 The library has been partnering with the League of Women Voters for seven, eight. This is the eighth year we've been in partnership with their speaker series. And it's a great partnership, but we're happy to continue it. Kate Rader is going to come up from the League of Women Voters and make the official introduction. Thank you, and I would like to welcome them behalf of the League. It looks like we're still getting used to being out in public together again. So for this program on election issues, we present Susan Clark speaking on constructive discourse. Clark is a writer and educator focusing on community sustainability and citizen participation and award-winning radio commentator and former talk show co-host. She has taught community development at the college level for 10 years. Excuse me. Clark's small-D democratic activism has earned her broad recognition, including the 2010 Vermont Secretary of State's Enduring Democracy Award. She serves as town moderator of Middlesex, Vermont, and she is a member of the League of Women Voters. Before I relinquish the stage, let me invite you to next month's program on January 10th on civics education where we will hear Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanses and from the agency of education, Martha Dice. And now I will give it to Susan. Hello, little Christmasy things. Thank you so much. So thanks to everybody for coming out on this snowy night. Can everybody hear me? Is this okay? Yes. All right. I am excited to be here. I know that constructive discourse is an important topic to all of us, and maybe some of us would rather be at home having eggnog. So good for you for saying, no, actually, this one's for me. So Kate introduced me. I won't go much further. I just want to say I do work with communities across New England on effective public engagement. And researcher and writer, slow democracy tells stories of communities across the United States using local democracy to make a difference. All those in favor is a book I co-authored with Frank Bryan, who knows an awful lot about Vermont town meetings. And we sort of called this one the reader's digest version of his 30-year study of Vermont town meetings. And Freedom and Unity, not technically a book. It's a comic book. Okay. But it was so much fun to make. And I'll tell you, it came out last fall. And if you're looking for some great therapy sometime, find a cartoonist, speak your truth, and then see what happens two weeks later when they give it back to you in a cartoon. It was a really satisfying, fun experience with the Vermont Humanities Council and the Vermont Secretary of State's Office and the Center for Cartoon Studies, which we have one of in Vermont in White River Junction. So you can see from all of that that I'm a local democracy nerd. So sorry about that. I will be addressing this topic of constructive discourse primarily from that local democracy perspective. But as we will see, a lot of the issues that we're facing at the national political discourse level have parallels in our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our families and in our marriages and in parenting, because there's a common problem that runs through all of these. Anybody spotted it? Human beings, right? Human beings deeply flawed. So we're going to see what we can do about that. So I'm going to start by talking about some of the unique challenges we are facing today in terms of constructive democratic discourse. I'll touch a little bit on brain science, how our brains have gotten us here, and then putting this together, what tools, what innovations might we bring to our current situation to sort of navigate and create more constructive discourse. So let me just start with some of the current strains on our society. I don't need to tell anybody here how exhausted everybody is from the past few years. The pandemic took its toll, of course, on our individuals and families and local economies. At that same time, you will recall that America experienced and of course is still experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning. And meanwhile, climate change, the July flood experience is still very much with us. And climatologists are telling us to prepare for disasters as the new normal. So these are real pressures and we're going to need to agree on how to address them. But will our democratic skills be up to that challenge? And January 6th was just one of many visual aids showing us that we, you know, are experiencing one of the most polarized and democratically fragile moments in American history. So if you're worried, which you probably are because you came out tonight, you are not alone. There was a recent survey that showed that fewer than one in ten Americans polled think that political ranker between average Americans will decrease in the next decade and nearly half think it's going to increase. So even the title of my talk today had to be carefully crafted. The League's initial impulse was to have me speak on civil discourse. Ooh, civil discourse. I can tell you right now, deliberative democracy practitioners. The word civility itself has become charged because there are activists working to dismantle racism and they reject that call for civility. They're arguing fundamental changes require confrontation. We don't want civility. We need to call people out in public and we need to disobey unjust laws in order to get elite's attention. I've seen whole events blow up and fail just over that one word of civility alone, which just kind of tells you where we've gotten to. So Democratic scholars are refining their language. There's a Harvard professor named Arshan Fong who said deliberative Democrats don't deny the need for conflict or adversarial politics, but think that a central purpose of that conflict is to establish the political conditions for fair and inclusive deliberative democracy. So he says, what do you want politics to look like after the fight? What's the model we're looking for? And how do we model that? There's a UNH professor, a deliberative scholar who said, our goal now has just been to help people get to the table and stay at the table. Please stay. Because this is not sustainable. We all know that we're going to have to work together to solve our problems. So how? How