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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
Key Words: US Election, adversarial politics, activism tactics, communication models, dialogue techniques, conditions for innovation breakthroughs, solving tough problems, new social ingenuity, micro and macro behavioural changes, personal anecdotes, Paris scene.
There is a pre-election debate this week in Paris between representatives from Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad. The topic is "The United States future under George W. Bush or John Kerry." Again, this is kind of impressive and interesting, an extension of the democratic process well beyond the US borders, more evidence that a nation-state concept based on just physical territory is less relevant and meaningful.
The room will be packed, no doubt; the event oversubscribed. But I'll probably give it a miss. I confess, I'm experiencing election fatigue. Even in placid Paris and even without a TV (the absence of which saved my sanity during the Iraq war), I'm getting burned out by its constancy in the media and its dominance in daily conversations. I also don't like what this election is doing to me personally, especially in how I interact with people I disagree with. (The article by P.J. O'Rourke, "I agree with me" in The Atlantic Monthly struck a few chords.)
At first I thought this malaise was just over-stimulation, a function of the sheer volume of coverage, which unlike other media frenzied events like the OJ Simpson trial or Elian Gonzalez (remember him?), the amount of attention at least seems proportional to the importance of this event to the US and the world. But then I realized that something more systemic was at work. My hypothesis now: that it's not so much the quantity of messages bombarding us that is the problem (although as the engineers' rule goes, a ten-fold quantitative change = a qualitative one) but more it's how we are communicating with one another during this election and more generally in society.
A provocative piece by Aidan Rankin called "Punch and Judy Politics" in The Ecologist brought all of this to the surface for me. Rankin exhorts that adversarial politics is threatening the democratic process instead of enhancing it because "human sympathy and tolerance give way to dogmatic certainty, and moralistic slogans thinly veil amoral and cynical acts. ‘Winning’ becomes an absolute principle, overriding any attempt to arrive at truth."
Adversarialism is an inferior way to do politics, in his view, because
all issues are presented as opposites, but in fact ... are complementary principles, or parts of a whole. The game of adversarial politics creates artificial divisions that result in individual bitterness and disappointment, and the diversion of progressive movements from their original goals towards self-limiting cultural niches. At a global level, adversarialism assumes a more sinister form, fueling the revival of ethnic and religious conflicts, masking a larger battle for control of the earth’s resources and the rise of fundamentalism, whether religious or economic.
Means and Ends
Rankin then gets into controversial territory by describing the corrosive impact of adversarial politics on progressive people and groups (hey that's us!), the self-identified agents of change. As he puts it, "inspired by ideals of social justice and equality, and seeking positive change, they [progressives] often take on the negative aspects of their opponents, usually the characteristics they most oppose." According to Ranking this happens in two steps:
First, they are co-opted: they are changed by the system, rather than changing it themselves. Second, they lose their positive energy -- the reason for their existence in the first place -- and replace it with anger, fanaticism and personality cults...
Protesters, in particular, have to be careful not to buy "into a political culture that finds its eventual expression in war," writes Rankin. (Indeed, the power of underlying metaphors in driving social change is something I discuss in an earlier blog, New Frames.) So, before well-meaning progressives know it, they start sliding into dogmatic postures and develop a reactionary mentality that stifles "creative thought and shuts off intellectual and practical possibilities." (My emphasis.)
Ouch. Ring any bells? It does for me. As a facilitator, I've seen this self-limiting cycle in many advocacy groups, especially when they have to work together, ostensibly because they have shared aims around making the world a better place. (Also see Alex Steffen's timely call for a new approach to environmental activism.) Like many Worldchangers, I've been disappointed the most by the organizations and people that inspire me the most in the social change sector. To my surprise, I've discovered that working with hard-nosed, short-sighted, narrowly-motivated corporate folks is much easier than Long View, high-minded kindred spirits in the change-the-world sphere. I really wish it weren't the case, but alas it is. The reasons for this are multi-faceted (Rankin skims just the surface) and far from new. Gandhi saw this dynamic half a century back, and why he said "means are ends in the making." Orwell also bespoke of these dangers in his vivid dystopia, Animal Farm and history is littered with horrific cases of revolutions turning in on themselves -- of Big Idea politics gone dastardly wrong. Again, I think a window into why this happens lies in how we communicate and approach problem-solving.
