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How to Have Difficult Conversations

Published on openDemocracy.net

Campaigners aren’t known for being contemplative. By definition they are trying to change something beyond themselves, and the stereotype of an outgoing extrovert with a megaphone exists because in part, it’s true. That kind of campaigning attracts admiration and often appears as the visible face of change. But what if collective introspection made us into better campaigners by improving our ability to listen and learn, especially from those we disagree with?

Who we interact with, and how, have became urgent concerns for campaigners, as opinions become more polarised around us. The challenge of reaching people we don’t agree with is especially important at a time when the far right is mainstreamed by the media and inciting hatred is a regular activity among presidents and other elected politicians. The challenge is both personal and political – what are the tools we need to disagree better?

For the past 15 years the Campaigning Forum (ECF) has functioned as a good example of the kind of space we need to promote long-term community building on the basis of cooperation and openness. Set up by Duane Raymond to encourage campaigners to share experiences as the digital sphere opened up (before social media!), ECF has expanded in reach and yet remained a close-knit community, providing an ecosystem of support that ranges from the technical to the emotional, where peers support not-knowing and where it is safe to ask for help.

At a recent ECF gathering Rosie Carter of HOPE Not Hate presented her experience of how we might approach an increasingly divisive political landscape. She was one of the organisers of the National Conversation on Immigration in the UK, which set out to answer the question, ‘just how divided are we, and how do we build bridges?’ Carter ‘walked the talk’ by travelling around the country to listen to people express their feelings and opinions. Although she found many people she didn’t agree with and had lots of difficult conversations, she also came away hopeful that a growing majority exists that is ‘open and tolerant.’

As this graphic shows there’s a lot of concern and ambivalence on immigration around which genuine conversations could be shaped, but campaigners will have to put more energy into engagement and understanding in order to be useful in this task. We have to listen to and respect views we might disagree with, and seek to find out why people hold the views they do without expecting that our own convictions will automatically sway them, so how can we learn to do this effectively?

After Rosie spoke I offered a peer session on ‘how to have difficult conversations,’ and the room filled with campaigners keen to share experiences. Drawing on sociocracy, a governance model made for power sharing and active listening, we sat in a circle, spoke in rounds, and I asked them to check in with themselves, identify bodily sensations and then express how they were feeling. The level of trust and safety that the group developed in minutes is not at all usual, and is a testament to the long-term trust that ECF builds for participants.

Google has spent millions of dollars proving that trust is the bedrock of constructive communication. They wanted to know why their best teams succeeded, and after not being able to prove any of their assumptions and going back to observe those teams, they found that what they had in common was not personality or intelligence or confidence or prior success, but something they called ‘psychological safety.’ That’s the kind of safety that’s built on feeling able to be real and vulnerable in a group, not competing with your peers, and being encouraged to learn from failure collectively.

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