do we engage more constructively when there are so many forces that keep us polarized? So there's some good news about this, but I'm just going to finish with a little bit more bad news. This is a funny slide, but humor is a way to cope with our scary reality. That is not an actual scientific study. But public engagement is increasingly inflamed by misinformation. I think we all know that. Social media and Amanda Ripley wrote a book called High Conflict, which I would really recommend and she has coined the term Conflict Entrepreneurs. Think about that. These are partisans and media outlets who make it their business to so distrust because they actually benefit from polarization. And so remember this term, Conflict Entrepreneurs. I'm going to use it a few times. Amanda Ripley, R-I-P-L-E-Y. Her book is called High Conflict. Yeah, fascinating. She goes all different kinds of conflict from wars to divorces, gangs, and what they have in common in terms of, again, the human brain. So yeah, Conflict Entrepreneurs, you might know some. From time to time, you might even be one. So we'll come back to this. So in addition, sometimes we are just our own worst enemies. Conventional participation, this is what political scientists call things like public hearings. Public hearings, by the way, the most common way that we bring people together in democracy today have, according to a lot of research, actually made things worse. Social scientists have been collecting data on that sort of two minutes at the microphone thing, that conventional participation, which are enshrined in law. They have, 50 years ago, we started doing things via public hearings. And if you can imagine life with no hearings, then you're talking smoke-filled rooms. So it's like, you get it, you get it, that public hearings were intended to make things more transparent. But the way they are formatted, public hearings are frequently neither, right? They're usually poor representation of the public, and there's very little hearing that's going on. So here are some direct quotes from, this is a textbook on public administration. Conventional participation, things like public hearings, tend to be harmful to citizens. It increases our feelings of powerlessness, decreases our political interest, decreases our trust in government. It can also increase polarization. If you think about a public hearing, usually it's like, all right, we have a proposal. If you want to speak for it, stand there. If you want to speak against it, stand there. Very little, it actually tends to exacerbate the differences rather than thinking about what they have in common. There are a number of other critiques of public hearings, but this idea that it can be hard, really hard, on the people who are involved, and it's not just, yeah. Well, ignorance comes to mind is that if you're not exposed to the public hearing and you don't know, so you're like, I'm ignorant, so everything's happy. But if I do get exposed, it might possibly create these things. So in a strange way, those bad things are more informed. Citizen, I don't know. Am I a more informed citizen if I go to a public hearing? Right. Right. I mean, maybe, although I might also be a more inflamed citizen. What I'm looking for is a better process than a public hearing. Sure. So these are for the folks in the audience, but what about the leaders? They don't like it either. It's frustrating, it's discouraging. It can actually even be dangerous to deal with a hostile, uninformed, argumentative citizens who are at public meetings. And ultimately, we're talking about outcomes. As the relationship deteriorates between the people and their public institutions, the legitimacy and the financial sustainability of the governments continues to decline. So I know that's a lot of bad news. And no wonder many of us are sick of democracy. So the question is why? Why is it so hard to create systems where we can hear each other? And what is it about humans that makes us... It makes it so easy for conflict entrepreneurs to manipulate us. So to answer that, I'll take a little brief foray into the amazing and amazingly frustrating human brain. There was a study that was done, first done in 2006. It has been replicated many times since where researchers wired up some voters to explore exactly what happens inside our brains when we receive new information, especially when we perceive that that information does not fit our world view. So they had a group of self-described Republicans and Democrats who were subjected to unflattering information about their own party's candidates. And according to their MRIs, this is brain reading. When the subjects were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, their brains actually under-processed the information. So the prefrontal cortex that's responsible for conscious reasoning, it hardly even fired. And instead it was the emotional circuits of the brain that lit up. So basically, participants' brains used emotion to ignore information that they didn't want to hear but that they couldn't discount intellectually. And what we have to remember is this is a physiological reaction. So there are scientists like Jonathan Haidt who explain it. They tell us that this sort of idea of figuring out the us, them, you know, who's on whose side, it's largely innate. Who's on my team and who isn't, it gave us a survival advantage back when we were banding together in tribes for protection. Thank you very much. Evolution, right? And Haidt explains that many of our individual characteristics, this is a really interesting book by the way, including whether we're the kind of person that gets excited about change or whether we're the kind of person who kind of prefers the status quo, that literally makes us more likely to be liberal or conservative. Those aren't simply opinions. We're talking about significantly inherited qualities and they make up our identities. And we're physiologically wired to embody them and defend them. So if we want to live in a world where people can take in new information and can find new ways to move forward together, it is easiest if we frame the conversation in ways that don't challenge those identities. And it takes patience and it takes, frankly, a lot of big-heartedness. Another great