merchand and Kathy Constantino (authors)
• Mediator in a Box 
• Bill/William Ury

Quotes and Highlights

(Given that we have two Gordons in this episode, we call our co-host Gord and our guest Gordon Sloan)

[1:21] Gord notes that one of things that Gordon Sloan has spoken about quite a bit in recent years is the distinction between a conflict and a dispute, and why that’s important. Gordon Sloan replies:

• One of the things that has to bookend that kind of a conversation is how little is really written about that distinction, so there isn’t a body of knowledge out there that generally recognizes it in this field (specifically mediation and conflict resolution, generally). 
• But there’s quite a history to that, and without boring us through this history over the last 20 or 30 years, the field has not labeled things very accurately, or not clearly enough that we can make these distinctions with the words conflict and dispute. 
• There seem to be two distinct bodies of experience that mediators are called in to deal with. (Gord adds that what Gordon is talking about is relevant for anyone dealing with conflict.)
• One experience is disagreement (which can sometimes be irritating, difficult or violent) and the other is difference
• Difference doesn’t always mean disagreement. There’s all kinds of situations where we could be different. Cultures can be different. And there could be lots of rich and interesting difference out there. 
• Gordon Sloan talks about how dispute resolution began all across Canada and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Gordon Sloan: so I know, in some of my personal relationships and the relationships of organizations and people that I have worked with over the years, there are just profound differences. And those differences are actually very productive, very helpful. They cause a lot of learning. They cause a lot of growth if they’re reasonably constructive and not dysfunctional. So that’s great! Viva la difference is fine. We can be different, and cultures can be different, and language groups and ages and genders, and all of the things that we mark as identities can be different, and everything can be just fine. But when those express themselves in disagreement, that disagreement is problematic, and when the field calls that conflict, I think they’re off base.
• Gord: “What you’re suggesting, I think, is that this distinction has to do with how the people involved handle it. Am I right?”
• Gordon Sloan: “I think you’re right.”

[7:09] Gordon Sloan talks about his professional involvement in a large church communion dealing with the determination of the church body to bless same sex relationships, and the challenging discussions among some of them. He says, “What I didn’t know at the time, and I am now really clear on, was that that wasn’t a disagreement; that was a rich conflict.”

[9:13] Julia shares that she’s still grappling with the terminology, and says “Are you saying from your experience that deep difference, so deep that it hits identity, is what you call conflict?” 

• Gordon Sloan: “I wouldn’t say that people of difference are having a conflict. I would say they’re in conflict. I think you can have a dispute, but when you’re experiencing profound difference, you’re in conflict.”
• Julia asks Gordon how he defines conflict.
• Gordon Sloan: “Conflict is…I would use the word non-commensurate, and I think that’s a big one. The not-get-together-able differences that divide us. […] I think some conflict is sufficiently commensurate that people can get along and discuss. But in a family where half the family is arch conservative and half the family is arch liberal, they’re going to continue to have disagreements because of that conflict. They’re in conflict politically, and so it’s not difficult for them to have disputes, disagreements, over all kinds of stuff: where the family vacations, how they spend money, what their standards are going to be for this, that, and the other, what kind of cars they drive.”
• “My experience has been that disagreements are negotiable, and anything that’s negotiable is mediatable. Conflict, particularly deep-seated, core conflict of an identity nature, is not negotiable. I mean, who’s gonna negotiate their sexual orientation or their gender?”
• Julia: “But what do you do about this, though? I’m getting very concerned about this philosophy and direction!”
• Gordon Sloan: “Well, one thing you don’t do is pretend to mediate it and think that you’re going to resolve conflict with people simply by sitting down for a difficult day together, and having tough conversations.” 
• Julia: “So part of it is getting realistic.” 
• Gordon Sloan: “It is.”
• Gord: “I don’t think you’re saying that it might not be valuable to facilitate a conversation, but it’s a different kind of process.”
• Gordon Sloan: “Absolutely. And the difficulty is we, I, but I I think most mediators, wade into what are packaged as disagreements only to discover oh my God, some of this is disagreement alright, and yes, I can help with that discussion, and they can get nice, clear, transactional outcomes. But some of it is not. Some of it is conflict that is so fundamental and so deep for these people or this organization that the best they’re going to do is have ongoing discussions that are more about education, exposure, familiarity, learning, those kinds of things. You don’t take Arabs and Israelis over a settlement issue and expect that you’re going to sit down with them and solve that problem.”

[15:35] Gordon Sloan shares an example of a time when he was mediating what he thought would be a pretty straightforward legal pleading and realized that a much deeper conflict was in the room. He sensed he was the only one who realized it. The case was regarding an injury following a car accident, and the plaintiff wasn’t interested in the nature of his injury – which is really what they were there to talk about – he instead focused on the nature of the accident, specifically a highly insensitive comment about him from a first responder, which highlighted how terrifying the experience was for the plaintiff. Gordon Sloan talks about the importance of acknowledging that this was not just a dispute over money – this was a conflict over Am I alive or dead? Does the other side understand this? Who’s going to prevail here, the 16 year old punk or the injured, nearly dead man?

[22:22] Gord asks Gordon Sloan how often he’s transparent with parties regarding the difference between conflict and disputes. Gordon Sloan responds: 

• I’m more that way, talking more about that, in the last 10 years, than I did in the first 25 because I didn’t understand it, and I’m not sure fully understand it now, but it’s certainly worth bringing that up – leaning back and saying, You know, I kind of noticed, and then disclosing what you notice. It seems to me that you people are basically different in the way you such and such regard so and so. I don’t know that that’s something that you should expect to solve today. Tell them that! But what you can solve are the various ways that that becomes clear in your workplace or in your relationship. Let’s talk about those.
• [27:00] Once you notice that conflict is really at work here rather than presenting disputes, then I think, as you were suggesting earlier, Gord, you can come clean and announce that you see this. And if I was the head of a team, I would ask them to contribute to it. How do you want to address this? And in a mediation, I would do the same thing. Some of them will say, “Well, we can’t address because that’s just the way we are!” And so if you can’t address it and that’s just the way you are, what do we want to do together today and maybe next week when we meet, or whatever it is, to acknowledge that and to see your way through?
• [27:44] This is all happening while the field blithely talks about conflict resolution as if it were frequent and possible. I don’t think it’s frequent, and I just find myself in the twilight of my professional career thinking, maybe conflict resolution doesn’t happen. Maybe conflict addressing happens, conflict of enlightening happens. And, maybe we don’t wanna resolve it. I mean, why should chainsaw-toting loggers beat their chainsaws into ploughshares.

[28:23] Julia says “Let’s talk about that for a second.” Gordon Sloan says “Why can’t people be the way they are?” Julia says “Well, because I’m here because my mother had to leave her home country because of war, because of violence, because my grandfather was murdered. That’s why I think we need to think about it and do something.” Gordon Sloan says “Well, sure. Except, um, I don’t know that situation, of course, but does that mean that the people doing the persecuting and the people being persecuted were inherently different? Or does it mean that people had been politically convinced that they should be on one side or the other of that problem?” Further discussion ensues! Julia asks “What if they clash in a violent way? What’s the response, if any, not just from a professional mediator from anybody in a community?” Gordon Sloan puts forward two responses: 1) education, exposure, connection, dialogue, and governments supporting and assisting in getting opposite forces together to talk and understand and see what they can do to become more familiar and change society. 2) maybe third party intervention or facilitation isn’t the answer to some of those problems. More assertive responses. We shouldn’t assume that when there’s violence and when there’s arbitrary outrageous behavior that somehow getting everyone together and talking about that, even over time, is going to solve it. People need to take cover and protect themselves from death and mistreatment and abuse.

[32:17] Bernie Mayer is part of my inspiration for saying that the way ahead with conflict issues is to see what in the conflict that is un-negotiable can be made negotiable. How can you make something negotiable? And that’s something I think third parties could do, whether they’re mediators, leaders, managers, or policy makers. How can we tease out of this significant difference specific issues that the different forces can tackle and solve? Part of that is cognitive behavioral therapy; if they see that they could do it, holy crow, maybe it will change their approach to one another, slowly but surely. The important thing in resolution conflict is to realize that this takes time and it takes a more or less – and it is more or less – willingness to tackle this. 

