From Shouting Heads to Shared Concerns: An interview with Laura Chasin (from Leverage Points Issue 76)

Social worker and family therapist Laura Chasin founded the Public Conversation Project (PCP) in 1989 to explore the potential of adapting methods used with families in conflict to disputes in the public arena. Since then she and her colleagues have facilitated a number of important dialogues with larger systems, including the inspiring one between Boston area Pro-choice and Pro-life leaders. After recently handing over the reins to incoming executive director Cherry Muse, Laura shared some memories, hopes, and plans with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert.

LP: Tell us how the Public Conversations Project got started. What were the issues that drew you into the public realm?

LC: It was not a particular issue that galvanized me but a more general concern about a kind of “climate change” I had been noticing in the public square. My graduate studies in American politics and democracy had taught me that the political structures and processes of democracy require an underpinning of what Robert Putnam has since called “social capital.” That is, the existence of rich networks of formal and informal ties both within and across different groups, as well as norms of civility and constructive debate. I was concerned about what I perceived as the subtle erosion of that underpinning. Also, I had recently become a grandmother, a shift that had sort of thickened my sense of the distant future. I really was afraid that if the trend I perceived continued, my grandchildren’s generation would not get to live in the kind of democratic society I had known.

The idea that became PCP was actually triggered by watching a televised debate about abortion sponsored by the Better World Society on PBS. I expected a constructive debate, but what I saw instead was shouting heads. And for some serendipitous reason, during that debate, I suddenly switched into watching with my clinical eyes. I got the idea that if this conversation were happening in my office, I would know how to interrupt it – as the poor facilitator did not. I assembled some family therapy colleagues, and showed the tape to them. And I asked them to think about what they would do if a conversation like this was taking place in their offices. Together we entertained a galvanizing question: could some of the approaches and methods we used with families in polarized, stuck conflict be adapted to disputes among bigger systems in the public square?

This was our founding question, and it wasn’t rhetorical; it was a real question. We decided to answer it with a modest experiment: we would see if we could facilitate a one-evening session between partisans on either side of a divisive issue. We chose the abortion issue for two reasons. A very pragmatic one was that we had access to people on both sides of the issue. And secondly, we had some familiarity with the substance of the issue. So, we began an action research project in which we videotaped almost twenty groups of four to eight people over the course of a year and a half. We had the advantage of not knowing what we were doing; we didn’t know which interventions and which ways of thinking would transfer. And so, we developed the practice of asking, of adopting a stance that has been an earmark of our work ever since. We don’t position ourselves as experts. We position ourselves as learners who elicit what the participants know and take our cues from them about how we can build on their resources and complement them with ours.

After that initial experiment caught the attention of the media in 1992, we had opportunities to work on a wide range of divisive issues, including the use of animals in research, human sexuality and the Christian faith, biodiversity, and talking to school children about gay marriage, among others. Although abortion is just one of the issues that we’ve worked with, it has been an important one for me in part because those early dialogues with pro-life and pro-choice partisans demonstrated how relatively easy it was to build an environment in which partisans could move from a black and white movie into a Technicolor one surprisingly rapidly. Witnessing those dialogues made me aware that the narrow band of experience most of us expose ourselves to – the relationship networks we have, the things we choose to read or not to read, the things we choose to listen to or not to listen to – induce simplistic thinking and a very black and white perspective on issues and the people who hold different views. I had had no clue that there was so much diversity on both sides of the abortion issue. Since then, I have come to believe that this costly polarization has caused many of the most compassionate, most thoughtful, most principled and caring people in this country, most of whom are women, to direct huge amounts of time and energy towards fighting each other rather than working together to address the underlying problems that we all care about.

LP: The erosion in the quality of civic dialogue that triggered your inquiry doesn’t seem to have improved much in the years since then.

LC: Clearly, I think it’s gotten significantly worse and I think the stakes are terribly high. Unless we change how we engage our differences in public, we will continue to lose the ability to handle the major challenges that this society faces – immigration, healthcare, the growing gap between the very rich and the poor, the deterioration of public education, the threat of terrorism and the probability of more frequent natural disasters; we need to be able to act intelligently and collectively on all these challenges. And yet, our ability to do so is handicapped by a climate of polarization to which most of us contribute to some degree. In my view, every time we vent our passion in angry, demonizing ways, we’re as good as belching more smoke into the public square. I think we really need to learn how to recycle our passion and speak it in ways that don’t have unintended side effects.

There are a number of things that give me hope. One is that there is plenty of practical knowledge available about how to bring people together and how to talk across even deep divides. For those who get motivated to facilitate bridge building conversations, it’s much easier than you might think. It wasn’t our fancy, sophisticated clinical skills that mattered, but what I think of as systematic common sense.

When people who passionately disagree about a “hot” public issue meet each other face to face, the gap between their entering assumptions and reality can close fairly fast. “Oh my gosh, I thought you had horns and a tail, but you’re a 3-dimensional human being, I can see you’re a reasonable person, you’re principled; you care.” This is the pivotal shift that opens the door to a different sense of possibility.

