Ken Cloke's Agility Narrative on the power of conflict resolution & mediation

0:44 The early part of Ken's journey with conflict, parents relationship, a shared heritage, and being close to Latino and Anglo communities.
1:42 Going to Berkeley, becoming an activist initially in the civil rights non-violent movement and working in the south
2:29 Part of the antiwar movement trying to stop the war in Vietnam and represented GIs
2:48 Legal approaches could not complete the journey
4:00 Legal path - civil rights, law professor, judge led to a point of personal crisis
4:33 A lecture on mediation changed Ken's life. The solution he saw conflict resolution to be.
5:59 Reflecting on last 42 years as a conflict resolver
7:11 The first few steps post that neighborhood meeting... 
8:35 Understanding protest as a law making process and evolving towards collaborative problem solving
9:53 The law is inherently adversarial - a zero sum game
10:33 What mediating dangerously is about - as said by Gerta "the dangers is in life are infinite, and among them is safety"
11:50 Connecting mediation and systems design 
13:18 Organizational conflicts as indicators of what is not working
14:42 Inside us, between us and around us. Conflict is required for paradigm shift
16:28 Conflict is a dance of opposites - inviting the other to a new dance with new music
18:02 Respect and disrespect - Will Smith and Chris Rock
19:59 Mechanisms of conflict operate at all scales
21:30 We can solve problems collaboratively with one another
21:58 Key tenets of Ken's Agility Narrative - An agile response - be present, deeply listen, and help the other person reach their point of vulnerability
24:15 What tools do you bring to the mediation? The tools of inner awareness, mindfulness
25:13 Empathy - A platform to find out what is true for the other. Relational empathy - experience energy flow between people
26:22 Approaching systemic conflicts is multifaceted needing a different set of skills
28:27 Three generations of systems design 
29:31 2nd Gen - Design leadership systems (that reduce conflict resolution)
31:15 3rd Gen - higher order conflicts once we learn to resolve existing conflicts
33:27 In your agility narrative, who/what is the protagonist? Each of us.
34:37 What is your theme for your agility narrative?
35:25 The artful power of questions
37:12 The magic in mediation
38:17 Asking pivot questions as part of an organization
40:38 In your agility narrative, who or what are the villains? Your own worst self
41:18 The reality of being a protagonist and a villain - The dance of Opposites in Narrative structure of conflict stories
42:39 Destabilizing the conflict story (victim, perpetrator and rescuer)
43:48 Another two looks at conflict stories
45:39 What is at stake if people don't learn these techniques. 
Jean-Paul Sartre "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you"
46:38 Call to action to a group of key organizational stakeholders who feel stuck - Multiple Truths 
48:01 The power of a planning process... may be constrained
49:49 Discussion of different forms of conversation
51:24 The value of dialogue rather than monologue AND Making Bread
53:02 The facilitator of dialogue plays a number of roles - including teasing out diversity
53:51 Threat, opportunities and mediation without borders
54:47 Ukraine and Russian war - the large scale organization of small scale hatreds - the power of the methodology that leads to war
56:19 What do you lose in your capacity to prevent war by making that assumption?
57:50 Our task as conflict resolvers is really simple. And we need a political system capable of mediation.
58:25 My brief wrap up and thank you to Ken for his agility narrative

Learn more about Ken Cloke
https://www.kencloke.com/
https://www.kencloke.com/books
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ken+cloke+and+vikram+mediator

Transcript

martin: [00:00:00]
 Welcome to the Agility Narrative Podcast. We hold this space as a community so we can listen to Leading Changemakers and enterprise. Agile leaders talk about their agility narratives. Each narrative we hypothesize is a part that gives us a more insight into the whole. We're very pleased to welcome Ken to the agility narratives to talk about his personal journey as an advocate and thought leader in mediation, modern leadership change, and a prolific author and a master of multiparty conflict resolution. To know more about Ken, please see the show. Can you a very generous with your time. Really appreciate you talking to us. Welcome.

Ken: [00:00:40] 
Thank you very much. I appreciate being invited.

martin: [00:00:44] 
Ken, I'm intrigued to learn more about the early part of your journey towards the work that you do now. Where in your personal journey did the interest in conflict and resolution emerge and how did that grow into a passion?