[33:31] Julia asks Gordon Sloan to say more about people who don’t want to come to the table, and how to motivate those who are avoiding conflict. Gordon Sloan shares a story that illustrates this question, and says “It’s very unusual, in any mediation I’ve been involved in, for the two parties to have the same level of keenness, the same level of volition. And I think the experiments across Canada and the administration of justice have proven they don’t need to have the same motivation. In fact, some of the experiments show they don’t need any motivation at all. Just get them in the room together, and with a little help from somebody – that’s all mediation is – things will happen.”

[36:15] The hosts ask Gordon Sloan to speak about how a leader could assess a situation, such as a workplace complaint. Gordon Sloan says:

• [40:06] If the presenting party or force says “We need you to mediate this dispute because it’s having an effect in the workplace,” and let’s say that person is manager of human resources. I would want to know, What do you mean mediate the dispute? “Well, it’s a terrible problem and there’s some ringleaders and so on and so on.” But what am I going to do? Because they may mean they want somebody going and coach those ringleaders. Or they may mean they want someone to go in and just fix things, which is not the profession I’m involved in. Or, or, or. There could be a lot of other processes that work there. And so part of the diagnostic tool for me is asking what’s needed here, both in terms of what the sponsor thinks and in terms of our professional expertise. 
• [41:04] We face these all the time. We’re in a much better position than a lot of other people in large organizations to assess what’s needed, and usually they’re very receptive to our assessment because, frankly, they’ve done what they can to try to get a handle on a very difficult problem. And then I think once one starts to talk to the people, either because you’ve done interviews or because you’re helicoptered in and you’re sitting down with very little preparation, which sometimes happens. Then those other diagnostic things apply. Is this just difference between these people, and they hate each other, and there’s some good cultural (small c, low-context cultural) reason for that, or is this really a disagreement that they have over some behavior that each has occasioned on the other? Or is a little bit of both, and you’re gonna find out more about that as they talk. It’s a bit fly by the seat, isn’t it?

[42:33] Julia asks Gordon Sloan to share his thoughts about the responsibility of a leader, whether they’re a leader of an organization or country, in terms of modeling healthy engagement of conflict or disputes. Gordon Sloan says:

• It’s interesting – that’s really outside my role as a third party, but when you look back at the situation after it’s over, you get these inklings of what might have been in place that could have prevented this in the first place? And I do think it’s a question of how open the leadership/leader is to acknowledge diversity, if it’s a conflict issue, and to be insistent upon non-exclusion, so far at that diversity is concerned, to be insistent upon principles of the workplace, and not just pay lip service to the principles because they’re too ‘suckhole,’ if I can use that adjective.
• [43:39] I have worked in plenty of big workplaces that are decentralized, where they will have standards set by a government body, a treasury board, or somebody – value statements – they say We maintain a diverse workplace in which the dignity of every employee, dah dah dah. And some, particularly, darn it, particularly older managers who were around before these things were developed, roll their eyes at that kind of stuff, and they’ve been through half-day courses on it at some time in the past, but they’re just not carrying it out. And so I think one of the obligations is – and one sees that dinosaurism disappearing, I must say, it’s a really positive thing – but corporate leadership has got to be sure that the leaders in those organizations not only understand those standards, but really have been schooled in practical ways to bring them about. 
• [45:00] It needs to become, and it usually is, one of the planks in the platform of someone’s performance review. This is a core, not competency. It’s a core approach that we expect you to take with your people, and we want to see fruit and when there isn’t fruit because often there’s rotten fruit hanging on the tree, you have to have dealt with it effectively and brought people to account, but also brought people to change.

[48:55] Gord asks Gordon Sloan to say more about the term ‘conflict management system.’ Gordon Sloan says:

• Chris Merchant and Kathy Constantino wrote the book on this subject, and they’re both insistent that these systems only work when employees build it themselves.
• [49:53] In about 2003, the federal government of Canada modernized the civil service and insisted that every government department and agency had to develop an informal conflict management system, and they had to do it themselves. Gordon Sloan was involved in eight or nine sessions where senior leadership, management leadership, rank and file, and union people all were brought together to figure out how they were going to deal with conflicts in their organization. They weren’t really talking about conflicts – they were talking about how to deal with disputes between employees, and disputes between employees and the organization.) This was by and large successful and resulted in systems that differed from one organization to another, rather than having one massive system across government. Everybody bought in.
• [51:38] I really agree with points that were made in one of your earlier episodes that there is a conflict management system, whether the organization recognizes it or not, there is a default system in place. Every family has one. 

[53:55] Gordon Sloan talks about some implications of professionalizing mediation, and says [58:38]“My experience has always been that mediation is not a profession. It is an activity. A complex set of activities carried on by members of all kinds of professions. So let each profession have its standards that it either imposes on its professionals when they mediate or not.”

[59:12] Julia asks Gordon Sloan if there’s anything else he’d like to mention, and he says:

• There’s gotta be someone out there who can write the book on conflict and dispute, and make that phenomenological distinction without getting too antiseptic about it. 
• We’re headed in a direction in the next ten, twenty years, of distinguishing those two things and developing paradigms for conflict addressing of the sort we’ve had for dispute addressing, because the dispute addressing ones, they’ve got models and frameworks and approaches up the yin yang. And with this other, we’re still trying to help those discussions of difference. But I suspect that’s where we’re going. I hope that’s where we’re going.

The post Episode 34: Gordon Sloan – Giving Up on Conflict? appeared first on On Conflict.

• The intentional community of Tamera, plus its Love School (both in Southern Portugal)
• The relationship between sexuality and conflict in the world
• His quest for a meaningful life
• The many ways that Tamera manages conflict and uses truth and trust to prevent it and build connection
• The importance of having an attitude of empathy and true curiosity about the “other”
• How if people can learn the ways of community, they can use the climate crisis as a positive transition to a non-violent and more regenerative way of living

More About our Guest

Martin was born in Dresden, Germany in 1990 and has been politically engaged since his early youth. In 2006, he took a break from school to join Tamera’s Monte Cerro Peace Education, and decided to finish three years of peace studies in Tamera rather than return to a conventional education path. His training includes traveling to crisis areas and taking part in the “Grace Pilgrimages” to the Middle East and Colombia. Since 2008, he’s worked with the Institute for Global Peacework helping to establish a global network for Tamera. Since 2017, he’s organized the Defend the Sacred international activist gatherings and dedicated himself to building a global alliance.Martin has published writings in various outlets, including Kosmos Journal, TruthOut, CommonDreams, The Indypendent, Tikkun, and Uplift Connect. “I’m aware that we live in times of rapid, accelerating change and that alongside the unimaginable suffering of people, animals, and nature, there’s a revolutionary awakening taking place in this world. I’m convinced that my generation will be able to abolish war, oppression and injustice if we can unite the many groups working for a better world in a common vision for the future.”

Martin’s Resources

• Tamera
• Two pieces that Martin wrote in 2019:
• → Sacred Activism | Movement for Global Healing
• → 80 Years Since the Holocaust Began: Can We Stop Fascism Today?

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Tamera’s Global Love School
• Tamera Peace Research and Education
• The documentary Love School by Ian McKenzie
• Tamera co-founders Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels
• Wilhelm Reich
• Sex at Dawn (book)
• Tamera’s Global Love School
• Tamera’s online courses

Quotes and Highlights

[1:22] Martin: “As long as I remember, I have always had this almost sense of belonging or being responsible for the larger community, whatever that was, whether it was my class in school or whether it was a sense of being not just this passive member of society, but somebody feeling responsibility.”

[3:25] Martin: “There was this Frankfurt school philosopher who said ‘A wrong life can’t be lived rightly.’ So you cannot have a right life inside of a wrong one. And so I was put on this quest with this sense of rebellion in me, and I was looking in ecological groups and in spiritual groups and in political groups, and I found different pieces of an answer but I still didn’t find perspective for a meaningful life for myself. And so getting to know a community that, in a way, set out to model on a small scale what a society would look like in which people would actually not need to go to a therapist in order to heal, or you would need to take people out of ecosystems in order for that ecosystem to heal, but to create a form of living together whereby the way we coexist, healing arises. This was just such a fundamental opening for me to a possibility for how I could use my life. It was amazing for me to get to know this place. I came here as a student, and then I ended up being a coworker.”