book, Catherine Schultz, the author of the book Being Wrong, has comically pointed out, and she has a great TED talk on this, when we encounter somebody we disagree with, we often react on a three-point scale. So you and I are talking, we realize we disagree. My first thought is, oh, this person just needs more information. So I kindly share my facts with you, right? But we still disagree. So then I'm going to move on to number two. Okay, the idiot assumption, because you have all the information, you know, you're just too stupid to see things my way. So what if that turns out not to be true? What if the person we disagree with has all the information and they turn out to be pretty smart? Uh-oh, that's really scary. We're going to have to move on to number three, right? This person is evil. They know perfectly well the truth, but they are distorting it on purpose because they are wicked. And you'll notice that this ladder leaves no room for the very most common of human realities, which is that intelligent people of good will sometimes disagree. And in fact, the only solution, uncomfortable as it may be, is to get together and to hear each other out. So this is really important, and it's especially important now, because at this moment in history, a lot of today's topics, affordable housing, school consolidation, citing wind turbines are so complex that even science can't give us one simple right answer because of competing identities and underlying values. And it sounds so hard, but here's the thing. The world is full of what's called polarities, two crucial, interdependent, but contradictory variables. That have to coexist. Navigating polarities, it's not easy. We manage it every day. Any parents in the room here? Parents have to be firm and flexible. Two competing realities, two good things, and if you'd rely too much on one or the other, you really need to have both in order to be a good parent. A good boss is both grounded and visionary. Organizations have to embrace both continuity and change. And in our home state of Vermont, since 1788, we have somehow functioned under our paradoxical motto. Anybody remember? Freedom and unity, that's right. If we were all completely free, we could never be unified, and if we were all totally unified, we would never be free. It is the ultimate motto of paradox. In New Hampshire, at least, they know where they stand, whether they're free or die. But we have been operating and understanding that these two competing things, two competing goods, need to be considered in lots and lots of decisions that we make. The trick about, if you have a polarity dynamic, but what if there are multiple poles? What if there are three things? Analysts call that a wicked problem. Anybody remember seeing signs like this? I think pinkies used to have one. It reminds me of this. We can do it good, we can do it cheap, and we can do it fast, but you can only have two. So balancing multiple poles, it's like a magic trick, but planners do this all the time when they're looking at a parcel of land and they've got one group that's really interested in environmental issues, like wildlife, you've got another group that's very interested in economic development, you've got another that's got social issues like affordable housing it's trying to work on. There's no one single solution that you're just going to pop off the shelf and it's going to please everybody every time. So the trick is, rather than thinking about solving wicked problems, we need to think about managing them, naming and understanding the underlying competing values, exploring the trade-offs together, doing that hard work of finding the best balance in each case. There's a professor at Colorado State University named Martin Carcasson who explains that most of the time, most problem-solving models that we have do not work this way. They focus on one of two tools, expertise or activism. Expertise, we bring in the scientific experts and they will tell us what to do or activism, right? Just organize a campaign, one side wins, the other side loses, boom, problem solved, right? Yeah, until the losing side comes back. Polarities and wicked problems are inherently different. They don't respond to one single technical solution. They don't respond to advocacy. What they do respond to is trusting face-to-face communication. Carcasson has said that solutions begin when we recognize that with wicked problems it's the problem that's wicked and not the people. Wonderful best-selling book, The Sum of Us by Heather McGee. She tells the story of desegregation in the American South in the 1950s and 60s where some towns were so against allowing black people to swim in swimming pools that rather than desegregate, they literally drained the swimming pools. So nobody could swim. So rather than this crazy drained pool politics, zero-sum policies where both sides lose, McGee has, her book is filled with more modern examples of deeper cross-cultural understanding and creates what she calls the solidarity dividend. I love that term. It's like, oh, win-win, there's a dividend. We actually both can benefit when we figure it out together. Because the good news is that brain science tells us we can actually use our intellectual capacity better when we don't trigger that fight-or-flight-us-them response. So we need techniques to frame issues and engage people in less divisive ways so that we can honor our differences and integrate the diverse values into the solutions. So to recap, polarities and wicked problems, they never get solved. That's the bad news. The good news is they do get managed or they can be managed. And in fact, I think some of the greatest human suffering comes from treating what's really a polarity as if it were a problem to solve. It's a polarity to navigate, and if you treat it as a problem to solve, that's where we really start to suffer. So how? How do you navigate a polarity? Exactly. So we could do a months-long workshop on this. If you're interested, it's definitely worth the time. But I'm just going to do a little whirlwind tour. And this work draws on a book by Brian Emerson and Kelly Lewis who are building on Barry Johnson's groundbreaking work, Polarity Management. So what are some typical common polarities that you might see in everyday