Coincidentally enough, this is a hot debate amongst Worldchanging contributors. In rapid-fire email exchanges, the conversation has been primarily over whether we should or shouldn't be strongly partisan and political in the aftermath of this election. And while I wasn't active in this exchange (still muddled was I) I can now see why it was important. Here we have an opportunity to model and experiment with alternatives to adversarial politics and avoid its negative trappings. But then this begs a big, hairy question...how do we do this?!?
Dialogue as Social Ingenuity
Indeed, what are the alternatives to adversarial politics? When is it useful and necessary, and when is it counter-productive and part of the problem? We're so locked into the dominant mindset about how we talk to each other -- both in business and political life -- that we can scarcely imagine another model. This mental map, born in a machine-metaphor world, sees communication as happening like a transaction (See below diagram.) In the same way that electricity flows, it presumes that communication is a back-and-forth linear exchange between "senders" and "receivers." In actual fact, most communication is organic and recursive, with much getting lost, conflated or misconstrued in the transmission. As we all know from personal experience, what a sender thinks she said is often interpreted quite differently by the receiver, and vice versa, the messages refracted through the prisms of the communicators' beliefs, experiences and assumptions. This "transmission problem" only compounds when we start interacting with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems, a circumstance which is increasingly hard to avoid in our interdependent world.
Many sage observers are noticing that this new social complexity is creating an "understanding gap." Dan Yankelovich, a venerable pollster who has studied American attitudes and opinions for five decades, believes that the types of problems today require more shared understanding than in the past. This is disturbing because we may be losing "social capital" within our communities, just when we need it the most. Adam Kahane makes a similar point in his book, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening and Creating New Realities (2004). To work on the toughest problems today, Kahane posits," we need a shared commitment and purpose... not just new ideas."
This is hard for many Cartesian rationalists to swallow. Sounds too soft and fuzzy. But this discovery is also mirrored in the business world. In studying how innovation happens in the world's best companies, MIT Media Lab's Schrage found that the key driver was not just "clever ideas but clever interactions between people." His biggest, most surprising insight was that better behaviours between people, rather than knowledge or the "killer idea", was the sustainable lever for innovation. In other words, it's not just content but also the process that enable better conversations. This creates a virtuous cycle because better conversation often means better ideas, and with the social capital or connectivity already created amongst a wider group of people, the chances that these ideas will get traction and a chance to succeed in the organization go exponentially up. They key is to create tools, techniques, and processes that put people into the collaborative mode of communication. This doesn't mean there isn't any conflict or friction; sparks usually fly when creative juices are flowing. But with the presence of a "shared space" which is usually co-created, people can surface and test assumptions, harvest the knowledge and experience of the group, and talk about hard things beyond just personal and professional agendas.
But how do you get into this space? This is no small feat, especially as the personal stakes get higher and higher, and the problems get tougher and tougher. And this is a huge topic and the focus of many emerging methodologies and approaches. However, a shared space for communication can happen around prototypes, new frameworks or models, a theory, a physical location, simulation, shared learning experience, or through stories or scenarios for the future. The tools are many. But no matter what one does, the first step is to understand that all "talk" is the same nor equal, even if we jumble them all together in our heads in practice. For now, let's unpack these briefly (consult the books at the end for deeper exploration) as the six "ds": dowloading, dictating, debating discussing, deliberating and dialogue.
Most of these "Ds" fall on a continuum within the transactional model of communication.
Dialogue, by contrast, is another species of talk altogether driven by a collaborative mode of communication. Dialogue techniques combine open listening and empathy with a rigorous discipline of surfacing key assumptions people are making about themselves, their conversants, and the shared problems on the table. This skill, while hard to do, is important because our most ingrained thought patterns and beliefs are tacit; if left unrecognized and invisible, these assumptions can isolate us from each other and prevent understanding. As Martin Buber describes it, good dialogue is about transcending the "I" and "you" and meeting in the ridge in between where the conversation can be about "we", about both/and instead of either or. Adam Kahane refines this a bit further, describing two kinds of dialogue: reflective dialogue which is listening from the inside, both to ourselves and to others empathetically and subjectively; and generative dialogue, which is listening and learning to see the whole system by connecting to multiple ways of knowing and insight. A higher form of consciousness, to be sure.
To be clear, just like I said, dialogue doesn't mean people have to agree or even like the other side. But if done well, dialogue results in two things: mutual understanding and insight (”thought”) and mutual trust and respect (“feelings”). Both of these things provide excellent traction for decision-making and action in subsequent interactions. Both provide a more enduring platform for shared problem-solving.