[6:23] Gord asks Martin if he can explain how Tamera is organized, how they work with conflict when it arises in their community, what it means to Martin, and how Tamera responds to it and how they make use of it. Julia also requests a basic orientation to Tamera.

Martin says:

• Tamera is an intentional community and includes the Peace Research and Education Center in southern Portugal.
  
  
• The community that Tamera is a creation of started over 40 years ago in Germany. It was founded in the after-waves off the leftist student movement of the late sixties. Its founder, Dieter Duhm, was one of the spokespeople and known authors at the nexus of Marxism and psychology back then who put forward the thesis that revolution without emancipation on the inner would ultimately result in a counter revolution, and that the issues off fear and competition and jealousy and all the interpersonal issues that are coming up in the activist groups cannot be ignored when we’re trying to create systemic change in society.
  
  
• In 1995, after 18 years of a radical community experimentation, they came to Portugal to create what they called and we still call a healing biotope, which is a community in which the relation between people, all kinds of people actually, between parents and children, between men and women, between the generations, but also the relations between people and animals and all beings of nature, is based on trust and cooperation.
  
  
• The project, in a way, is a research center that operates with a very radical ambition, which is that in no form of relation, inside of this societal microcosm, are we accomplices in a system of violence and fear.
  
  
• This leads me to the point of how we deal with conflict. It’s a lot about turning ourselves as people and as a community into the research object that we ourselves are looking at, into how does conflict arise? A central observation that has been made over and over again in this work, especially as we’re looking into how does conflict arise between men and women, between parents and children, between the generations, you’re seeing that what is happening in a group, in a way reflects what is happening on the bigger global scales, what is happening between peoples, between different religious groups in the world. So in a way, when you can resolve the traumatic layers that are being touched and that then leads to these patterns of fear and defense, it is when you can really understand that and in a way permeate it with consciousness. You resolve conflict, and you also gain knowledge about something that is happening as a dynamic in the world. So the way we approach conflict has a lot to do with gaining consciousness. It’s this idea that where there is consciousness, there can be no wars.
  
  
• We see the conflict as inherently interrelated, so like our exploitation of the earth and our lack of truth and the suppression of our own life energies are not separate things, but they’re interconnected. So if you want to end the war that humanity is engaged in towards the planet, we also need to look at how we’re suppressing nature within us, and also vice versa. We see that if you really want to use conflict as a means of creative evolution, we need to look at the wholeness of life and not just say Okay, here’s one conflict, and we’re solving it, because the whole system that is producing these conflicts just remains the same and keeps on perpetuating itself.

[12:12] Julia asks Martin if he can speak more about how one gains consciousness. 

Martin says:

• It seems that a lot of the eruptions of aggression and violence, and all the way to war, happens in the space where an energy that had been held back before, and that is not connected with our conscious reflection, in a way breaks itself free. You could say it’s a subconscious attempt of liberation, but a lot of the destruction and also like, if you have done that and then, the next day or the next year or the next life perhaps, you feel sorry and regret for that, you realize My consciousness wasn’t present in the situation.
  
  
• The work in the way that we’re doing is actually on different levels. The most basic level is the community level, where it is important when you acknowledge that we have layers inside ourselves where we are not innocent. All of us, we have these potentials of aggression and fear in us because we come out of a society where, in a way, fear and anger are just the two flip sides of a basic conditioning of the person who, our humanity that cannot really express itself really. So if we accept that, then it is logical that if you want to create a community of trust, you have to be able to address each other in this way. You don’t just work on conflict once there is an eruption. There is a process of self-reflection and of social transparency, where people undergo a process of making visible to each other and giving feedback to each other about what is happening inside of themselves and also reflecting to one another what they perceive. This is a logic of life: in living organisms, all the time, there is this process of feedback and communication and creative feedback loops.
  
  
• This is, in a way, a way of reclaiming truth, because I could also say where there is truth there can be no war. In many ways, you can say those eruptions of anger are an eruption of a truth that had been held back and couldn’t be articulated in a different way. So this is really a social responsibility to create forms of life where people can make themselves visible to one another, because it is always the explosion of the other that suddenly comes up in these excesses that we are seeing in the world. 

[16:11] Martin talks about how a peaceful society is one that is based on trust, and “in order for trust to arise, you need to know that people will still stick with you even if you show the sides that may be more negative.” “There are these corners inside of us where we think, If I tell that to the people, then that’s it. And the experience of a trust community actually is, you reveal that, and they will be more connected to you because you have shown something of yourself that creates deeper connection.” 

[19:40] Gord asks Martin to revisit what he said about revelation of inner experience and the dark corners that would go on between people and says “I’m wondering if you’re also promoting or  suggesting that that would be helpful at an institutional level, or at an international level, where ideally countries or large institutions would reveal their dark parts of the things they’re struggling with to each other, or move in a direction where that kind of dialogue might be possible.” 

Martin responds by talking about the necessity of trust and responsibility in such an activity, and mentions “one of the things that we’re involved in here [at Tamera] is an alliance of leaders of different social movements and Indigenous communities and other intentional communities such as Tamera, and we are also, in a way, using this this kind of work in order to bring peacemakers and activists together in a space that they also wouldn’t encounter in the normal kind of work that they’re doing.”

[22:36] Julia asks Martin if he can say more about what builds and strengthens trust. 

Martin pauses as he thinks, then says “It feels like such a basic quality of life. You know, it’s very hard to define love, in a way. I don’t know, like, it feels like the more you come close to these fundamental parts or energies of life, the harder it gets to define them. But I would say that trust has a lot to do with the capacity to show myself without defense to someone else, like the capacity to let myself to let myself be seen in a deeper way.” He adds:

• Like I said before, truth in communication is really essential for building trust, but I would also say that truth as such can also just be a weapon for war.
• Equally, what is important is an attitude of empathy or of true curiosity about the other. I think this is especially [relevant] in the context of conflict, or of even worse situations in the world. It is not enough to say, I’m a peace worker and I’m on the good side. And over there are the fascists and warlords and the other perpetrators. If you really want to make peace, the question is, Are we also ready to really listen to the other side and to understand what prompts them to do that?
• Do I want to tell something to the other, or am I actually open for a conversation that might also transform me? That might shift my viewpoint, because I think truth, in the end, is not just this thing that one person has and puts to the other, but it is an evolving, dynamic life process that lifts through the openness of communication.
• I would also say, in a community context, reliability is a huge thing. That I actually know the other person will show up, and to know that there’s a sincerity, like if I know that another person really cares for life. There is this beautiful saying, I don’t care how your night was and what you have suffered, but I care, will you get up in the morning and do what is necessary to take care of whatever it is, the community or the children or whatever.
• We’re going through this worldwide crisis. Another part of that reliability is also, are people participating in what is happening, or are they just shutting themselves down?

[27:40] Gordon reflects on Martin bringing up fascism and asks Martin “What’s your pathway or suggestion for how to respond to those kinds of political regimes that seem to be controlling and not helpful?” 

Martin responds by talking about Wilhelm Reich, a writer and thinker who really influenced him. Wilhelm “put forward the idea that fascism is not so much political ideology, it is much more the expression of an authoritarian character structure. So it is, you could say, in a way, it is the almost inevitable resolution of an inner conflict that happens inside people where there is so much of an inner separation between the kind of conscious, polite, bourgeois part and the suppressed, underground or emotional substrate of all those bottles of life energies.”

[30:44] Martin adds, “I think we have to find a way of addressing people that are, in a way, becoming followers of fascist movements. In a way, we’re really taking it from the angle of empathy of asking, Why are people behaving the way they’re behaving? And can we address the underlying hurt that is prompting them to demand all immigrants to be banned, for minority groups to be suppressed or even killed? This is not normal. This is not just human nature. It is the expression of an underlying pain. I think that we are getting to a real decision point in the world because the social systems and the political and economic systems that we are having now are more and more disintegrating. And then the question is, Will people stick fearfully in their identity groups and then have these kinds of conflicts to one another? Or are we able to embrace this disintegration as an opportunity for transformation and for an ecological regeneration? This second possibility, in a way, relies on an understanding of what is happening in ourselves and what is happening as we are driven by fear that really allows us then to make another choice.”