life? We mentioned some of the ones that parents see. Certainly in your relationship with friends, you're going to see something like structure and flexibility. You're taking a trip, planning a trip with a friend. And one of you really, it's like, I want to do this on Tuesday, I want to do this on Wednesday. I want to make sure to see the blah, blah, blah. And somebody else is like, I want to see what happens. Let's just take life as it comes. You know, like people have gotten divorced for more, for less than that. These are some of the ones that organizations have, some of the ones you see in leadership. Things like action and reflection. You know, are you somebody who's sort of just really wants to answer questions or are you, you know, more of a slow thinker. Reality and hope, that's one that we're all struggling with right now, I think. Many of us have a preference on these polls. You might see yourself up there and know exactly which one you are on candor and diplomacy, for instance. It's really natural for any individual to have a preference on one of those. And of course, none of these, if you look at the way these are framed, none of these things is bad. For example, you'll notice structure and flexibility. It's not like, if I were a person who is really into flexibility, I might say, rigidity and flexibility. But it's like, no, we're not doing that. On both sides, when we're talking about a polarity, both sides are good. And it's not one versus the other, we want them both. On the other hand, there is such a thing as taking any of these things too far. So navigating a polarity, this is what's called a polarity map. And this one is continuity and change. So two sides, and this is the kind of thing that we can do in our brains or we can actually actively do them on paper or in public forums. But the two sides represent the two poles. Over here, continuity, over here, change. The top represents a healthy use of that pole. If we could just focus on continuity and not worry about it, not worry about change, what good things would we get? What benefits would we have if we could just focus on change? And then over uses, the consequences if we overuse that pole. What happens if we focus only on continuity and neglect or ignore the other? If we take this pole too far. So I'll give you an example in a second, but there are lots of different ways you can use a tool like this. I've done it with folks where you actually have four flip charts in the room and you visit each of the flip charts and you fill it out. It can be an actual, really a physical experience. You can sense at which pole you feel the most comfortable and at which one you just kind of tense up. I had a colleague tell me one time that he was working out west with some farmers and they were talking about a continuity and change issue, I think it was, that had to do with farmland. And everybody was willing to discuss all four of the poles, but there was one farmer who would not walk to that flip chart. He was willing to throw out some ideas but he would not stand next to it. You can see how powerful it can be to experience this with a whole room. But another way to do it is through polling, you can individually have people fill these out. So here's an example that some of us may have seen or experienced. Should we renovate the old town hall or the school or fill in the bank or should we tear it down and build a new one? Continuity and change. So you can imagine if you were in your community, maybe you're even on the Planning Commission or on the Select Board, and you know that this is a hot one. You know that this is going to be about more than bricks and mortar. You sense in this case, I'm not in every case, but maybe in this case you sense that there's some values involved, maybe some old time or newcomer stuff. It could turn into an ugly fight. You'd rather have constructive discourse. So how much you use a polarity tool? I did this with a group this summer. And here are some of the responses that we saw if you think about it. What are the benefits of continuity, of sticking with the old town hall? And by the way, we took money out of the argument. Just for the sake of argument, we took money out of it. Let's say it costs the same. So here are some folks saying it's going to respect our local history. It gives us a sense of place. And it, we know how it works. Having a historic building is a draw for tourism. Oh, I should have taken out that cheaper thing. The environmental impact doesn't increase our taxes for now. These were some of the things that they were brainstorming. And they also were pretty, it was pretty easy for people who really liked continuity to think about how mad they would be if things did move too fast and what if we did just go ahead and tear down the old town hall. It disrespects long-term residents that would lose their sense of place, lose their sense of control. So some very negative things down there under that. But we also filled in the other ones as well. And so this idea that you can innovate that the town will look less run down, we could attract new families, it might be a healthier building. And start to name some things that we don't, the people over here seem a little rigid to me. These words start to sound pretty negative. They're not even innovative. In fact, we're even going to start saying that they're exclusionary and that they're equity issues here as well. Which starts to get pretty personal. Down here when we start talking about some of these negatives, it can be raised some really hot issues. And if you've ever been in one of these conversations with somebody who really was attached to their poll and it was a polarity and not a polarity to navigate, not a problem to solve, what tends to happen in these conversations if you don't pay attention is that I will tell you all the good things about continuity and the overuses of change. Whereas you will tell me all the benefits of change and all the overuses of continuity. And we will have one of these kinds of diagonal conversations where we talk past each other endlessly, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, green, green, green, green, green, green, green, infinity loop. Ever happened to anybody at Thanksgiving, by the way? We're talking