Ken: [00:00:58] 
Well, I think for all of us, earliest interests began in childhood. And I would say that it comes from having parents who one of whom was quite comfortable in conflict and the other was quite comfortable in resolution. My parents had an interesting relationship, but I learned a lot about different approaches to conflict from watching the two of them. And then the second piece was growing up in Southern California mostly, and seeing the conflicts that were taking place between Latino and Anglo communities, black and white communities, and being very touched by this. And then the third piece of it was going to college in Berkeley. I think that's probably all I need to say. You can imagine the rest. But I was I became an activist initially in the civil rights movement and worked in the south and south Georgia and in southern Alabama and also in the north. And in a way, was my goal was really to increase conflict through a kind of nonviolent approach to and a kind of moral witness approach to divisions between people in the process. I was trained in nonviolence techniques and became a trainer also for others in nonviolence, and that stayed with me throughout the 1960s. I then became a part of the antiwar movement trying to stop the war in Vietnam. I represented GIs who were against the war and courts martial, and a variety of other things worked very closely with antiwar GIs and and other groups of people who are opposed to that war. But what was clear to me was that the methods and approaches that were appropriate to, for example, stopping lynching or getting access to non-discriminatory bathrooms or restaurants or hotels or bus transportation or stopping the war or whatever it might have been were able to take you a certain distance, but they couldn't complete that distance so we could get laws passed, but we couldn't change hearts and minds.And in order to change people's hearts and minds, it was necessary to do something different. And so for a long period of time, I would say I was searching for some kind of methodology that would allow me to be both principled in the sense of kind of large scale global issues that impacted all of us. And at the same time, true to what I understood as a human being, which is that it is possible for us to talk to each other. To work out our issues to solve problems. I had gone to law school as a way of being providing a kind of support for the civil rights movement and became a law professor and then a judge. This kind of reached a point of crisis where I was. I began to realize that I was supposed to do justice as a judge, but I had no idea what that was. And it seemed that legal system actually stood in the way of achieving justice as a goal for many people. And I went to a lecture on really was about mediation, but it was to set up the very first neighborhood justice center in Los Angeles. And within just a couple of minutes, I knew that my life had changed because I could see that this methodology was one that had applicability on all scales, not only to the individual conflicts that I was facing in my own personal life, but to the larger conflicts that we all face globally in the form of warfare, discrimination against others, civil unrest.All of those issues are ones that express themselves in the form of conflict and our ways of interacting with conflict that can end up either suppressing the conflict and keeping it underground and alive, or settling it through some kind of compromise, but never really reaching the underlying reasons for the conflict. But when we say conflict resolution, what we are describing is trying to understand the sources of conflict and dismantle the conflict at those sources. In other words, take an approach that has preventative possibilities. So I would say then for the NAT, for the last 42 years, I have been a full time conflict resolver in every kind of dispute probably that you can imagine. Neighborhood disputes, barking dog disputes, kids who commit crimes in their victims, environmental disputes, workplace issues or big organizational issues, international conflicts, a full range of issues and as you described, also large group, multi stakeholder consensus building processes. So out of all of that has come a conviction that the process that we're describing is able to touch us deeply, individually, personally, and at the same time to align us with a set of values that for me are quite important values of for other people, values dialogue, values of kindness and caring. And fundamentally, those are implicit in the mediation process. So that's a kind of not so short answer.

martin: [00:07:09] 
That's amazing. I'm curious about that neighborhood meeting and after that neighborhood meeting, what were the first few steps that you took from that meeting? Because that was obviously a very big impact on you and changed your life. But what were the first few steps that you took?

Ken: [00:07:24]
 Well, the first step was to sign up to be among the first people to be trained in mediation in Los Angeles by the Neighborhood Justice Center. This was a part of a federal program that set up neighborhood justice centers in several cities. Los Angeles was one of those cities, and I was among the first cohort of people to be trained in mediation. And then, of course, I created something called the Center for Dispute Resolution and began practicing. I dropped all of my other work and just focused on doing this and trying to learn what it's really about. And I'm still learning.

martin: [00:08:04] 
So it's like an amazing journey. In 2001, you wrote Mediating Dangerously the Frontiers of Conflict Resolution 2002, you co-wrote The End of Management and Rise of Organizational Democracy. What had shifted in you? I guess you've sort of answered this question already, but to go outside the traditional mediator, legal practice type models that you've had in traditional in mediation.