[37:02] Julia reflects on Martin talking about the economic and societal structure disintegrating, and can we embrace this as an opportunity to reconstruct community. She asks if he can make this a bit more practical, such as for individuals not living in his community. Martin replies:

• I think some of it we can see in crisis situations or natural disasters, where people are suddenly no longer encountering each other in this anonymous way, but where they’re suddenly appreciating each other’s humanity and each other’s presence.
  
  
• There is this beautiful work that is happening in Detroit, for example. After the economic crash where people just got together and did all kinds of social projects and community gardens and all of this. This is something that I imagine with the kind of growing disintegration of these large scale, centralized systems, that people will suddenly discover the power and existential value of community.
  
  
• The capitalist dream has kind of bought us into believing that we actually just exist as these separate individual selves that are here to pursue this path of private fulfillment in profession and wealth. But actually, no, we are always in relation to other people. And what do we do if we acknowledge that? How do I engage? It really requires a shift of the ideal of living where we have to, I think, especially as Westerners, we have to take down this idea in our minds which separates us from a communitarian way of being.

[40:25] Julia shares her interpretation of what Martin said about being communal. She discusses how for those in individualistic or low context cultures, there’s a mindshift from thinking “I am alone” or “I am in a diad” to being embedded in a matrix of community. She clarifies with Martin that is inviting us to look around to see that we are indeed in community. Martin responds:

• I feel like if people go into this shift of perception, there are just natural reactions, like, how do I make this place that I live in more beautiful? How do I engage with people in a way that increases empathy? How can I be a contribution for the well-being of the community? Those would be questions that will guide me to answers.
  
  
• There is a certain awakening of we are communitarian beings. And I think this shift is the inner revolution that is needed for us to survive the climate crisis. Because if not, we’re going for eco-fascism. The powers that be will use the crisis to further perpetuate divisions in order to stay in the places where they are. But if people can actually learn the ways of community, they can use the crisis as a positive transition to a non-violent and more regenerative way of living.

[44:17] Julia talks about how she and Gordon think that Martin has a unique experience and viewpoints regarding the relationship between sexuality and conflict in the world, and asks Martin to speak to this.

Martin says:

• “I was speaking before about a little bit of history of the project and this idea of the relationship between the success of political change on the outer and the transformation of the inner and where this kind of put people into this research of how do we live together in a way that we can really resolve conflicts between one another in a way that community of reliable trust arises. And in a way, the project didn’t initially make sexuality the key issue, but it just became so apparent that when you dig deeper and deeper and look at where many of these conflicts are rooted, you come to the area of sexuality, love, partnership.”
  
  
• “Also, I would say the relationship between sexuality and the sacred, whatever you want to define that as, religion or God, like the words in a way don’t matter. But there is an inner, like there is a gravity center in the human soul that has a lot to do with was the sacred and with the erotic. They are not identical, but they are definitely strongly related, and when they meet, it is like, I think it’s the most potent soul power in humanity, and as sexuality is an area which in a way contains such deep holds, such deep desire, such deep longings, such a potential also for healing and transformation.”
  
  
• “But also, as we’re coming out of a cultural era, this whole patriarchal era, where in a way, sexuality was damned and demonized, and especially female sexuality being so terribly punished and prohibited. It also holds such deep trauma and pain. And so when the promise for dissolution and surrender and deep desire meets with this deep expectation of pain, you have an explosive cocktail upon which a society can actually not exist in a peaceful manner, because patriarchal society in a way try to limit sexuality to the relationship of marriage, like in a way it was generally banned from social life from… the freedom of sexuality was just not allowed, but it was put into a into a into a little container in which it could be practiced. And actually, when you go into this container, you realize No, you are dealing with a universal power that is so immense that hardly any couple is able to deal with it on a one-to-one basis, because it is simply, like you’re putting a tornado into a small box. The forum and content do not correspond to one another. And so sexuality is dealt with in a very private way, but actually, when you look into what the people are going through in this area, you find basic patterns that are of collective character. And so, in a way, the question is, Do we want to stay on this level of denying, in a way, the societal relevance of that? Or do we want to acknowledge it, this issue, and include it consciously in a process of societal healing? I think this is, in a way, also the question that comes out of that, for anyone or for any movement that wants to really transform society in a humane way.”

[49:10] Martin goes on to say that many intentional communities also fail because of this, because they’re unable to actually deal with the energy; it requires a lot of wisdom and commitment.

[49:40] Julia refers to what Martin said about society putting sexuality into a little container and says that she thinks that’s where most of us are sitting. She asks Martin to elaborate what it actually means to have sexuality have society relevance and to incorporate it into societal healing.

[50:19] Martin points out that he’s not just talking about it in terms of lifestyle – he also wants to look at it in terms of cultural development. 

• He mentions the book Sex at Dawn, “which has this anthropological view on sexuality and exploring in a way, prehistory and saying that most of the time that we as humans have been around, we existed in these communal clans where sexuality was just naturally shared as part of the communal existence. So this whole notion of private romance and this kind of marriage to just a small container in a way didn’t even exist. So in a way, yeah, I’m referring to something that in a way, seems like to be out of another world, but in a way, I also believe that as humans, we have a certain memory of a different way of life.”
  
  
• “And I really want to stress this point that it is not for us about, does somebody live monogamously, or do they live polyamorously. The point is, really, Do we create communities, like social like forums of coexistence, where the issues of relationship between people are being dealt with consciously? Or do we leave it up to individuals to figure it out by themselves?”  

[52:07] Martin: 

• “What we’re doing has a lot to do with – many of the processes that I described before around transparency and truth and self-revelation and trust, to also apply that to this area. To really ask the question like, What does truth mean? How much trust can be there? And what does it also mean to support each other in this area as we become more truthful human beings?‘
  
  
• Martin goes on to speak about the healing power of honesty and transparency regarding sexuality and sensuality.
  

[55:12] Julia explores how to connect Martin’s beliefs and practices to the corporate world, e.g. at a team meeting. 

Martin says “Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. I don’t have a real answer for it, I must admit. But I will say that as people from all kinds of different societal positions visit Tamera, including leaders in all kinds of peacemaking organizations or even the corporate world, we started to create a program called the Global Love School, where those people come together to actually go into this kind of space of truth around sexuality and different kinds of experiences, but also open this conversation. What does it mean for us to follow these ethics of truth and trust and transparency in the sexual area, even if we are not in Tamera and are living our lives in the world. Yeah, it’s an incredible exploration, and it’s definitely not easy to take this inquiry of truth in this area out into the world.”

[56:48] Julia mentions the Global Love School and a documentary that’s coming out soon about it, called Love School, which is directed by Ian McKenzie. Martin adds that Spring 2020 is the current release date.

The post Episode 32: Martin Winiecki – Peace and Love in Portugal appeared first on On Conflict.

• The importance of truly connecting with people over informal conversations during negotiations
• His involvement in getting his local county government to pass the first climate emergency resolution in the United States (the second in the world!) 
• Qualities of a good, effective leader
• Vision, humility, and resilience
• How to cope with the sense of helplessness and despair that can arise when thinking about the state of our planet 
• How his local Climate Mobilization chapter builds a “robust shock absorber” to handle internal conflict
• Words and terms he created in his new book, such as the Kardashian Climate Index

More About our Guest

Herb Simmens is the author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future – the first book to create the beginnings of a climate vocabulary. With degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, he was chief of long-range planning for the state of New Jersey in the 1990s. In that role, he oversaw the largest effort in the USA to involve the public in the creation of New Jersey’s long-term plan. He also was a professor at two NJ colleges, a town manager, and county administrator and director of one of the first non-profits focused on climate. In 2017, he also helped persuade his county government in Montgomery to declare the first climate emergency in the USA, and the second in the world. 

He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, though the sidewalk in front of his home is in the District of Columbia!

