Both sides now

The road to regeneration starts with recognition

In a nutshell: we can all make assumptions about those with whom we disagree, but seldom actually encounter. As part of any regenerative learning and organisational development we urgently need to create more equal and powerful encounters with ‘the other’ in ways that bridge divides, build mutual awareness, and seed common ground.

From first contact to common ground

I have always been fascinated by the moment of first contact between cultures. As a kid I was an avid reader of historical accounts of early explorers, conquerors, and indigenous peoples. Their first impressions of alien civilisations, species and ways of life were so exotic and uncanny set against the familiar and predictable world of my childhood.

At first I was charmed by the mix of mutual awe, confusion and curiosity that characterised these encounters: the way the Aztecs were simply staggered to see a horse for the first time, let alone a strangely pale, furry, metal-clad man riding on its back, or the dazzling spectacle that greeted the astonished Spanish soldiers when they arrived in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.

As I learned more, the initial romance invariably dissolved pretty fast. The inevitability and ease with which those with more power exploited the weaker became depressing familiar.

The quest to understand what unites or divides us, and find ways to avoid seeing each other as aliens turned out to be a constant thread in my work when I grew up.

In the first ten years I spent as a social researcher and facilitator of a variety of citizen dialogue events I got a ringside seat in the dynamics of first contact. It was so satisfying to watch the dynamic in the room shift, as participants moved from scepticism and guardedness to mutual curiosity, acceptance and even at times a kind of collective epiphany. My favourite sight at the end of such events was to see participants who started off sparring with each other exchanging phone numbers or going to the pub to continue their conversation.

In our polarised and alienated world, we need the ability to conjure and sustain these powerful moments of mutual recognition and collective belonging. It’s not just to keep democratic life healthy, important though that is. It is also vital if we are to form the kinds of unlikely coalitions of actors that we will need to overcome the massive challenges we face, including the turn to a regenerative world in which we can live well, within our ecological means.

Harmful habits of perception

During the past year at Bramble we’ve worked with, or for, a variety of the leaders and organisations involved in this struggle: from analysts to activists, executives to officials, and in sectors from energy to food.

We’ve curated various moments of first contact in our leadership and organisational development (OD) work, helping diverse humans cross professional, ideological and cultural divides to meet, learn from and understand those whom they may normally regard as, at best, a misguided but well-intentioned disruptor, and at worst, a deliberate adversary.

In most, if not all cases, we’ve become aware of two harmful habits of thought that seem to condition people’s expectations in unhelpful ways.

The first harmful habit is the natural inclination to mentally construct a dangerous ‘other’. Outgroup bias is a common psychological heuristic in which we stigmatise a simplified and homogenous version of another social group that we have constructed and that does not match their complex reality. It’s understandable when we’re faced with an external, complex and existential threat over which we feel we have little control, and in which our in-group identities are also deeply invested.

This negative impression can only be sustained by avoidance, seclusion or exclusion. There are many understandable reasons to maintain this separation, whether due to negative past experiences, engagement fatigue, fears of complicity or collusion or even personal safety. But I am still surprised at how reluctant people can be to get in a room with people they regard as the opposition, and as a result, just how little direct interaction certain stakeholders have had with each other, even within the same organisation or geographical region, let alone across a whole sector or system.

The second habit is the tendency I have observed is for people across the system to feel trapped and powerless to act.They may attribute this to hardwired features of the system itself, such as the incentives, legal requirements, or to the expectations of more powerful stakeholders who have a hold on them.

This is felt not just by green NGOs, activists, or community groups, who you would expect to feel a lack of agency given their lack of resources and their relative weakness in the face of what they experience as powerful and extractive global businesses, institutions, and practices. We also hear a version of this narrative when working with senior decision makers in precisely those powerful and well-resourced organisations. While recognising their own agency within the command structure of their corporate sphere, they nonetheless often feel that their capacity to influence — and in fact their very existence — is largely hostage to the demands of impatient markets and demanding investors, unrealistic or contradictory public expectations, or overly cautious and short-term governments.

