Let Me Introduce Myself
Are We Making Progress In Working Together to Solve Problems? How Can We Tell?
I start this blog with a lifetime interest in attempting to make a difference in the world while being alternately disappointed and then hopeful at the prospects. Most of the time I believe passionately in the ability of humans to make positive, forward progress, and am convinced that in the bigger picture of our species’ history, we are evolving toward more constructive ways of resolving differences and creating better lives for all people.
But some days, I’m not so sure. I wonder what others think. What evidence might we cite to demonstrate that humans are learning and developing our capacities for getting along? (Of course we bombarded daily by evidence of the opposite proposition — that humans are increasing violent and intransigent.) I’m interested in data and demonstrations that we are indeed changing for the better. I am interested in collecting, sharing, and building knowledge about how we are creating genuine change. For instance, one of the most difficult questions, under investigation in several disciplines is, “how do humans change deeply ingrained behavior?”
Gandhi and MLK: Using Non-Violent Conflict As Powerful Tools of Change
In college I was inspired by the ‘rhetoric of dissent’ –powerful speakers, like Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi, who truly changed the world through the power of language, ideas, and courageous collective action. With incredible thoughtfulness and dignity they used conflict in the most constructive manner possible, to create profound change. Their primary impulse was to create change; their moves to do so created conflict. It was not conflict that came first, but the positive vision. In moving toward the goal and bumping against existing structures, conflict was sparked. Gandhi and King made conscious choices, over and over again, to resist human instincts of fight or flight. They inspired legions of others to do the same. I, myself, was motivated by their thinking and their action.
Electing Candidates to Office: Politics as a Vehicle to Change
I spent the first part of my career attempting to make a positive difference in the world by working in national politics and government. For 12 years I served in communications positions, working for candidates and office holders, including my first job as press secretary to Bill Richardson (New Mexico) in his first run for Congrees, and four years as a press secretary for U.S. Senator Gary Hart in Washington D.C.
In the beginning I believed that communicating the most compelling arguments would move people divided by differences of opinion on important issues. Years later I came to see that our system of reasoned debate on important public issues no longer functions as a constructive search for better solutions. Instead we are gridlocked by our differences. Destructive conflict on an institutional scale is a severe impediment to affecting change on crucial public problems.
Other Vehicles for Creating Meaningful Change
I did not leave politics and government believing that politicians are to blame, or that government is to blame. Throughout my time in Washington I worked with people who were very bright, well educated, and genuinely dedicated to making positive contributions, whatever their ideological leanings. What struck me most about working in Washington was the way people communicated, or rather, failed to communicate. Everybody was a speech giver or speech maker. Our nation’s capital seemed to be a place in which everybody was speaking to people “out there,” but “inside the beltway,” no one was listening, no one was interacting. I was disappointed not only in our political and governmental processes, but I had also grown tired of my craft. One-way communication had gotten old.
The American Leadership Forum: Collaborative Leadership
Living in Denver, in 1991 I had a great opportunity to explore questions about social change, conflict, and communication. I went to work for the American Leadership Forum, a national non-profit organization founded by Joseph Jaworski. As the son of Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, the younger Jaworski felt an acute need to find alternative ways for tackling social division, change and leadership. After an intense and broad ranging investigation with prominent thinkers in a variety of fields, Jaworski created ALF in the early 1980s as a vehicle for bringing together leaders from government, business, and non-profits to work together on community problems.
By 1989 Jaworski had gone on to work for Royal Dutch Shell, but “his intuitive sense for the need for collaboration in communities and the nation” (Chrislip and Larson, 1994), resulted in ALF chapters that are still active today, and contributed to an emerging field of community collaboration. The work had attracted the interest of two large foundations that commissioned research on the effectiveness of ALF and other efforts at cross-sector collaboration in the U.S.
Real Results with Collaboration
The MacArthur and Luce foundations provided grants to investigate the characteristics of collaborative initiatives that made significant public improvements in American cities. Working with David Chrislip (of ALF) and Carl Larson (of the University of Denver), I conducted primary research, interviewing dozens of community leaders and citizens involved in large-scale collaborative initiatives. I was so inspired by the people, the process, and the results of these endeavors that I started by own facilitation and training practice, Collaborative Solutions, in 1991.
Certainly the principles of collaboration appealed to me – inclusiveness, relationships, constructive conflict, shared leadership, interactive communication – but what was equally compelling was its usefulness. As David Chrislip and Carl Larson say in the book that emerged from this research project, “people are learning to work together. They are working together because they have to; nothing else works to solve problems or improve performance” (1994).
Collaboration As A Distinctly Different, Constructive Approach
As someone who had been disappointed in the effectiveness of our political process to deal productively with conflict and instigate meaningful change, I found collaboration (in its many forms) to be a compelling and realistic new approach to public problems. Collaboration is defined by Chrislip and Larson in very specific terms:
“That concept, as we use it, goes beyond communication, cooperation, and coordination. As its Latin roots – com and laborare – indicate, it means ‘to work together.’ It is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties who work toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability for achieving results. Collaboration is more than simply sharing information (communication) and more than a relationship that helps each party achieve its own goals (cooperation and coordination). The purpose of collaboration is to create a shared vision and joint strategies to address concerns that go beyond the purview of any particular party. (1994, p. 5)
Starting My Own Company: Collaborative Solutions
Since 1991 I have worked as a facilitator, mediator, trainer, and consultant helping organizations solve problems and create meaningful change. My company name, “Collaborative Solutions” indicates my belief in collaboration as the organizing process in resolving conflict, building teams, achieving organizational change, addressing public issues, and finding new ways to deal with complex, multi-sector, global problems.