One famous example: while we didn't know it at the time, dialogue played a special role in reversing the nuclear arms race and ending the Cold War, as Yankelovich recounts in his book, The Magic of Dialogue : Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (1999.) When Gorbachev was asked a few years after Reagan left office what the turning point was for the relationship, he said it was a meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland. Because this was the first time the conversation extended beyond their main agendas; where they explored each other's aspirations for their two countries and without judgment tried to understand each others core values and assumptions about the world. It was there that the political impasse broke. (This is freshly picked up again in a new book, An Icelandic Saga: Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended by Jack F. Matlock Jr. which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books.)
Almost all non-violent big breakthroughs, I would argue, have a similar alchemy. There are, of course, courses for horses. Dialogue is a specialized form of communication to be used only in certain circumstances. It's no panacea, and there is clearly a time and place for all of the other "d"s, although it's hard to justify "dictating" and "downloading" for anything but military-like contexts. As Adam Kahane found when working in deeply polarized conflicts in countries like Guatemala, Colombia, Cyprus, and South Africa, when it comes to working on stuck problems or creating something new, dialogue not debate, is the best approach. As he explains,
Experts form ideas and present them, and then authorities adjudicate among these already formed ideas. This approach works for deciding between already created alternatives, but it does not create anything new... and that open listening is the basis for all creativity –- in business and engineering as much as in politics.
Shoemaker's Children
So dialogue techniques, processes and tools is a place to look for new social ingenuity, and this may come in handy in the post-election circus. All of this I sincerely believe and I hope this wee tutorial helpful and timely. But some recent regressions on my part have given me a good reality check about how hard this is to put into practice, and just how hard-wired our instincts and habits are when it comes to talking. So the teacher -- and I do teach this -- remains a learner and a chastened one. However, we all study our own problems to some degree, yes?
Two personal stories I'll share to illustrate my point. The first happened just two weeks ago when my "favourite" uncle visited me in Paris. (They are all favourite when they visit.) He's a well respected, smart lawyer in the biotech field and quite involved in my hometown politics and community--a big fish in a smallish pond -- so I was interested in hearing his thoughts on what kind of prospects there were should we want to return home some day. I really was looking forward to this positive, future-oriented conversation, but as soon as I heard through the family grapevine that he was a Bush supporter, I started dreading his visit and the inevitable adversarial conversation. And this reaction really surprised me. Like, it's just politics, right? It's just an election? What troubled me, in particular, was the nasty thoughts and feelings this conjured up in me against someone I loved and respected. "How could someone that intelligent believe Bush could possibly be an option", I thought to myself. And I'm sure he thought the same about me.
When the topic was breached, as I knew it would be -- I had forewarning, remember -- instead of practicing everything I've learned, I reassumed my old pre-dialogue self. What set me off was the well-intended but vigorous lawyerly cross-examination, no doubt intensified by the bottle of Brouilly we had just consumed. So right from the start I had unconsciously conceded the communication style to him, which was really the beginning of the end of any real conversation, and exactly what Rankin was talking about. We were soon just "downloading" our own beliefs and attitudes without really aiming to understand the other's position. It was about scoring points, about me proving how smart I was to my uncle and vice versa.
Admittedly, this kind of talk was fun on one level, jostling and jockeying for position, a little amusing, young buck-older buck rough and tumble. But on another level, there was no real satisfaction. No one learned anything from each other, and if we put a mirror up to the situation, our best selves were poorly represented. I was all of a sudden living with my teen self again trying to prove that I was a grown up now, and he was a middle age man out of his context trying to impress his young turk of a niece that he was worldly and knew best. Sadly, we were worldviews apart with no bridge in sight.
And a real opportunity was lost: an opportunity to actually talk about how we were talking, which in turn would magically take us into meaningful territory: namely, how as a child this communication environment shaped me as a person, the path-breaking first grandkid trying to be authentically heard in a large, complex Latin-Saxon family (a combustible, contradictory mix of Italian, Irish, Scottish stock.) How this adversarial politics within our crazy clan continues to be the source of key problems at an individual and family-wide level. We're no Bosnia or Rwanda, but like society as a whole, this extended family talks a great deal, but almost never directly and never about the things that matter the most. It's hard to imagine this changing within my own family, let alone the world.