past each other. I'm convinced that I'm right and you're wrong. And this is the way conflict entrepreneurs love to frame issues. My side wants the benefits of yellow and I will frame the other side purely in terms of its overuses. And so and it's really painful to live down here in the overuses. They may be true, but if you put me here it's going to make my brain turn off. If you start telling me that because I am in favor of continuity I am suddenly somebody who's exclusionary and I'm in favor of inequity that is going to make me extremely grumpy. And down here if you tell me that the benefits of change, all of a sudden you're going to tell me that I'm disrespecting long-term residents and I'm an elitist. I'm also going to be very grumpy. It's really painful to live down here and our brains turn off if we live down there and rather than being a creative problem solver if I'm being placed down here what I'm going to act more like is an animal in a cage. And furthermore I'll probably start calling you these things over here. So this is called the suffering paradox if we treat polarities like a problem and try to solve them. It has some definite symptoms. You'll probably recognize some of these. We preference, we attach, we wet ourselves to one pole. Othering, we create the other. We start to be unable to see a possible compromise. The either or is so strong that we kind of neglect the idea there could be a both hand. And it results in hampered communication, damaged relationships, inferior results, bad outcomes. Oh, I have a little visual. You've all seen these, but it really brings to mind a finger trap when we start to pull apart from each other because of this. It's a trap, right? It's a trap when we pull apart from each other. We see the similarity here that we have to coexist, we're stuck together, but we're triggered and we want to pull away and it only tightens the trap. And there are a number of reasons that we might resist coming together while we might pull apart. We could be scared that we would lose part of our identity. We might anticipate judgment from other people who are on our side who have the same preferences challenging our team. We could be threatening our side's values. But there's some real strength, real power in brainstorming these lists together in an open, honest discussion. When I actually hear you, if we're really open and brainstorming, I could hear you say, well, I don't happen to believe this, but I know some people think that this could disrespect long-term residents. That's a pretty powerful thing to have me hear you say that. And we start to... Just for the sake of facts, we understand there is such a thing as an overuse of my side. I still prefer this side, but yet it can go too far. And a shift can really happen when I hear you say out loud the overuses of your way and the benefits of mine. And it siphons that energy out of the infinity loop. And I don't want to stress this. The conversation is transformed because all of a sudden we can come together, I can get my fingers out. And rather than talking against each other, yellow versus green, side versus side, we start to recognize that we are unified in wanting these good things. And we are unified in really wanting to try to figure out how to avoid these bottom things. It s a more relaxed, not the infinity loop. Everybody wants the top. And then you can start talking about the third way. What is the third way? What is the way that we are going to get something that respects our local history and also might give us a healthier building? What can we do to have a really strong sense of place and also innovate and have fresh ideas? If you start framing the question that way, you come up with different kinds of answers. So this is a tool that can be used in a bunch of different ways. It can just be a lens that you can bring. I actually use it a lot these days, especially when I'm listening to the news. But also in a conversation with your neighbors or friends, is this who framed this question? Is this being framed by conflict entrepreneurs? Is somebody just trying to push me into my corner off? Is there a polarity underneath this that maybe could be framed more productively? You can ask yourself the question. It's also one that you can use if you are actually talking with somebody, to a colleague or in the community. Somebody frames something as A versus B. You might ask them, what would happen if we step back and looked at things a little more holistically? We both recognize this tension. We value both of these two good things. How can we honor them both and find a way forward together? What might a solution look like that would honor both of those sides? Or, you know, you can actually use it as a discussion tool, like I said, with the whole deal, with the flip charts and the having people actually visit them. But watching out for conflict entrepreneurs, they will never frame a conversation this way. They want us to live down at the bottom with the overuses. So I mentioned that it's, if we want to help people move forward, it's easier if we frame things in a way that doesn't challenge a person's identity. I just want to mention a superpower that I think we have here in Vermont. And that is the sense of place. In the United States, you know, place isn't simple. In the United States we have centuries of place-based sins to reckon with. We've violently displaced Native American populations from our homelands to forcibly, we also forcibly relocated enslaved Africans to our shores, so place is not a simple thing. That said, whether or not by design, the United States is a nation that's full of immigrants, multicultural communities. We have refugees from across the globe. Whatever each of our personal histories, many, many people feel a strong organic sense of place in the place they now call home. So it's natural for humans to want to engage with place. And in Vermont, right here, we have some place-based advantages that helped us to understand each other. One of them, of course, is right outside your door winter. And the days are even still getting shorter for another week or two. And it makes winter feel even longer when you just lost your power as most of us did. So, when somebody tells me that they've just survived their first Vermont winter, I can share a celebration with them. Or if they tell me that they've been here for a decade, I mean, that's ten winters, right? Or that they tell me their family's been here for seven generations. Or that they are of Native American descent. Any of these statements is embedded with meaning and it's an opportunity to connect, that we can use it as an opportunity to connect with each other. Another one that we have, of course, is our scale in Vermont. Our post-colonial settlement patterns in response to the natural landscape. We are clustered in small human-scale communities. A lot of people don't know this about Vermont, but we are technically the most rural state in the United States according to the most recent census. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean we're Wyoming with these vast open areas. It means, because it's a census, it's about people, right? It's because we have by far the most people who live in communities of 2,500 or less. That's how it's defined as rural in the census. So nearly 65% of Vermonters live in these small communities. And what that means, it's how we govern ourselves, it's how we know our neighbors. It's a huge factor that gives us a sense of connection. And that's, again, superpower that we can build on. Town meetings, of course, you will hear me talk about this as an inheritance. There are over three-quarters of Vermont towns make decisions of some kind at floor meetings. They're little tiny legislatures dedicated to self-governance and direct democracy year after year, decade after decade, century after century. It changes our democratic DNA and our expectations of how we make decisions together. And, of course, shared experience over time builds social capital. It's that place-based trust and neighborliness and reciprocity. They're a powerful inheritance so that, you know, we can push together. So conflict entrepreneurs will make it their business to nationalize issues. They will name and frame things in ways that will rile up their base. But the more we can resist that nationalization, the more we can think about what we have in common with our neighbors is a canny response to what we share. And the place is our commons. So I'm just going to give a couple of examples. You know, there are a lot of there's been increased polarization. We know that. But the good news there is that there are a lot of new groups that have emerged to take on bridge building. A lot of you have heard of probably Braver Angels which facilitates conversations across a red-blue divide. I will name just a few more. Some of them are pretty fun. This one, this is Living Room Conversations. This was founded by Joan Blades. And you may not have heard of Joan Blades, but you have probably heard of another organization that she founded, moveon.org. Oh, thanks. Denied. You've been denied. So Joan Blades who co-founded moveon.org she has created a process where you have two people, you and a neighbor host a conversation on a controversial topic. But the trick is that one host has to be a self-identified liberal and the other one a self-identified conservative. So they invite over a few of their friends, but again they have to maintain that balance. And so if you Google Living Room Conversations you'll see that they have a whole host of topics from voting practices to food and health, how to talk about politics that are framed in a way that you can have these Living Room Conversations. You can have them on Zoom as well. And the idea is not to find agreement, shared beliefs or opinions, but alignment, shared intention. So a very cool process worth looking into. Here's a new one. I don't know if anybody, any of you has seen this documentary called The Abortion Talks. If you want an inspirational example there's an organization called Essential Partners and it was involved in some very unusual constructive discourse that's covered in this documentary. So in the 1990s in the aftermath of a shooting at an abortion clinic in Massachusetts they convened six women, three leaders of pro-choice groups and three leaders of pro-life groups. And these women were so horrified by the shootings at the clinics that they risked their professional lives and their personal safety, frankly, to meet secretly. And they said, yes, we will meet once secretly, as long as it can be completely, you know, just come in. They met once with a mediator from Essential Partners. We'll do it again. They met once more. And eventually, regularly, over the course of six years they kept on meeting these six women in mediated conversations. And the purpose wasn't to change each other's minds, that was never going to happen. This is like the head of NARAL and the head of pro-choice and pro-life groups. But they wanted to understand each other better. And ultimately they changed how they would speak about each other in public. Ultimately they feminized each other, which dialed back the public rhetoric which had inflamed their followers. They gained extraordinary mutual respect and they even started to engage in some cross-partisan effort. So worth taking a look at these amazing six women and the conversations that they had. This is a more playful example. It's just so wacky that it seems to be working. The Warm Cookies of the Revolution. It's a civic health club in Denver. Of course, every event they do have milk and cookies. And of course it's Denver, they always have the gluten-free cookies and the soy milk. But the idea is to help people come out of their ideological corners and also to have fun. So they have some really silly events. This is the Civic Stitching Pitch panel discussion with moderators on political topics. Things like gentrification and gun safety and legalizing marijuana. But you are required to bring a craft. You have to bring your knitting. Or if you don't have one, then your craft supplies are supplied. It helps people kind of stay human, reduces speech-ifying. They have a Thursday night football game where during half-time they have timeouts to discuss social issues that revolve around professional sports. They had an emergency preparedness event that touched on actually not just zombies. But they did include some group activities during that awareness event. And clearly just had a lot of