I also derive hope from the beginnings of a movement toward trans-partisan dialogue. Groups like “Reuniting America: Engaging across the Divides” have been building relationships among people from all segments of the ideological spectrum, and they’re now engaging in dialogue on specific issues. I’m hopeful that people like your readers and others who have systems, process, or bridge building skills will decide to apply them to the public square. I’d like to see us develop a 21st century arm of what you might call “civic social work,” or “civic systems work.”

And finally, my hope lies in the development of ways to share best practices across professions and disciplines. I think the cost of sticking to our professional and disciplinary silos is huge. I have this dream of a kind of “community convener corps” of social capitalists -- systems thinkers, family therapists and mediators, people who do policy dialogue, people who foster public engagement or consensus building – who can foster community solidarity and resilience in the aftermath of civic disasters or even prevent crises from happening.

LP: What will you focus on going forward, to support this kind of healthy growth?

LC: I’ll still be active in the role of chair of the board at PCP. My passion is to mainstream what we have done. I feel really good about this nuts and bolts guide we’ve just published, Fostering Dialogue Across Divides, because it makes what we’ve learned accessible to lay as well as professional people. I’m wondering how we can increase the impact of what we do beyond offering more trainings and generating more written resources. I wonder if we should we translate the guide into other languages. I ask myself, “Where are the audiences most ready to change the way they engage in the public square and how can we reach them?” Should I spend my time writing op-ed pieces and letters to the editor every time someone talks about polarization or bridge building? Should I speak to journalists’ organizations or city managers? Or should I focus on mentoring the next generation of practitioners?

Another passion I have right now is finding out how to build bridges across the so-called Red-Blue divide. We’re working with partners to develop a Red-Blue website where people will be able to enter into dialogue and play cooperative games with people from different parts of the political spectrum. I also hope we’ll have more opportunities to explore how online conversation and face to face conversation can be mixed and matched, and how these new technologies can be harnessed for connecting people who have differences in rewarding ways.

LP: And we can't overestimate the power of simple human connection. How would you summarize the heart of the matter from where you stand today?

LC: We have lost sight, as a culture, of what most people used to know. With the rise of single-issue politics and the polarizing media, I think too many of us have lost the ability to disagree with somebody really strongly about something and still care about them and respect them as a person. We’ve developed the nasty habit of defining people by their views on a particular public issue. In some circles, people even use the terms, “pro-choicer” and “pro-lifer.” Our current civic culture encourages me to take the 360 degrees of you and reduce you down to a single defining degree; like folding up a fan. PCP’s practices are designed to open the fan up again so I can understand why that one percent of you thinks and feels the way it does because I see it in the context of the many more degrees of who you are. As I appreciate a widened range of who you are and understand the underpinnings of your views, and as you do the same for me, the odds increase that we can identify and explore shared concerns. We might even find a way to do something new together.

Editor's Note:

The initial edit of our conversation with Laura left such a wealth of information on the cutting room floor that we are compelled to continue it here for those interested in learning more about the specifics of PCP's methodology:

LP: How does systems thinking figure in the work you do?

LC: Well, in our background as systemic family therapists, we were trained to identify cyclical patterns of dysfunctional thought, talk and actions that were fixed and unvarying – what you might call reinforcing feedback loops that led to continuous escalation. We developed strategies to break up these cycles and to amplify spontaneous deviations – such as the uttering of a child, or a common sense observation from a grown-up, or even a suggestion by the therapist – that seemed likely to foster constructive change in family behavior.

Everything we do sits on top of three fundamental goals: One, encouraging participants in a face to face interchange to voluntarily restrain their conflict-sustaining patterns of communication and action; second, encouraging deviation from these patterns; and third, promoting new patterns that are more likely to lead the opposing parties to outcomes that they would regard as mutually beneficial.

LP: The guide you’ve just produced is filled with practical knowledge about how to achieve those deceptively simple goals. I got the sense that structure and sequence were important to your methodology.

LC: That’s true. For example, all our dialogues begin with a “go-round” in which it is very clear there are three things you can do: You can speak when it is your turn, you can listen, or you can reflect. We learned early on that this structure was critical at the beginning, because the more polarized the conflict, the more people come in thinking they’re going to meet the devil. The structure, we were told, is essential for lowering anxiety levels to a point that people can hear and learn from each other and can also speak effectively about their own views. It helps create an environment in which learning can take place.

As a structure, it also builds people’s capacity to listen. We often propose a pause between each speaker in which people are asked to reflect on what they’ve heard, maybe jot down some notes. This blocks the reactive pattern that many of them will have experienced previously, and builds capacity to engage in a different kind of conversation.