Herb’s Resources

• Herb’s website

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Climate Vision for Montgomery County
• A Climate Vocabulary for the Future 
• Paris commitments 
• Sir David King
• Bernie Mayer (have you heard our interview with him in Season 1?)
• The Sixth Extinction (book)
• The Climate Mobilization (group)
• Derrick Jensen 
• The Lancet’s article about health professionals and civil disobedience 
• Dean Spillane Walker

Quotes and Highlights

[1:42] Herb talks about how during the 1990s, he helped lead the state of New Jersey’s long-range planning for the state – essentially, it was an effort to figure out where New Jersey should go in the next 20 years or so. He says, “Basically, we’re sort of legislatively mandated to come up with a plan for the future of the state. […] we were also legislated not to do it with a few of us bureaucrats sitting around a conference room, you know, coming up with ideas and writing them down, hoping that we could get them past the politicians, but rather to do an initial draft, the sort of blue sky vision, and then to send it out for detailed negotiations with every county government. We had 21, and every municipal government in New Jersey. And New Jersey had […] 566 local governments. We basically spent five years literally negotiating both the map of the state where development should occur […] The legislation, instead of just simply saying the state will write a plan, we were obligated to negotiate. In fact, there was actually a term in the legislation that I’ve never seen anywhere else, called Cross Acceptance. Both sides had to agree to accept the ultimate language that was developed. […] I learned a lot from it.”

Gord: I’m wondering if there’s some more you could share with other listeners about what you learned.

Julia: Yeah, I was gonna build on that too, and in particular what you might have learned about how to envision, as well as […] what you might have learned about conflict and also leadership. What’s required to create a vision of the future?

[05:10] Herb: “What sticks in my mind is my favorite part, which is the magic word, vision. We use lots of different techniques, but one of them that I found the most exciting and fun, and I think it had a significant impact in terms of making the process work, is the ability to literally put in illustration form, or in video form, some of the physical changes that we were espousing and recommending.” Herb discusses two examples and says “That’s one dimension, is the literal meaning of the word vision. A tangible, physical sense of what an alternative future might look like in their community.”

Julia asks Herb if he can share any lessons around conflict, such as with his staff or from engaging with others. Herb says “The first part had to do with overcoming the natural, or maybe unnatural, but very real suspicion that all of the interest groups [had]. […] They were no magic wands that one could wave to overcome that suspicion that that here we were, the state coming in, and they were gonna lose, either economically, in the case of builders, who, we would say no longer could develop on farmland, for example, or the farmers in return, they could no longer sell their land to the developers. And so a lot of it was simply going out there. And a lot of it was also, in my recollection, the kind of informal conversations that you had. Nothing dramatic in me saying that, or original, but it was as much making sure that I had enough rest to be able after the meeting ended at 10 o’clock to go out for a drink with some of the local folks and really listen and debrief and so forth. So you need a level of commitment and even stamina, just basic things like that […]. It took five years and I don’t I don’t think it was five years that was wasted. I don’t think Well, jeez, we should have been able to do it in two and a half because…it’s a trade off. Obviously, the longer to take before you reach the final product, then you’re delaying implementation of good stuff. But on the other hand, if you go too quickly, then you lose the opportunity or the risk of losing the opportunity to implement anything.”

Julia: “Yeah, and I think what you’re saying is really profound. And although, as you said, perhaps nothing new per se, but this commitment to relationship, commitment to a connection, informality. A saying that we have is to go slow to go fast.”

Herb talks about a professor he had in graduate school who influenced Herb’s practice, saying “[the professor] had come to graduate school after a very high level position and career at federal government and state government and so forth. He was one of these people who could have gotten by giving a lecture once a week and still got paid a lot of money and been a star. But instead, he insisted in his class that he meet with every one of his students one-on-one for a least an hour early on in the semester and 90% of that conversation was about the student, and I felt so – you know, today, even as I talk to the two of you now, I feel kind of warmth and gratitude. And though I haven’t always been able to remember that in my dealings with people in my life, I have enough of the time, and ultimately it’s about internalizing that.”

Julia: What kind of leadership do you think it takes to enable people to come to those places of visioning?

[11:29] Herb: “I don’t know. I mean, I’d like to be able to say, but I’m not sure how much authority I can say it with. I’d like to be able to say that a good leader, or an effective leader, somebody who really knows him or herself first, in other words is a conscious leader, is a mindful person, somebody who is open to mid-course corrections, who is open to – again, it’s certainly nothing original – to listening first before speaking, to feedback from his or her staff, being open to it and responsive in a good way. […]Another part is having a drive and a commitment to actually do what it takes – to get back to what I said before, if it means sitting down and having a drink late into the evening afterwards, or sitting down with your staff one-on-one to talk with them, or to find out about people before you meet with him to read about their background and their history so you go in feeling like you know something about these folks. It’s the bunch of, both skills and attitudes and preparation that I think has to come together. And maybe there’s some inherent quality that some people have more than others clearly do, to be able to project likability and excitement. You put all that together and you know, it’s so simple!”

[13:09] Gord: “One thing I want to underline from what you were saying was again this idea of speaking to people, you know, having the drink afterwards, because I think that happens based on an internalized value of connecting, right? You mentioned your professor and whatnot. But it’s something that you live, right? You don’t behave that way unless you inherently value connecting with people, right?”

Herb: “I mean, that’s right. Yes. I think if you just do it in a kind of artificial way because you read some guide or a consultant came in and said you should do that. People are going to see through that because you’ll be looking at your watch or your phone or, you know, waiting for it to end or not really listening. And people will pick it up right away.”

[13:46] Gord: you’ve written some documents, and one of them that you provided to us is called Climate Vision for Montgomery County. And you live in Montgomery County. This is an interesting piece of writing. What you’ve done, or how I would describe it anyway, is you’ve taken a reader 20, 30 years into the future, and then from that point, you’re helping them look backwards at the changes that have occurred in order to reach a carbon zero emission state for that county, right? And all the different things that have to happen to reach there.”

Herb explains why he wrote the book. He also says: 

• “One of things that I’ve thought about all these years and with the climate work, is that we’re really talking about, in my view, we’re not simply talking about a sort of one-on-one substitution of electric vehicles for internal combustion vehicles and electric heat pumps for gas heat or cold heat or natural or oil heat or whatever. Those are things that are necessary, but the ramifications and the consequences and the impacts of doing those go way beyond simply those substitutions. It’s really a transformation in almost everything about how we do our business – and business in the broadest sense, how we live. So that’s what I tried to convey.” 
• “In fact, after I finished, I surprised myself when I added up all the new programs and institutions that I sort of put out in this scenario, and I think I came up with 30 different institutions that this vision incorporates that don’t exist right now. Everything from, for example, a coalition to deal with the mental and emotional health of everybody.”
• “A severe climate distress that’s already beginning, and will, tragically, you know, I think it’s inevitable to have to say this, that will accelerate greatly, and that will affect not just the most vulnerable – they’ll be affected the most, almost by definition, but it will even affect the leaders. Because nobody could put themselves outside of what’s happening, except for the shortest period of time.”

Gord: “In actualizing such a vision, what are the types of conflicts that you would expect that a leader would encounter? And how would she or he be wise to think about those and respond to them?”

[19:39] Herb: “Well, I think that the first conflict is to have a leader who gets the need to even support and sponsor this transformation. I mean, that’s the biggest hurdle. Because right now, we can probably count the leaders, quote unquote, in North America who have the vision and the dedication and the position to do that on maybe one hand. […] The question is, how do you take a creative vision and then implement it? And I think that’s part of the reason, the obvious reason, that we’re seeing the extinction rebellion and the school strikes and sunrise movement in the United States. And I assume you probably have an equivalent in Canada. All these groups are finally emerging to say enough is enough.”

“I was happy and proud to be one of three people who went to our county government two years ago next month, actually, and got them to pass the first climate emergency resolution in the United States. It was only the second in the world after a small community in Australia. It was December 5th, 2017. And now there are 1100 communities – I just checked this morning, covering tens and tens of millions of people all over the world that have declared climate emergencies, including many, of course, in Canada. And that’s really gratifying. It’s still just two words, climate emergency. It’s action, obviously, that matters.”

[23:03] “We’ve never had an issue that’s created so many different kinds of conflicts. […] There’s so many cleavages that are so different and so unique to climate, and so vexing. And obviously if that wasn’t the case, we’d have made a lot more progress. And by we, I mean countries all over the world. There is hardly a country in the world that’s meeting its Paris commitments, for example, and those are, as everybody knows who follows this, utterly inadequate. We have to have a certain amount of humility about this rather than simply say, Well, we just need to X, Y, and Z.”