Ken: [00:08:35] 
My experience with the law in the South was quite formative from this perspective because the Southern states had all passed laws requiring segregation. And so if you simply took a straightforward approach and said, well, whatever the law says. Is the way that it has to be that's neither very agile nor very evolutionary, nor very principled. And so instead what we need to do is to understand that there is a law creating process, and the law creating process has multiple forms. One form is demonstrations that we engaged in that were designed to put pressure on Congress to stop segregation from being legal. And that was influenced, of course, by the United States Supreme Court. But as someone commented many years ago, the Supreme Court follows the election returns. It's all evolving. And what we the question is, what are we involving towards? And I think that the answer is that we are evolving towards collaborative problem solving, working together to solve our problems, including the problem of having problems with one another. And what I have discovered is that the law is a very poor instrument for doing that because it is inherently adversarial. And I say this as a judge, someone who's been a judge and someone who is still works as an arbitrator and has a lot of experience being in those types of settings. We can describe the law as what is called a zero sum game, meaning that it is win lose.If you bring a lawsuit, you either win or you lose, but there is no win lose in mediation. Or if there is, it's not very deep or profound mediation. What mediating dangerously is about can be expressed in the idea for the title, which originates with the German writer Gerta, who said, and I quote, The danger is in life are infinite, and among them is safety. So law is a kind of form of safety, of playing it safe when it comes to interpersonal conversations, when it comes to emotional expression and acknowledgment, when it comes to identifying what really matters to you, none of those things happen very easily in courts of law, because the framework is one in which there is one side that is completely opposed to the other side, and there is no structure that allows those two sides to have a dialogue with one another or to discover what they have in common, or to figure out that there might actually be a third solution, which would be better than either of their solutions, but could only happen by combining those two solutions together in some way. None of those conversations are encouraged in courts of law, and yet that's what we need to have happen.

martin: [00:11:50] 
And in 2021, you and John Goldsmith released a course, a book called Resolving Organizational Conflicts Also on Innovation and System Design. Can you tell us a little bit about why in organizations you've connected mediation and systems design?

Ken: [00:12:10] 
Great. So let me go back to the the subtitle of Mediating Dangerously, which is The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution. And what I tried to describe in that book was the inner frontiers and the outer frontiers. So the inner frontiers include places like where there are intense emotions inside of us. The external frontiers include things like organizational systems, the ways that we work, how to think about systems and structures and environments and cultures and communication patterns and things of this sort in a somewhat more structured way. And so there are a series of books that we've written about resolving conflicts at work. Is one of those books, the end of Management or the Rise of Organizational Democracy is another. And the last book that we published, which was the one on mediating organizational conflicts and systems design, takes this to a new level. And the new level is this. Many years ago, William Ury, Steve Goldberg and Jean Brett wrote a book called Getting Disputes Resolved, in which they came up with the idea of conflict resolution systems design. So conflict is a system, meaning it regenerates itself. We can have a very simple definition of a system as anything that turns in a circle. And so the goal of systems design is to turn the circle into a spiral. And one of the ways of doing that in organizational life is to think about. Organizational conflicts as indicators of what isn't working inside the system, or to put it in terms that I used in one of those books, conflict is the sound made by the cracks in a system, a family system, a neighborhood system, social system, a political system and organizational system.Conflict is just the sound made by the cracks in that system. Now, if you want that system to succeed, don't you want to know about those cracks? Wouldn't you like to actually turn those cracks into some better form of organization that doesn't divide and pit people against one another? So here's another way of thinking of it. Conflicts are located fundamentally in three places. Every conflict, one inside of us, two between us and three around us. That is environmentally and systemically and culturally. And so part of what we want to do is to look at those systems, those environments and those cultures. And then what we realize is here's another definition of conflict. It's the voice of a new paradigm. How does a new paradigm ever show up? And the answer is in the form of some conflict between the way things have been and the way that they might be. And now we divide into left and right. The left wants change to happen rapidly, the right ones to slow it down. Why? Because one sees what the problem is and another sees that maybe the answer isn't quite complete yet. Or there's something that is being lost when you change and every change involves the loss. How do we create a conversation then that allows us to be clearer about what it is that we want to change and to work together to try to bring it about? And I think that that happens in couples and families and communities and organizations and nation states, or it doesn't.

martin: [00:16:06] 
We've talked a lot about the space in between in some of these podcasts, and it's been a current theme. And I like the concept of people, the space in between and the environment, like what's around. Can you talk a little bit about your expression called The Dance of the Opposites?