The word ‘solutions’ in my company name is not meant to imply that I have the answers. Solutions are the result of a collaborative effort – the particular goals and outcomes achieved by people working together. I see collaboration not as the end, but the means to whatever ends people hope to achieve.
Some Disappointing Realities: Too Much Collaboration or Too Little Learning?
While I have been very encouraged over the last 17 years by the proliferation of professional fields involved in the same kind of work, I have often felt like a person ‘without a country.’ I have not found one discipline, one framework, or group of professionals that have the complete picture for resolving conflict and creating meaningful change. Sometimes I’ve been disappointed in trying to speak with professionals in one context about work in other contexts.
Often language and models are so dissimilar that conceptual links cannot be made. It seems to me that communications trainers, organizational consultants, ADR mediators, and multi-stakeholder facilitators, are all talking about the same kinds of things, but cannot share knowledge because they use different languages.
Can Collaborators Collaborate to Advance Learning?
Building a Shared “Mental Model”
Over the last three years I have worked in my spare time on an effort to forge some conceptual bonds, link models and create shared language among those working in collaborative fields and endeavors. I’ve been building a framework of the various theorists, concepts, models, words, practices, and tools being studied and practiced across disciplines such as education, business, public policy, natural resources, health care, and environmental protection.
Sometime soon I hope to share this framework and turn it into a wiki that can be built collaboratively, of course. It’s really quite an undertaking and does much to suggest we are making progress, developing capacity, and increasing knowledge about the last great unchartered frontier of our time — human relationships and the forces that push us toward destruction or brilliant achievement. My most idealistic hope is that this framework might serve as a “shared mental model” that will help us surface assumptions, challenge those assumptions, uncover ‘repeatable’ experiments, document ‘evidence-based’ findings, and identify gaps in understanding.
I hope this blog will serve as a forum to help make some of the connections between disperate collaborative communities, toiling away without the benefit of others’ experience. I do not claim to have the answers myself, only the motivation to connect the many who do have some part of some answers. At heart I am a learner, a communicator, a facilitator, a connector, an integrator of ideas. If you have some intriguing notions that connect theories in one field to another, let me know.
I will be writing about connections authors and researchers are making, discoveries and findings, interesting propositions and surprising studies that shed new light. Some specific topics will include conflict, communication, collaboration, interpersonal relations, organizational change, leadership development, performance improvement, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, dialogue, organizational learning, problem-solving processes, and many others.
Conclusion: Using Conflict Constructively = Collaboration
At the beginning I mentioned MLK and Ghandi. What do they have to do with all the words that followed? The point I don’t want to lose is that they saw conflict as a constructive, positive force for change. They did not see conflict as violence. They were highly competent in creating tension between an ideal vision of the future and the less than perfect reality. The conflict between the two created enormous energy for change. Yes, violence occurred along the way, despite powerful and consistent exhortations against it. Their behavior, however, motivated tens of thousands of others to behave peacefully, yet confidently in asserting their specific requests for change. Theirs was the kind of communication, behavior, and basic understanding about people’s tendency to violently defend, if attacked, that we can all learn from. Not just in great matters of justice and equality, but in the coffee line, on the soccer field, in the office, and everywhere one set of interests pushes against another set of interests.
Communication and Constructive Conflict
And the connection between conflict and collaboration? I am convinced that much of our difficulties in getting along with others are due to conflicted feelings about conflict. It is so uncomfortable for some that any sign of disagreement indicates a relationship, project, or organization in trouble. In recent years, as collaborative approaches have been discovered by corporations, schools, the courts, science, technology, and even adolescent techniques in socialization, collaboration is often viewed as the antidote for conflict. It is not.
In fact, collaboration requires conflict — constructive conflict of the kind advocated by Gandhi and MLK. We must assert our differences and bring attention to key beliefs and assumptions that lurk below our consciousness and drive behavior. Communicating clearly and positively about ourselves, what we want, what we perceive open the way for understanding and effective action. Simply focusing on others, and what is wrong with them, is rightly felt to be an attack, and usually marks the beginning of a dysfunctional spiral of ineffective behavior and destructive conflict.
This is the crux of the challenge in improving human progress and our ability to get along. I’ll have more to offer in later posts on the specifics of this challenge. For the moment, I suggest one of the best models I have seen in practice, with strong evidence of success in the research literature, is labeled “constructive controversy” by authors Johnson and Johnson. The key, they say, is that individuals must “be able to criticize another person’s ideas while confirming his or her competence and worth to see the issue from all perspectives” (Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T., 2000, p. 303). More on this later.
Because of the work of these authors and scores of serious studies of human interaction, conflict, communication, and collaboration, my answer to the question posed at the outset is yes, we humans are getting better at getting along.
I look forward to hearing from others who share my passion in for these topics.
Warm Regards,
Beth Smith
Collaborative Solutions
http://www.CollaborativeSolutions.us
bsmith@CollaborativeSolutions.us
Communication and Change Weblog 