[24:34] Herb discusses the religious dimension of climate: “Among fundamental religions, whether it’s Christianity or I suspect Islam, or Judaism, my religion, there’s much less support for climate action than there is among the more mainstream or progressive forms of those religion. I think it’s in part because it’s very disorienting because if you believe in a benevolent God or even a malevolent God, but an all-powerful God, you figure either – and I’m oversimplifying, of course, there’s thousands of religious sects out there with different subtle differences, but – well either this is what God wants for us, you know, this is the end times, the beginning of the end times, and who are we to interfere with that, or, if all these changes are occurring, it can’t be because of God, because if it was bad, God wouldn’t allow it to happen. So it’s got to be good. And those are some of the most intractable conflicts […] Is there anything that’s held more deeply among so many people than their religious beliefs?”

[26:26] “Gord: One of things you mentioned was humility, so maybe that’s one of the things you’re advocating, right? As a leadership stance in responding to some of these…”

Herb agrees and says that part of the reason is because “the science, for example is changing.” “I follow 10 different newsletters that report the latest climate news every morning or so from all over the world. And I don’t go by more than a day or two without reading a study or headline of a study that says, now that the scientists have learned something new that they did not know before, and almost 90% of the time it’s bad news: this is happening faster, this is more severe, etcetera, etcetera. And so, it’s really humbling in terms of figuring out how to act as a leader because we’re constantly getting new information. […] I wrote a book called A Climate Vocabulary in the Future, with five or six hundred new terms. One of the terms I came up with is what I call the carbon maze: that every time we think that we’ve got an answer – not every time but many of the times, we then learned that we’ve hit a dead end in the maze and we have to sort of go back to scratch again.”

Gord: “So humility would be one thing. And anything else you could suggest to someone in a leadership position, in terms of dealing with these particular types of cleavages?”

[29:09] Herb talks about open-mindedness and single-mindedness regarding the environment, and says “…we are in an existential emergency. I mean this is something that will end life as we know it one way or the other in the next couple of decades, and either we collectively start to try to figure out how to do it, however long the odds are, in a way that preserves a modicum of life and livability or, you know in a catastrophic way.”

[29:50] Herb: “There was a British scientist, a very eminent British scientist, Sir David King, who is an adviser to four prime ministers who said not long ago – I happened to see him speak in London – he said, ‘What we do in the next ten years will impact the next ten thousand years or so.’ So if you’re a leader, that’s got to be in your head and in your heart every moment of the day.” 

“You need to have this set of qualities, to be open to new ideas but never, ever to, not just give up or forget the urgent need for action, but to continually find new ways to convey that to the public.”

Herb talks about approaches taken by Churchill and FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and says “We remember them and we read them because they apparently really did have an impact on us back then to mobilize them for the hard times ahead.” “You need humility on the one hand […] and also being focused and determined.”

[32:00] Herb: “Another paradox, I think, is about negotiation and open-mindedness, with people listening to all sorts of views and coming to an agreement. Yet we don’t have time to listen to everybody’s views if we’re going to act effectively on climate change. So there has to be a kind of authoritarian dimension. I hate that word – there’s got to be a better word than that. […] But you know, almost a kind of ruthlessness. And I say this with hesitation, but I really believe it.”

“We have this responsibility for a thousand generations of people in the future that literally may not exist unless we do the right thing. So I guess what I would say is get enough input to allow you to get support from people, but not so much that you don’t have time to take the proactive action to get the results you have to get.”

[33:05] Julia: “Herb, you’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and again this is the individual theme, I think, individual leadership – how do you maintain any sense of the vision or the determination part? Because I know for me, and I’ve spoken about this actually on the podcast before as well, certainly with Elizabeth May, there’s a part of me that really goes to collapse. I mean, I know about The Sixth Extinction, and there’s an element of, you know, I know what conflict looks like at its worst, and it’s not pretty. I know it from my work, but I think, as I also mentioned off-air, I also know it from my mother’s experiences with the war. So there’s a part of me that’s quite dark about all these changes. Dark, and a sense of helplessness. So that’s what I’m curious about. I’m sure I’m not the only one. You spoke about the need for people’s mental and emotional well-being, the more that the realities are going to sink into everybody, regardless as to whether you quote unquote believe it or not, it’s happening. We turn on the TV and it’s got to affect people to see fires from outside of the Earth’s orbit. It’s that kind of direction I’d be curious about from your own experiences. How would you speak to our listeners, a listener about what’s required in the here and now?”

[34:39] Herb: “Each question you ask is more challenging than the previous one, which is what I had expected!” Herb discusses a group he’s involved in called the Climate Mobilization, and how in his local chapter, “We have basically a one-on-one conversation. People pair off into twos or threes, depending upon the numbers, and just for three minutes or five minutes, each speak uninterrupted about what’s on their mind or what’s in their hearts, as a way both of ideally loosening or diminishing their emotional burden or sharing something positive, but also as a way to connect us with each other. So we see and feel, we’re dimensions of the people that we interact with. So if an hour later in the meeting there is a conflict about, you know, Should we do civil disobedience? Should we decarbonize our cars before we decarbonize our building?, or a thousand other things like that. Hopefully, we have I guess what you might call a more robust shock absorber built into our small little collective system. And so I think practices like that – and there may be lots of different variations of that; some people are more or less comfortable with those things – could be really valuable, particularly in the kind of atomized world that many of us live in, in our boxes or little houses here and there, where we don’t see our neighbors and our relatives aren’t living upstairs, they’re living a thousand miles away, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s one small piece, I think, and that’s you could also put that under the rubric of resilience.”

[36:45] Julia: “Yes, yeah, I love that. […] What’s required of each of us individuals to step up to our leadership? What’s required of each of us?”

[37:36] Herb: “It’s so obvious, but find some reliable sources of information and inform yourself as much as you can, because there’s so much – as with almost everything, unfortunately and tragically – so much what I call synthetic information rather than natural information. Information that’s manufactured to serve the interests of people manufacturing that information and not the people getting it. So learn all you can about the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and continue learning. It’s not just Well, now I’ve learned it. I can act. But don’t make any major or significant decisions […] until you’ve learned a little bit. Or join a group or a conversation with people to learn. When you reach a point where you feel you have some sense of the contours, whether it’s local, national, international, then you’ll be in a better position to make your own decisions. […] Until you have enough of a background to distill that information you’re hearing, it’s hard to know how to act effectively.”

[39:35] Julia: “So a piece of the inner leadership that’s required is to continually educate, to be a continuous learner. […] For me, I’m looking for the helplessness. There’s a part of me that just wants to give up, because it’s too big.”

[39:52] Herb: “Well, it’s interesting because I think you’ve hit upon something really important. Part of the reason I’m involved with this [group] in particular […], the Climate Mobilization […] one of the first principles – and again, it sounds so obvious – is learn and tell the truth. And if the truth is that you, Julia, are feeling despair, say it! Write it! By extension, it’s hard. It takes courage. We’re not taught to do that. There’s been, I think, a terrible misapprehension about the downside of acknowledging and feeling despair, helplessness, and for years, I think most climate communicators have basically said, We can’t scare people. We have to give people hope.”

[41:08} Herb discusses an article by Derrick Jensen, “a very passionate environmental writer,” about how Derrick basically doesn’t believe in hope and finds it very disempowering. When he’s asked to write an article for a magazine and he writes about despair, the editor will say I want you to end with some hope! And yes, you can, and you should, if that’s the truth! Herb says “I think it’s a very profound observation. Let’s not treat at least adults as kids, you know, and I can feel despair for a day or a minute or an hour or maybe even a month or two and then snap out of it and then act, and then maybe go back to despair because that’s the kind of world we were all gonna be – if we allow our feelings to come out and acknowledge them, we’re going be in those kinds of different states. And that’s okay!”

[42:12] Julia: “Yeah, and Herb, […] you’ve kind of given me my antidote in a way because I think, as you say, speaking one’s truth and being received emotionally, being acknowledged that where one is is okay, has an ameliorating effect, has a dissolving effect, and its cycles back to something Gord spoke about earlier I think, with the two of you and your component, where Gord said, there’s this piece about a value around connection, human connection. And I actually for the first time just glimpsed something positive, which is, perhaps this crisis and this mayhem will give us more opportunity to reconnect, human to human to human, because we are going to need each other more than we certainly ever have in a very, very, very long time.”