Ken: [00:16:25]
 Yes. So conflict is a dance. We have the expression, it takes two to tango. We don't recognize that there is a hidden corollary. And the hidden corollary is it takes one to stop the tango and that one can be you. How do you stop the tango? Answer You start some new music and invite somebody to dance to it. That's a shorthand and a metaphor. But here is the kind of basic idea of this What is the invitation into the dance? Sometimes the answer is a personal insult. Somebody accuses you of something and you jump right in and say One. No, I didn't. And to you did something else that is equally bad. And this is an automatic response. It's hardwired by the brain in the limbic system of the brain. And so what we can see is that that conversation is going to go precisely nowhere. What is a conversation that could go somewhere? Well, the answer may begin with a question like what makes you believe that I am doing that thing that you have accused me of? And here is really the deep answer to that question. Whatever it is that I have accused you of is something that I have experienced myself, perhaps as a result of something that you have done, perhaps as a result of something someone else has done. But what has happened is that I have begun to, let's say, feel disrespected myself, and so I disrespect you. It was interesting watching the Academy Awards the other night, the Oscars, and seeing that moment when Will Smith slap and with some great emotional intensity, Chris Rock for having made a derogatory statement about his life. But here is I think the deeper truth is that every little act like that is a kind of metaphor for how we are feeling and Will Smith feel slapped by Chris Rock's comment. Sure. So what is he really doing?

martin: [00:18:33] 
He retaliates.

Ken: [00:18:34]
 Yeah.But the retaliation is actually a form of teaching. He is trying to teach Chris Rock what it felt like to be spoken about or to hear his wife spoken about in that way and to communicate that it was a kind of betrayal, or he sensed it as a kind of betrayal. Now, this is not to justify what he did is simply to say, let's look more deeply at what it is that is happening in conflict. And so if we can ask questions that invite people to do that kind of searching inside themselves, what we are able to discover is that there is some source of conflict inside of them that is unresolved. There is a wonderful sort of Hungarian writer who is actually lived in Paris during World War after World War Two. His name is M Cioran or Chiara, and I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Yeah. Here's what he wrote. I'll just read this to you. The man of violence cannot exempt himself from suffering. His occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction. Beneath his self confidence, his braggadocio lurks a fanatic of disaster and. We are all violent men of anger who, having lost the key of quietude, now have access only to the secrets of laceration. Nicely put. And I think that there's no fundamental difference between warfare on a grand scale and the very teeny, tiny arguments we get into on a very petty scale with one another marital spats, little petty arguments with our neighbors or coworkers. The mechanisms by which conflict operates are fundamentally the same. And if that's the case, then conflict resolution techniques can have an impact both on a small and a large scale. That's what motivates.Me.

martin: [00:20:34] 
I remember being at a antiwar protest in London in my early ages, and we're like a million people there. And there was it was a fantastic event. And at the end it was a small kids who found swords and started to fight each other. Yes. It's just a matter of scale.

Ken: [00:20:58]
 Yeah, absolutely. What is happening with those kids who are fighting with the swords? And the answer is they're establishing a zero sum game of dominance.

martin: [00:21:10] 
Yeah.

Ken: [00:21:12] 
Who's highest on the pecking order and who's lowest? And they're practicing the skills that they perceive they will need in order to fit into a society that is organized along those same zero lines. Where are you going to fit in, in the pecking order? And the point is, we don't need a pecking order. We can solve problems collaboratively with one another. It takes way more energy to do that. It takes far greater skill, even a higher order of skill than the order of skill that it takes to settle issues by litigation or by power struggles. That's a great observation to see those kids just preparing for the next war on some level.

martin: [00:21:57] 
So let's start talking about your agility narrative. Can you set the context for us? What are the key foundational tenets behind the narrative? Okay.