Another structural element is the use of ground rules – what I now tend to call a communication agreements. Typically these include things like, “Speak as an individual, Speak for yourself rather than as a representative of a group, Omit rhetorical questions and interruptions, Share air time, etc.” They’re very behavioral; we don’t say, “Treat each other respectfully.” That’s too vague for us. It’s got to be visible or audible. The hardest agreement we often recommend tends to be, “Refrain from attempts to persuade.” Whatever agreements the participants decide to make, the facilitator asks for and is given the authority to remind people when they forget them. Let’s face it, we’re asking people to do something that feels unnatural; very different from how most people are used to talking about the issue. So of course, people are going to forget. Assuming the role of the guardian of the ground rules and holding everybody accountable for honoring them is a major way the facilitator demonstrates his or her own trustworthiness.

In a sense, our challenge is to create an environment in which people have enough trust to be willing to lay down their rhetorical weapons. To set them all aside and open themselves to a new experience, that will be really new for everybody.

Some of that trust building happens before the participants enter the room. We usually interview each person prior to the group dialogue. This conversation helps them put their best foot forward when they come into the room because they know what to expect and they have already developed a trusting relationship with one of the facilitators. In those interviews, we ask people to reflect on their hopes for the conversation, to go meta to the conversations they’ve had and reflect on how they’ve tended to go, and what behaviors have contributed to that? Have there been any exceptions? How do they understand why conversations that went well did so, and what does that success suggest about making the dialogue they’re coming to be constructive? We’re in effect using them as consultants to the process and getting their ideas about how best to move the conversation forward.

Another structural thing we do has to do with seating. We sit people side by side in a circle, alternating among side A and side B participants. And we ask them to talk at a pre-dialogue meal about something in their lives that does not indicate which side of the issue they’re on. People have said that’s hugely important. It starts the process of softening of the stereotypes people have.

We frame catalytic questions that invite people to reflect on the complexity of their own views and listen for the complexity of others’. We were taught by participants in our early abortion dialogues which questions we needed to ask and what order we needed to ask them in. First, they said, you must ask something about life experiences that will help people understand each other’s views about the issue. Second, “What is the heart of the matter for you?” And third, “Within your perspective, are there gray areas, hard cases or conflicts of values that you would be willing to mention?” The surprise in those early dialogues was that the process often worked so fast that, after having supper and hearing the first question, people moved right into the third “gray areas” question during their response to the “heart of the matter” question. It’s in the answer to that third question that the outlines of shared concerns begin to appear.

LP: As you say on your website, you’re after “previously unthinkable possibilities,” rather than common ground.

LC: Yes, we very early on stopped using the language of “common ground” because our experience has been that the more polarized the issue, the more people hear “common ground” as compromise, no matter what you say. This makes sense. If a conflict has polarized an issue into black and white, then common ground has got to be gray. However, most of our conversations aren’t about finding agreement. The invitation usually says that the goal is to develop mutual understanding, clarify differences, and identify shared concerns. In some situations, an understanding-seeking conversation is the highest leverage intervention because if you can change the patterns of communication, the relationships will shift and, as the relationships shift, the undiscovered possibilities will emerge spontaneously.

Sometimes dialogues have more specific outcomes built into their beginnings. For example, the pro-life and pro-choice advocates featured in the 2001 Boston Globe article, Talking with the Enemy, came to the table with a goal of de-escalating the very tense climate in Boston at the time. In 1994 a man named John Salvi shot personnel in two clinics that offered abortion services. Two people were killed and several others were badly injured. What motivated the leaders to come together was the fear of further violence if there was not a change in the political climate. The pro-choice participants were afraid of more attacks, the pro-life leaders were afraid of retribution. And they all succeeded in changing the rhetoric they used in the public square in a way that contributed to a de-escalation of the violence.

But in most of the situations in which we’ve worked, participants have been attracted by modest dialogic goals. People come together, shifts happen, and they think of something to do together or write together whereas if you had pushed for such outcomes from the beginning, you would have been less likely to achieve them. It’s paradoxical.

My favorite metaphor for the work we do describes people fighting in a closed room that’s full of smoke. They can’t quite see each other, and they don’t know how big the fire is or where it is or what’s fueling it. And what we do is open the window so they can see each other, we all can see the fire, and they can decide what they want to do about it. Do they want to put it out? Stop feeding it wood? Put it in a fireplace? Smoke-free choices among newly visible options become possible.

Our new guide begins with a quote from the pro-life and pro-choice leaders. “In this world of polarizing conflicts, we have glimpsed a new possibility, a way in which people can disagree frankly and passionately, become clearer in heart and mind about their activism, and at the same time contribute to a more civil and compassionate society.” I very much wanted to feature this statement, which so beautifully expresses the “both/and” on which the future of our democracy may hang.

Suggested further resources:

Fostering Dialogue Across Divides: A Nuts and Bolts Guide from the Public Conversations Project

Additional Resources from PCP

Listening to the Volcano, by David Hutchens

Additional Dialogue Resources from Pegasus