More About the Difficult Conversations Course

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The post Episode 46: Season 2 Finale 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.