Ken: [00:22:07] 
So I would say that there are three fundamental philosophical propositions that lead inexorably to the idea that agility is essential. One, No. Two, people are alike. Two, no single person is alike from one moment to the next. Three Conflicts are complex, multidimensional, multi determined, constantly moving. And as a result of these three propositions, we can say that there is nobody can ever know in advance what they're going to do in order to resolve a conflict. It's impossible. What, therefore, do you do? Well, you have to be agile. You have to be another. You have to, in the first place, show up for the conflict and in the second place show up prepared to listen at such a deep level that you are actually able to figure out what the person is trying not to tell you and to figure out some way of helping them get there, even though they're trying to tell you to stay away from it, if I can put it that way. What is that? That's the area of maximum vulnerability to the other or to the self. Now, with those three propositions, we can also reverse them and we can say, yes, everybody is different, and yet we're remarkably alike. Each individual person is different from moment to moment, and yet we're the same person we were when we were born. And yes, conflicts are complicated and chaotic and multi determined and all of those things. And yet there is something underneath that is in common between all conflicts. And what these propositions suggest is that it isn't just a question of being agile in the abstract, meaning having no ground whatsoever to proceed on. What is important is to combine agility with analysis, with understanding, with experience, with, if you will, with knowledge of the world. And that combination creates wisdom.

martin: [00:24:14] 
You've talked about the need to be present as a person in this conflict and as a mediator. What tools are fundamental to being present as a mediator in a conflict where you've got a number of people that work together and want to find a better way forward than currently? How do you how do you approach what are the tools that you bring to the table?

martin: [00:24:41] 
I would say there are the tools fit into those three categories of three. Haitians that I mentioned before that conflict takes place in. So the inner tool is the tool of awareness, mindfulness, the ability to be present with as much of your life energy as you can possibly muster and not have that life energy.Be Fixed or attached to something that makes it inflexible, incapable of being agile in that moment. The second piece, I think, is empathy and the ability to experience not just what may be taking place within another person, but relationally between them. So there is empathy which consists of not I know what it feels like to be you, but I can imagine within myself what it might feel like to have experienced what you have experienced. And that isn't really I'm not going to treat that as an answer. I'm going to treat that as the platform on which to ask a question in order to find out what is true for you. And then the second piece is what I think of as relational empathy, which is the experience of the flow of energy between people. And if you watch that energy flow between people, you discover that there is a whole unspoken language in human communications ways that people are directly communicating with each other through body language, tone of voice, all kinds of things. And you can watch this happen and you can watch it move. And then the third piece is the ability to understand the operation of systems. The system doesn't show up for the conversation. It's not a part of the mediation, and yet it's present. There is a system of superior and subordinate in every workplace. There's a boss, but the boss shows up as a human being on the one hand and on the other hand as an archetype, a stereotype, a category, an idea, a principle, a set of goals, etc..And so all of these things need to somehow be unpacked in order to be able to separate the issues that need to be resolved. Here's an example, my favorite example of a system, a coffee table with expensive things on it, a two year old and parents who care about those things. That's a system and it's going to turn into a circle and there's going to be arguments in fighting. But if you simply bring the parent and the children together without the coffee table and the expensive things, you're not going to be able to figure out what the real problem is. And all you have to do to solve the problem is move the expensive stuff from a coffee table that a two year old can reach up to a mantle piece where they can't reach it. Problem solved. And you have done nothing regarding those individual people. Well, every workplace is filled with systems that are exactly like that. And so one of the focal points of conflict resolution systems design is to look at those systems and try to redesign them in ways that would be preventative. That's a whole different set of skills. And so you can see that the approach to organizational conflict or to political or systemic conflicts is multifaceted, and the skill that helps you in one place doesn't help you in the other. You need a different set of skills, and then what you need to do is figure out how to combine them in a creative way.

martin: [00:28:26]
 I when I think of agile as a system or scrum or servant leadership, these are processes that reduce conflict, but often they become systems in themselves, create that conflict as well. When I think of something like interest based resolution as a system, how do you see that system interacting and being useful in an organizational conflict setting?