I am not arguing that these are false narratives. There are valid assumptions and almost always concrete evidence to underpin them. But where they might only be partially true, or lacking necessary nuance, the power and security of the narratives prevent people from challenging, refining or radically altering them.

Curating powerful encounters for personal and collective development

Over the past year at Bramble we’ve been experimenting with possible remedies. Note that a remedy is not a cure. It only alleviates the symptoms that cause undue suffering, albeit temporarily. And perhaps that’s all we should wish for, as without the friction or that arises from difference we would lose the spark that ignites change.

One of these remedies is to harness the power of culture in the way we design and facilitate learning and development events, to create moments of awareness, imagination and agency.

The French sociologist Bourdieu describes how people coming into a particular social arena (“Field”) will have internalised certain expectations and rules (“Doxa”) for what is deemed normal in that context. In our case, it might mean a leadership workshop, self-paced learning mission, field trip, peer action-learning set, or multi-day large group event. Participants’ socially acquired, unconscious and embodied instinct for how to navigate this arena (“Habitus”) informs how they will participate, respond to others, and interpret what they experience subsequently.

Bourdieu highlighted the problem of symbolic domination or violence in such situations, by which a dominant group asserts their power over the weaker participants by rigging the rules of the encounter. This is the norm in such situations, as the young me found in my history books.

Along with our clients, partners, and others, we have been experimenting with creating Fields for personal and organisational development that alter and invert the customary norms. Participants navigate the event or moment together on an equal but unfamiliar footing, making it harder to assert dominance, or reinforce entrenched narratives about the other. This creates heightened openness to novelty and the possibility of a shared Us emerging, rather than just reverting to more of the same old ‘Us vs Them’ script.

We are hugely indebted to all those who have inspired and taught us about experience design over many years, including The Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures, The Human Library, and many, many others.

What does that mean in practice? When it comes to the design of our learning and development experiences, we harness some key principles to encourage mutual awareness. Here are a few:

Place

For face-to-face events we try to choose venues in unlikely places, and with rich stories, that are off the radar and out of kilter with what is expected, from old churches to community centres and warehouses. We draw on the deep history of the place, and either commission or create our own music and stories to bring the past, present and possible future of the place into the encounter, so that we can both expose shared, deep roots and the stories that have led us to where we are today. People use walk-and-talks in the neighbourhood, or ‘secret dinners’ in the surrounding area to have the necessary but powerful conversations that can alter outlooks.

Voice

We bring the whole ecosystem into the encounter in all its cacophony. Drawing on the wisdom of the Human Library and others we run large group sessions and workshops in which artists, engineers, activists, future generations (e.g. young kids and teens), ecologists, financiers, scientists, executives, policymakers, writers, young grads, local residents, and even other species have a shared platform with which to inquire into each other’s realities through intimate, curious and brave conversation.

Time

Finding the way into another person’s worldview requires time, patience, trust and intimacy. We are starting to experiment with facilitating ongoing 1:1 dialogues between individuals who regard themselves as having very different, even competing positions on a key sustainability issue. Over the course of several sessions over months, we hope that they will come to understand and see the world through the others’ eyes, potentially being altered in the process and thereby increasing their own capacity to hold complexity, while still retaining their integrity.

What we notice in all these experiences is how usefully discomforted, surprised and delighted people are when they spend time understanding the motivations and actions of those they normally avoid, distrust, or even at times denigrate.

As people make the effort to recognise and empathise with the other’s struggles, we can hope for a kind of mutual disarmament. That as defences come down; what was previously ‘their’ problem becomes ‘ours’.

Through our leadership and organisational development work we will keep experimenting to create the conditions for awareness to arise among those whose who can help the shift to a regenerative world. But curating these moments is often hard and the opportunities are too rare. We want to make it easy and frequent and are keen to team up with others with similar intentions. So if that’s you, please feel free to make first contact.