[43:00] Herb: “That’s right, and I think that’s a great segue into the question about leadership. One of the dimensions is to say that the kind of effective leader we need now, and that has to emerge, are leaders that encourage and support connection.”

[43:20] Gord: “You spoke about the group you’re in and having those few minutes to talk about what you were experiencing and feeling two people in the group. But what we also want to try to do is create those kind of connections with people who think and feel very differently than us, right? So that’s the other thing. We want to try and build that kind of connection with people on the other side of the divide, right? And how do we do that?”

[43:52] Herb: “We’ve self-sorted ourselves out geographically in the United States, where basically the people on the left are living with the people on the left, whether it’s within a neighborhood of a city or a state or region or whatever. And so our kids don’t go to school with the kids of different thoughts and beliefs. […] In the United States they have a simplistic but I think accurate analysis: you could tell so much about a community whether it has a Whole Foods versus a Cracker Barrel.”

[45:25] Herb: “If you want to sort of begin dialogue, start with the people who are most like you but may not be as, quite where you are at this point. […] Don’t try to convince people who deny climate change exists. Try to convince people who do accept climate change to act!”

[47:59] Herb talks about his efforts in Montgomery County and how in the two years since they passed the emergency climate resolution, they’ve done very little and have been butting heads. Herb wonders “Maybe what we need to do is take our time and talk to the people in the allied professions, occupations, our churches, our schools, as a way of bringing about climate change.” Herb mentions that he just read a recent “editorial in the Lancet, the British medical journal, one of the preeminent medical journals in the world, that said that health care folks more or less have an obligation to do civil disobedience! It’s reaching that point! […] It really opened my eyes. The good news and the bad news about climate is that it affects everything. So that’s the bad news. But the good news is that there’s almost no individual or group that couldn’t easily see a dimension where they can act because of the connection between climate and what they do and who they are.”

[50:01] Gord asks Herb to speak about his new book, A Climate Vocabulary of the Future. Herb says “What I realized a couple of years ago was because climate effects everything, it would be really useful to think about what a new vocabulary that encompassed all these different dimensions of climate might look like. And so I was silly enough, or crazy enough, to actually try to do that. I came up with a few hundred different words and terms to describe various dimensions of climate: the economic and political and the social and psychological one, and physical and scientific and so forth. And I think I think it’s always hard for an author to talk about his or her book objectively, but a lot of people who read it actually learned a lot, and they laughed a lot. I consciously or unconsciously put some humour in there. As I write in my preface, actually helped me write the book because it helped deflate some of the despair that I felt writing the book, and I could sort of put a little distance by making a joke about something or coming up with a silly term, you know, like the Kardashian Climate Index, for example: it’s the ratio of the number of times that people search for the Kardashians on the Internet versus climate change.”

[52:30] Julia asks Herb if he has any advice for listeners. Herb says, “I guess my advice is given with hesitation because I usually find that when it’s label as advice, people don’t want to hear it. [All three laugh.] I think I could say a lot of different things, and the one that comes to mind is maybe the most grandiose, which is, notwithstanding all the horrors that are starting to occur, will occur, we largely as a people still have the future of our lives and our communities and our nations and our world in our hands. And moments of despair, as we talked earlier, moments of helplessness, as you said: acknowledge them. Don’t feel guilty about it. Don’t feel embarrassed about it, or try not to anyway. But then recognize that you’ll come out that, to some degree or other, and maybe this idea of our own empowerment can help us as individuals and as groups of people, to both come out of our despair and also then to take the kind of vigorous action that, at the very least, will reduce the amount of harm that’s done in the world, to us, to our neighbors, to our communities, to our families, and may actually turn around things now because we just don’t know.”

Herb finishes by talking about an experience he recently had at a retreat in Greece with a participant from Oregon, Dean Spillane Walker, who said “something like, You know, this is the most important work in the world right now, and that may sound a little grandiose, but I think there’s a lot more than a kernel of truth in the kinds of conversations that we’re having right now, here and elsewhere, so what more can you ask for than, at the very least, to be alive at this amazing time when all this stuff is happening, and we could be not just an observer, but a participant in it.”  

The post Episode 30: Herb Simmens – Collaborating with Six Million People appeared first on On Conflict.

• Letting matters emerge
• Conflicts versus disputes
• Recognizing and improving conflict management systems in organizations and teams
• The power of workplace culture, and how “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
• Rigid investigations versus restorative approaches
• The Cynefin framework about complexity, simplicity, chaos, disorder, and complication, which David Snowden has theoretically developed  
• Multi-level responsibilities in conflicts and disputes
• The importance of trust, relationships, and ethical use of power in positive conflict management systems

More About our Guest

Jane Morley is a lawyer, mediator, and leader of organizational and social change, especially in the areas of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples and justice reform. In 2008 and 2009, she was a Commissioner on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and worked on the development of a national restorative justice process to address Canada’s legacy of broken relationships resulting from the Indian Residential School experience. She is currently engaged in a family justice social lab in British Columbia and is the Strategic Coordinator of Access to Justice BC.

Jane’s Resources

• Restorative Solutions website
• Click here to download a great guide by Restorative Solutions on restorative workplace investigations. It describes what they are, what concepts are involved, and how to prepare, facilitate, and report about them (as well as how to do a follow-up circle with the participants). Click here for the one-page summary.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

• Access to Justice BC 
• Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Myers-Briggs
• Adam Kahane
• Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love
• Cynefin framework; David Snowden 

Episode Highlights

[5:28] Gordon asks Jane about whether her approach to jobs and positions she’s taken on relates to her conflict management style, and Jane responds by saying “I think it’s a question of emerging: confidence that things will emerge.” She adds, “That’s not always true of every problem that you’re faced with. Sometimes a pure linear approach to the solution of that problem may be the more direct one. With conflict, I think we’re dealing with complexity, and when you’re dealing with complexity, part of the definition of complexity is that the solutions are not obvious. They emerge. So intellectually, I enjoy complexity. I have a, maybe a higher tolerance than some for some level of chaos. Some people would call it chaos. But certainly a willingness to let things emerge. And I think, when you’re dealing with conflict, at a deeper level, you need to have that.”

[6:54] Jane offers her definition of conflict; she distinguishes between conflicts and disputes, relates them to diversity, and clarifies functional and dysfunctional conflict.

[8:07] “I think of disputes often where – the conflict may be a symptom, it’s the actual interaction between individuals where they’re disagreeing about something. If they become problematic, that’s usually a symptom of an underlying situation of dysfunctional conflict, and that’s where you get into the managing conflict as a system, because you have to look underneath the dispute to figure out what’s happening systemically and the complexity that’s there to deal with it.”

[8:28] Jane discusses the terms “conflict system” and “conflict management system” in terms of organizations and notes that functional conflict management systems can bring about achievements for an organization, whereas poor conflict management systems are unhealthy for an organization. Jane also notes that mediators are often trained to deal with disputes and aren’t thinking about the conflict system. 

• Julia asks if some teams and organizations lack a conflict management system, and Jane says “There’s no such thing as not having a conflict system. You have a way that organizations manage conflict,” which may be formal or informal, and relate to culture and values. 
• Gordon adds to this by pointing out that a conflict management system could be “Speak up and you get fired,” or training a group of internal mediators to handle conflicts as they arise, or hiring external arbitrators for particular disputes or issues. 
• Jane introduces the metaphor of an iceberg, with the tip of the iceberg being the more obvious disputes in an organization and the below-water portion representing all the contributing factors behind the dispute, which may include a history of trauma with one or more parties. 
• Jane elaborates by commenting on the role of culture and rules in an organization’s conflicts and the likelihood of resolution and prevention of further conflicts, and notes the phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

[17:49] Gordon asks how one can improve their conflict management system. Jane recommends being curious and asking questions, such as whether a high-conflict person has a history of trauma (when appropriate). She adds, “When dealing with complexity, rules don’t work so well. There may be some principles that you can follow. There’s purpose that you should always have in your mind. When you go into a situation, it’s about applying those principles more than it is about figuring out which rule you’re going to apply.” 