Ken: [00:28:54] 
So there are several pieces of this. Let me describe what I wrote about it in the book that you mentioned on resolving organizational conflict. There are three generations of conflict resolution systems design generation. One looks at the systems inside of organizations that are attempting to resolve conflicts. That is, is mediation available? Where do you go if you have a conflict? Is that working? What kinds of conflicts work there and what kinds don't? What can HR do? What can it not do? Do you have an ombudsman function, etc.? Second generation of conflict resolution systems design looks at the organizational systems as having an impact on conflict resolution. Or, to put it slightly differently, it begins with an idea. Which is every organization is a conflict resolution mechanism. That is its idea is to bring a diverse group of people together and combine them and reduce their level of conflict growing out of their diversity so that they can work in a united way to achieve a common goal. That's what an organization is. And so here's once we assume that an organization is a conflict resolution mechanism, we can see, for example, that when there is bad leadership, there is more conflict. When there is good leadership, there is less conflict. Therefore, leadership is a conflict resolution mechanism. How good are leaders at mediating conflicts in your organization? Well, that's a set of questions. And now we can design a set of systems that are leadership systems, not conflict resolution systems initially, but now, not just leadership, but feedback and evaluation systems, reward and compensation systems.All of the various systems inside of organizations generate conflicts and can be redesigned to generate fewer and higher order conflicts. And what do you get at the end of this? The answer is some new set of more highly evolved conflicts, and the third generation of systems design is using systems to design design principles to redesign systems design so that, for example, if you try, we know that families are systems, but none of the organizational systems that I've described would work in a family. So what principles design principles ought to inform the way that you think about and create a sense of family. And that means you have to take a look at systems, design itself and do some tinkering. And I think that tinkering probably goes on forever, meaning I think we continue getting higher order conflicts based on our capacity for resolution. So as a child, you got into conflicts on the playground over who got to play with the toys, but then you figure it out. How to solve that. Let's play together. Once you achieve that skill, those conflicts disappeared and now you had new conflicts, conflicts between team members or whatever it may happen to be. And so there is and in the crossroads of conflict that you mentioned earlier, there is an evolution. There's a chapter called The Evolution of Conflict and Resolution. And I think that's what happens.

martin: [00:32:30]
 The interesting evolution of conflict management systems. When I was learning conflict resolution, I learned about these conflict management systems and I was very disappointed. Yes, but the extent and the nature of them. And so it's look forward to reading a book and learning more about broader systems that.

Ken: [00:32:51]
 It's very frustrating. And the difficulty is that unless you get beneath that system to the design principles that led to it, the system will continue regenerating itself. And one of the sources of that design system is the organizational culture. And so you can use the word team to describe what you're doing, but it doesn't make it a team. You just call it a team because that's the word of the day. But then you go on treating it in the same bureaucratic way that you've treated groups before them. So that isn't a shift in content, just in language.

martin: [00:33:27]
 I need to ask you about your agility narratives in your agility narratives. Who is the protagonist, that main character or characteristic? Who's the feature of the narrative and hopefully the one that wins out in the end?

Ken: [00:33:43]
 This is going to sound kind of trite, but I think it's everyone. We are all the protagonists and I see the people that I work with as the protagonists in their own conflicts. And because the conflicts exist inside of them as well as between them, as well as systemically and culturally and environmentally. What is necessary is not only that people that I see them as the protagonist, but they see themselves as protagonists. That is themselves personally and the other person as a legitimate protagonist in their own life, the leader of their own life. Then as soon as you have done that, you've shifted the narrative, and the narrative now becomes one of self discovery, discovery of the other, and the discovery of the world that shapes self and other.

martin: [00:34:37]
 Would you say that that's the theme of your agility narrative? And if so, why? Why do you pick that thing?

Ken: [00:34:44]
 I would say that there may be other themes as well, but I think that that is certainly a core theme. And the reason that I pick it is because it leads me in the direction of technique that is as a result of that set of assumptions, I'm going to operate differently in the first place. I have to respect and dignify each person, no matter how badly they're behaving with a kind of mantle of leadership that I see that in them, they may be able to see that in themselves. They have the capacity to act differently, to be agile themselves, to to turn on a dime and resolve this in a moment. And then what it does is it leads me in the direction of a set of questions. And next week, I'm doing a webinar on the art of Asking Questions. Here are some examples of those questions between two people who are fighting, arguing, yelling at each other. Excuse me. Is this conversation working? They're going to say no. And then you can say, why isn't it working? And now you have brought them back into themselves. Or they may say because the other person is doing something. So what is the other person doing? Would you like to ask them to do it differently? Why don't you ask them right now? Or here's another one.What is one thing that you could do right now in this conversation that would make it work better for the other person? Would you be willing to do that? Or here's another one. On a scale of 1 to 10, ten being highest, how would you rank the conversation you were having before I asked you that question? They'll say two minus one, whatever it is. How would you rank the conversation we're having right now? Six, seven, eight? What would it take to make it a ten? So those are examples of what comes to me from the assumption that everybody has the capacity to stop and turn on a dime. I call those the pivot points, and the purpose of the question is to identify the pivot point for that person. And the more empathy I have and the more awareness I have inside of myself, the more sensitivity to systems, the better I will be able to precisely target that pivot point and ask a question that takes them exactly there. And that's what the search is for.