fun. For a local example that's similarly fun, I hope some of you have heard of the Civic Standard which is a new group out of Hardwick. They call themselves a mobile cultural center. So they do, they are in the old newspaper building in Hardwick, but they also will do things at different places, whether they're hosting a harvest celebration at the Grange or free soup nights, or they've got speakers and workshops and music junkets. They did a homegrown theater production about their own community in Hardwick where the town manager played the town manager. And they're just doing very creative very exceptionally just playful and super serious work of reweaving the fabric of their community. While we're talking local, I'll just give a couple of fun local examples. Peachham has an elaborate partnership between the school and the town where each grade goes through a democratic process to nominate a name for a town, Snowplow. And then the voters at town meeting get to vote on it. It's inspiring, it's unforgettable for the kids, and it's this light-hearted moment of public discourse for the adults. You probably also heard about what happened in Woodbury recently where the town moderator teamed up with the elementary school to moderate a mock town meeting. And the students got to debate several issues including whether to spend 500 real dollars on new playground or a field trip. And these little genie kids up there talking about you know, should it be long-term physical infrastructure or experiential education, what are the trade-offs. Public did a great story on this. And in the end, spoiler alert, they did choose the field trip. But the Fairbanks Museum executive director heard the radio story and was so honored that they would choose a field trip that he donated the field trip which meant that they got to get the playground equipment. I'm not sure what the democratic lesson is there. But a fantastic experience for them and for the community. So to wrap up I will just mention a little dialogue process that's called the Conversation Cafe. And this is a format I've got the little cards here. Got them with my yes, along with my finger trap. Conversation Cafe cards. They offer ground rules, things like if you're going to have a conversation with a friend, open mind, having an attitude of curiosity, speaking with sincerity, speaking from your personal experience, try to keep it brief, some ground rules like that. And my favorite part is on the back these are reminders that you can just carry with you and you're in a conversation that's on the verge of becoming uncivil. There's these questions that can help you to bring things back together. Ask your person who is saying things that you disagree with. What happened that led you to this point of view? Ask them for a story. How does this affect you personally? Which is an interesting way of getting past the talking points that you might have heard on the radio. How does this affect you personally? I'm curious, can you say more about that? Boy, we never say that when we're in arguments, do we? And then, of course, the ultimate here is what I heard is that what you mean. Which is a very, very powerful way to help people make sure that they're saying what they mean. Oftentimes, there will be a follow-up. Yeah, that's what I mean and you can dig a little deeper. I think the idea with these is to take a breath and to discover the concerns beneath stances, the interests beneath the positions. Because when we are feeling heard, it helps our minds relax. It helps our minds open and even might allow us to recognize the gaps in our own knowledge and to become curious to learn more. So the goal is not to embrace, not to validate, not to convince. It's to understand. And in the work of constructive discourse, there isn't any more powerful tool than listening. So that's it. That's for me. I'm happy to take questions. And I have more of these cards. Any thoughts on polarities? Public discourse? Snow plows? Framing. Issue framing? The worst conversation you ever had at Thanksgiving? What were you calling the people who are the entrepreneurs? Conflict entrepreneurs. Yeah. Or what about state powerhouses? Sagan. State powerhouses. They're not entrepreneurs. They're the state that has the public relations strings and is putting the story out this way and this way and this way. Yep. Things are definitely spun and that's the world of advocacy and sometimes that is a thing that advocates do but it's worth asking is this framed in a way that often times it'll be framed in a way that makes my side look good. But is it framed in a way that is actually making the other side look bad and is actually trying to inflame the narrative? That's one of the questions that we can ask I think in these situations. You can ask that question and it doesn't create more inflammation. I'm talking about asking it in my brain. When I'm trying to be in this world and I'm trying to live as a human being but I mean it certainly is a question that once an issue has gotten polarized I'm thinking of like for example that town hall example which is a pretty toned down example really compared to a lot of the things that we're fighting about these days but so that's why it's helpful to use it but once you've already had one of you've already really really gotten polarized and one side has already started name calling and those kinds of things it's really hard to do this kind of conversation. This is a much more useful tool to use upstream of the polarization because again it's like people's brains have already turned off but it's not impossible and it is at least helpful especially if you have what you might call a third way solution to say here's why I'm proposing this solution because I think that there are benefits of both of these and there can be over uses and we're trying to avoid these so it can still be useful. I want to be clear that some of the issues we're dealing with today things like racism for example, that's not a polarity it's not a well you know there's upsides but there are ways that certain issues that we are dealing with can bring in racism and can bring in even in the town hall example you can say oh those people it might not be about race but it might be about exclusion of another kind they those kinds