• Julia asks what those principles may be, and Jane says “One principle is that you should be trying to get the people who are in dispute to manage the dispute themselves as much as possible. The closer to the dispute you work with, the better. But that is not always possible. You have to figure out what the next step is. Even when you bring in interveners, the more they are building up the capacity of the people to manage the dispute, the better. So if you think of conflict as a good thing, and a good conflict management system as one where the conflict is functional, that means you have got competent people in conflict, and lots of people are not competent in that. So you use the situation as an opportunity to educate people. And I think that’s a principle.” 
• “Another one is to think about the fact that there’s underlying causes to the dispute, and be curious about what those are. You don’t have to define them exactly, you don’t have to know what they all are. They’re all complex. But the more you understand the context, the better able you are to respond to the conflict or the dispute that’s before you in a competent way.”

[21:30] Gordon asks how a leader of an organization can bring about system-wide change so that everyone in the organization will start responding to conflict differently. 

Jane responds by saying that “Changing systems is not easy. Systems are, by their nature, they are meant to perpetuate themselves, and that includes perpetuating the bad things about themselves. But that doesn’t mean you give up. An organization is made up of individuals, and part of the reason why conflict is complex is because human beings are complex. But they’re also thinking beings, and they can make choices. So if you’re going to try to change the system, it’s a lot about educating people, having them experience different experiences. It’s not about lecturing to them about how they’d better behave better. It’s about working with them, and sometimes, not just working with them, sometimes it’s imposing some rules and regulations as well. But I think experience, as we all know, is probably the best teacher. You can have, and it’s useful to have, some group sessions talking about some of the basic principles of conflict and how people manage conflict and how people are different. Those are particularly useful workshops. It might be Myers-Briggs or something else, but the major point of it is for the group to begin to understand that there are individuals there that have different needs than they do, and different ways of dealing with things. So building up that understanding. If you just do that very abstractly, then it will go past people’s heads. It’s also important to do it in the context of an actual issue and get people talking about that, and reflecting.” 

Gordon asks how to implement Jane’s suggestions in an organization of say two thousand people, and Jane suggests using pre-existing divisions, e.g. according to jobs, as well as asserting that conflict is good and can help the organization achieve more, and that conflict also needs to be managed in a functional way. Jane also points out that managing conflict is a significant part of managers’ jobs, so one approach to system-wide change is to make it a competency that’s expected of managers. 

Julia asks Jane if there were any concrete examples that Jane could discuss, and Jane tells us about the Yukon government’s transition that she was part of.

[33:26] Julia asks Jane to talk about the conflict management system that Jane co-designed with a colleague. Jane points out:

• The importance of co-designing a conflict management system along with the actors who are going to be implementing the system
• It’s an iterative process
• There’s a lot of explaining and educating as you go about the fact that whatever comes out of the process will be experimental, different, and will take awhile to figure out how it plays out
• You have to constantly lower people’s expectations about how you’re going to come in and “fix it” 
• An investigation can be necessary in some circumstances, e.g. when you have factual differences about a horrendous event, but going back to what she said about the tip of the iceberg, normally these things are symptoms of other matters going on, so a third party coming in to “fix” things and everyone stopping any sense of responsibility they have, isn’t what works. You have to get the parties to feel responsible for the future
• The role of a third person, e.g. a mediator, is not to be an expert; they don’t have a filing cabinet full of different systems to apply to this particular situation. It’s the parties’ system that’s working in certain ways, and we are facilitating a reflection on what’s going on and how that might be changed. It won’t work unless it works for the parties and unless the parties take some responsibility for it
• The Cynefin framework about complexity, simplicity, chaos, disorder, and complication, which David Snowden has theoretically developed  
• Various comfort levels with uncertainty

[43:44] Gordon asks Jane to describe some examples of leaders in an organization taking responsibility. Jane points out that:

• The traditional investigation process is about blame. Jane differentiates her approach in the Yukon as being restorative
• Supervisors often don’t have really good people skills, so they need to take some responsibility for developing those skills
• Managers should recognize this and help those developments
• Managers are responsible for creating positive work cultures and should have high competencies for conflict management 
• There needs to be some real authority to enact change in the process; the system needs to have some teeth

[57:53] Julia asks Jane about formal and informal conflict management processes

[1:01:10] Jane says that trust, relationships, and ethical use of power are crucial aspects of positive conflict management in organizations

[1:03:07] Julia asks Jane if there’s anything else she’d like to add. Jane says to use disputes as opportunities; understand that the solutions are within the organization and you need to figure out how to make that happen. It will look different in different circumstances 

The post Episode 28: Jane Morley – The Leader’s Role in Creating Conflict Management Systems appeared first on On Conflict.

In this episode, Gord and Julia discuss:

• How they landed on leadership as the prime topic for Season 2
• What they value in leadership
• How they always feel respected and connected when they’re in conflict with each other
• Collaborative leaders and conflict competent organizations
• Their 7 steps to collaborative leadership:
  • Be responsible
  • Think systemically
  • Coach
  • Have and model difficult conversations
  • Mediate as appropriate
  • Know how to do team development
  • Be committed to continuous improvement

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Quotes

[0:40] Julia talks about how she and Gord were working together on conflict projects in the community during Season 1, and from both, “One of the things that thematically we noticed was that no matter the organization, no matter the context, no matter the person we interviewed, leaders and leadership would come up time and again.”

[1:15] Gord: “Leaders are very influential in the way conflict plays out in systems, so that could be an organizational system, it could be a community, it could be a group, it could be a team.” Julia: “It could be a country.”

[1:29] Julia suggested they share what each of them values in leadership. Gord: “Certainly I think we value the potential of conflict.” Julia: “That’s a pretty provocative statement!”

[1:52] Julia: “I’m going to say something that I don’t think you’re expecting to hear me say.” Gord: “That’s fine.” Julia: “…what I thought of just now is how you and I engage in conflict. We have lots of conflict.” Gord: “Yeah, we do.” Julia laughs: “I’ve never experienced in any of our conflicts that you didn’t respect me…I’ve just felt this sense of connection with you.” Gord: “I would say the same thing, and I think I could even state something behavioural about that, and that is, you listen to what I say. No matter how much you might disagree with it, or that it might offend you or even hurt you.” Julia: “Yeah, and that piece around the understanding, I think that’s one of the principles in our field, right? Just because I understand you doesn’t mean that I agree. It gives me permission to connect with you. I just never realized that listening is connecting. That might sound weird, but…” Both laugh.

Julia: “I do want to bring it back to leadership and collaboration, it’s just that I think maybe this is a principle emerging around collaboration, which is, you keep connected, and I think for me that’s one of the reasons that I find political discussions so disturbing. They seem to be bereft of any respect, any connection, with somebody who has a different ideological perspective, and it’s so destructive, so non-helpful.”

Gord: “We see that differences over policy or direction or whatever are totally fine, and should be engaged in vigorously to produce new ideas and compromise where required. But the character assassinations, the looking for dirt on people, the obsession with making someone bad so that you can do better politically is just so unproductive for the public good, and yet our societies around the world, so many of them, have fallen into this so deeply.”

[5:47] Julia: “In Season 2, we really want to go on a journey of exploring leadership and conflict and groups, communities, organizations, and where the intersections are. And you and I are starting with a certain premise about the areas that we think are most important for leaders to pay attention to.”

[6:40] Julia: “To kick off the season, we put our heads together, you and I Gord-” Gord: “Bonk.” Julia: “No conflict about it, it was just ouch! Together we’ve created seven areas that we think leaders need to be aware of and capable of acting on when it comes to conflict.” Gord: “And we’d like to reflect on these during the course of the season and see where that takes us. Although organizations are our focus, some or much of what we have to say will apply to other groups of various sizes. It could be a team, a community, the political realm.”

[7:15] Gord talks about two phrases he came up with: collaborative leader and conflict competent organization.

[8:50] Gord and Julia discuss the seven areas for leaders to be aware of and capable of acting on when it comes to conflict:

• Be responsible
• Think systemically
• Coach
• Have and model difficult conversations
• Mediate as appropriate
• Know how to do team development
• Be committed to continuous improvement

The post Episode 27: 7 Steps to Conflict Leadership: Season 2 Begins appeared first on On Conflict.