martin: [00:37:12]
 Why do you believe that's effective? What's happening? How are they feeling about the questions that you're asking?

Ken: [00:37:18]
 They're feeling two things. One is, oh, please, no. And the other is, oh, please, yes. They're afraid of the question because of its transformational possibilities. And they're desperately want to be ousted because they don't like where they're at, they don't like how they're feeling. They want out of this. And so the answer, in a way, to your question is because I've done it so many times. And I know that it works. I've seen it work. One of the articles I'm writing a book that my next book is going to be called The Magic in Mediation. And there's an essay at the beginning of it which is about the sources of magic. And this is magic to ask a question like this that takes someone precisely to that pivot point and shows them that there is another answer that they can give that is infinitely better than the one that they've been giving up until now, one that frees them. As opposed to keeping.Them trapped. 

martin: [00:38:16]
 In organizations. When you're living in an organization, you're part of that organization, part of the structure of that organization. You're often potentially even part of that conflict. So could you use the same sort of questions in that sort of context? Does that does that work as well?

Ken: [00:38:34]
 You can, but it's way more difficult. The reason why people bring in mediators from the outside is primarily because of the fact that as an outsider, you're not expected to understand what the culture permits and prohibits. And Nicholas Newman, who's a fairly famous European sociologist, has written that there are fundamentally two kinds of societies, those in which everything is permitted except that which is prohibited, and societies in which everything is prohibited except that which is permitted. And organizations can take those two different forms. But the object of the question is to expand the level of permission for people to talk about the things that the organization does not give them permission to talk about. So requires agility because you may get an initial answer that is, no, I'm not going there and you may end up respecting that answer. It may not be possible for them to step outside of it, but because I'm an outsider, I can ask questions like that that they have a hard time asking of each other. However, here's a guess everybody has been in meetings that were totally pointless and counterproductive and even destructive and sat there and just taken it. So here's an option for anybody who's in a meeting like that. Raise your hand and say, excuse me, is this meeting working for everyone because it's not working for me? Can we go around the room right now and talk about one thing each person say one thing that can make this meeting better. That's a little bomb we just threw into the meeting. And it is a way of stepping out of the culture of meetings and drawing people's attention to what isn't working as opposed to the attention just being on how how am I going to be able to survive this? Now, that's risky and difficult to do if you're in the organization. It's easier for me on the outside.

martin: [00:40:38]
 In your agility narrative, who or what are the villains?

Ken: [00:40:43]
 Well, there there are no who's among villains. There is a kind of villain, which is your own worst self, your tendency to violence, to hit back, to be destructive simply because of the fact that no one is hearing you what has happened to you and the destructiveness that you are feeling, whatever that may happen to be. So I would say that there are kind of there are set of villains in every conflict. And the main one is the assumption that the other one is a villain.

martin: [00:41:18]
 You were talking about your protagonist as being everyone, and in essence, your villain is everyone as well. And it's the person that we are at the time, in the moment that we're reacting or responding, makes us a protagonist as well as a villain because we're all part of that overall system. Can you tell us more about that switch between protagonist and villain? Can you say like the dynamics between between those two elements of us?