of key issues can get brought into a polarity so it's useful to step back when we start talking about some of those issues. I'm thinking for example of when we want to rename a school mascot if you looked at a school mascot issue from the point of view of continuity and change and we're really able to step back you might see that some of the people who want to stick with that school mascot are doing it for you know I mean you'll hear an old man say I propose to my wife underneath that school mascot it's about change sentimentality about you know or a connection to place that transcends whatever that mascot image is not what it means in that person's mind it doesn't mean the mascot doesn't need to change it does mean that we can understand each other better and not just assume that the person who wants to stick with that mascot is absolutely must be racist because how could they not be if they wanted that you know instead be able to step back a little bit and start to say how are some geez maybe we need to make sure we stick with that color you know and honor the history of the number of games that were won under that mascot you know that's what it takes yeah have you heard are aware of the deep canvassing yes great example in a way it's not quite the same as what you're saying here and what what is your how's that fit together it's very very relevant so the question is about deep canvassing which is an innovative tool that I believe was in California during that was during a initiative and referendum process around maybe gay marriage I think it was and what they realized was that the organizers realized that they were if they were just going to go at it head on this issue of you know win lose there should be gay marriage well I think they lost so they started doing something called deep canvassing which is door to door talking but with listening so rather than ding dong hi my name so and so blah blah blah let me tell you all the reasons that you need to believe what I believe instead it's can you tell me what your views are on this issue can you tell me you know using some of these kinds of questions what's your experience with it you know what happened to you that made you feel that way starting to connect personally with that door to door tip much more time intensive that actually allowed people to understand that here was a human who in the course of conversation came up that they were a person who wanted to get married and they were gay and here was their story and that it's it's measurably changed minds measurably changed the way the conversation was happening so it's a very powerful listening is a super powerful social change tool it might seem when you're you know on the face of it it's like no we have to fight in fact it can be more powerful almost it's more sort of an Easter to use the energy coming at you to make the change there is a video I guess it's out of Yale that's supposed to be introducing people and suggesting trying I didn't find it all that helpful because they had the example they gave they gave a couple of examples show someone interviewing go knocking on the door and talking to them and it was like well you know that was a prime candidate they just seemed too quick as a yes they start by asking a question but the guy was really pretty ready to really believe the position the low-hanging fruit it's definitely low-hanging so I didn't really I felt that I didn't really learn much from this video I would have a little bit more challenging interaction would have been helpful I ended up leaving me with the impression you start listening until you get a sense of the emotional basis and then you go in there okay well if it starts to feel weird and manipulative then well that's why I was wondering whether it didn't seem like this was what they said the description they gave I had felt didn't quite fit the example that they even have sent you a link to this other thoughts sir I wonder between you and Michelle is there any way that all those people that are watching it on live streaming or watching a recording flater can respond to some of their ideas to you or to the library yeah up to you Michelle but I'm happy if people want to send an email with a question yeah I can respond to those all the people we sent the original notice to sure yes I'd be happy to I can't guarantee I'm going to know a lot of answers but I'll take the questions more likely know the answers than I will sure okay absolutely have you been using this in your town moderating skill set to some effect the navigating polarities yeah town meeting is wonderful town meeting is intended to have 150 or 200 people in a room at a decision making point so town meeting is the decision making moment is the end result exactly so less it's less useful in that sort of Roberts rules of order parliamentary procedure moment and in fact we are making it oftentimes in either or decision at a town meeting that said absolutely it's crucial during the year ahead of a town meeting during the time ahead of a decision that we're making a yes no decision to be able to have those rich conversations I mean it was never intended to be the only time that we get together during the course of a year so I have been working actually a lot with select boards and to some degree school boards leaders as well in looking at how this tool can be used in their work in micro situations as well as macro ones so that ultimately when we do come to one of those decisions it's been informed by these values and process like that thank you I just can't tell you how powerful it's been for me to be able to to feel like so often in public conversations I feel like there's something wrong here and when this tool came up for me some years ago I was just like this is this really helps to figure out why some of these processes are so frustrating so you know what's interesting too is that it's used a lot in I use it in public spaces as we mentioned but I think it's used even more personal coaching and even in therapy for people to be able to understand the polarities within ourselves so it's an interesting tool to think out in all different kinds of scales all right great thanks thank you thanks if you need a little conversation cafe card I've got them I would love one thank you