The second story took place in June in San Francisco at a cocktail party a friend of ours threw for us while we were in town. Before the party, a bunch of us went out for dinner at a Tapas Bar in the Mission District, and I happened to sit next to a couple I didn't know very well, but the woman I knew peripherally; she was another Canadian, a good friend of a close friend of mine. Her boyfriend appeared a little too "golf course and GQ" for my tastes, but I tried to repress any pre-judgments. So far so good. I quickly learned he was passionate about politics. Even better. And then learned that he was a staunch Republican and backer of Bush.
But, curiously, this didn't put me off. I was somewhat fascinated, because I had remarked to someone earlier that being in Paris I had not met one Bush supporter, and this troubled me since it indicated a certain narrowness of my social network, a boundary limit of sorts to the kinds of people and ideas I was interacting with. This was doubly troubling given that a key tenant of my business is that good foresight and better futures need multiple perspectives at the table. As a practitioner, then, I should practice what I preach or else I'm susceptible to the same blind-spots I help mitigate in others.
In any event, we got to talking and to my disappointment it quickly turned adversarial. I honestly wanted to understand why and how he thought the way he did. I wanted to peel away the superficial speech and get down to the deeper issues, and see if there was a place where we could both meet. But within five minutes, it was clear that there was no chance of this. It takes the consent of two people to dialogue and the right conditions, which simply weren't present. He wasn't willing nor able (emotionally or intellectually) to get into this kind of communication. I was also to blame. While I didn't regress as badly as I did with my uncle, I was aggressively Alpha. The trip switch was his ad homonym attacks on Kerry, as a person, as opposed to any policy discussion or reflection on Bush's record. But this was a garden variety meltdown, in itself not a big deal. However, what really saddened me the most was what happened later. Hours into the evening, when we were at the cocktail party, I overheard him in heated discussion with his girlfriend, saying that "he couldn't stay at the party because there were just too many Democrats in the room." And soon after that, they were gone.
Now, I know this must happen all the time, especially in polarized parts of the world. But I don't think I'd ever really encountered this kind of self-segregation so close to home. I could also see a personal scenario for the first time where this kind of thing becomes the norm and worsens. I hated that. Clearly, if non-dialogue is a precursor and perpetuator of violence, it's not a long way from these polite slights and social avoidances to something far more ugly and sinister. And while I hope it doesn't come to this, this election could trigger such a regression if we're not careful, which is a scenario that's unfortunately plausible. (See "The Coming Post-Election Chaos"By John W. Dean, 22 October 2004).
As these two anecdotes illustrate, adversarial politics is bugging me not just because it's annoying noise in the ether or morally worrisome at some conceptual level, but also because it's infecting me at a personal level. The moral of these stories underscores a key lesson in systemic change practice: we have to start with changing ourselves first. That a vector to macro change is clearly at the micro level. Such a cliché, I know, but true in the sense that it's certainly a more satisfying way to live.
Unimaginable Possibilibiles
Just last night, watching Star Trek, there was a throwaway comment by the Captain in conversation with another species, I can't recall which. He lamented that while Earth's peoples had learned out how to live together peacefully and collaboratively in the 21st century, regrettably the clashes between different worlds continued to persist, making it necessary for the Enterprise to be ready to do battle and resort to violence on occasion. This saddened him.
While this scene seems definitely science fiction, and truly fanciful that we could ever get to such a stage in our species development, as Nelson Mandela put it in describing the South Africa situation, "One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and time again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start." Dialogue and collaborative communication technologies will creation the conditions for impossible things to emerge, while avoiding the most pernicious effects of adversarialism and violence-based solutions.
These observations are often dismissed as idealistic, but I can attest that when you work this way you're surprised, again and again, by just how much more effective and yes, practical it is. Every time I do this, I still have to suspend my disbelief, but then shake my head after, saying,"why we didn't start doing this sooner?" Trust in emergent processes does require some faith.
Another way to see this: much like how life made the radical leap from single cells to more multi-cellular entities capable of handling complex activities, our chance as a species I believe depends on making a similar leap in how we communicate. We need a more complex and collaborative way to communicate. Processes like dialogue might point the way to how this might be achieved. So let's try as Worldchangers to put these tools into action in the coming weeks and days, for how we talk to one another will be surely put to the test.
Books and Articles Mentioned:
(Thanks to fellow Pioneers of Change chum, Bjorn Brunstad, for forwarding this to our email group. The article is not available online so click here. This work-around aside, the magazine is good so check it out and buy a copy. With a tag-line "rethinking assumptions" how could you resist? Well... actually...hmmm... I can think of many people who avoid this at all costs and therein lies one of our big worldview divides.)