Ken: [00:41:49]
 So I wrote a book that you mentioned earlier called The Dance of Opposites, and one of the chapters in it is called The Narrative Structure of Conflict Stories. And in thought conflict stories, there are actually three characters, not two. There are heroes. There are villains and there are victims. In other words, there is the victim, perpetrator, rescuer, triangle. And everybody who tells a conflict story describes themselves as a victim and the other one as the perpetrator. And the one they're telling the story to is the one they hope will be their rescuer, their knight in shining armor, Snow White and the evil witch and the knight in shining armor. And a part of what we want to do is to look at the nature of conflict stories and figure out how to destabilize that triangle. And here's how we do it. There are three moves from the hero that which is me, because they're telling the story to me. I'm not here to solve your problem. I'm not the judge. I am passing back to you, both of you. Responsibility for outcomes from the victim. Do you have no responsibility whatsoever, either through action or inaction for what has happened and to the perpetrator? Can't we extend some empathy even to the big bad wolf, to the ogre? And so the purpose of these is to destabilize the conflict story, which fundamentally consists of you did it, and I'm the one that was done to. And there's a second story, which is there's nothing that anyone can do that can help us in order to let me off the hook from having to try to do something about it when my trust has been broken and my and I feel vulnerable to whatever it is that you say and do.So here's another look at conflict stories. Two looks. One, there are three stories. One, there is the story you tell yourself. Two, there's the story you tell other people. And three, those are the reasons why you made up those other two stories. And now here's another set of three. Every conflict story takes the form of an accusation. Beneath every accusation is a confession of vulnerability, of caring. And beneath every confession is a request. So you are lazy. The confession is I wish I could take time off and I feel disrespected that you aren't helping me. What's the request? Can you give me a hand? Three fundamentally different outcomes, different stories, totally different results, same content. So the idea is cut from the accusation to the confession or the request. What would you like the other person to do? Instead of what they're doing right. Those kinds of questions will allow them to gain some insight into an alternative way of perceiving their adversity, their hostility, the hostility that they're experiencing and the hostility that they're feeling, and then transforming that into a problem solving, joint problem solving. That's the that's the whole idea.Express Very simply,

martin: [00:45:27] 
I don't have to think very far to a conflict that I'm experiencing to understand that those stories and how being able to deconstruct a conflict story could be so powerful. Can you define the stakes? What is at stake for people in conflict? What's at stake for them if they don't learn these these techniques?

Ken: [00:45:48]
 It's real simple. What's at stake is your life. That's what's at stake. Are you going to remain stuck or are you going to do something to free yourself from this mess that you're in? Because conflict is a state of being stuck. Here's what Jean-Paul Sartre says. Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. But the freedom isn't just the freedom to counterattack. It's the freedom to step away and come back in a constructive way, in a problem solving way, in a way that doesn't deny the legitimate interests of the other person. And this applies politically as well as interactively, socially, familiarly on every level. But it's much more difficult to do.

martin: [00:46:36]
 It is difficult to close the conversation, to turn it to specifically the context of an organization. Imagine you're talking to a group of key stakeholders who feel the weight of constant change that we've collectively lived over the last two years, and they're wanting to move the organization forward and honestly, they feel stuck using that word that you just used. You understand the difficult position. You empathise. Tell us what's going on and what are you most curious about in such a situation and what would be your call to action?

Ken: [00:47:15]
 Well, there are a series of them. I would probably need to do a little bit more in order to find out what the true sources of the problem are. But here's an essential idea. Being stuck means there are two or more truths. And so part of what we want to do is, instead of trying to choose between them initially, try to figure out what is true about each of them. But what is true oftentimes lies beneath the surface. The question is, why is that position important to you? So I would say with a group of people that you're talking about, the first thing to do is to go back to basics and find out why is this a problem? And that sometimes what that means is, paradoxically, what is called strategic planning. But which actually is a kind of retreat to basic principles. And on the basis of those principles, figure out how you're going to move ahead. So let's go back to what our vision is. What is our mission? What are we here to do? What are our shared values, our core beliefs? What do we really want about the sorts of things that are important to us? What stands in the way of our getting those things? What are some strategies that could be used to overcome those barriers? What are some tactics to implement those strategies and how do we start to implement them tomorrow? That kind of process can be very powerful in an organizational setting, but it may also be that there is some other problem with the change process, and I found this in countless occasions.The difficulty is that there's something wrong somewhere in the change itself or in the change process or in the relationships that are leading to change that has not yet been acknowledged or dealt with or solved. That's my basic take away from it. So I try to figure out what that is. There's no way of knowing what that is in advance. I've got to ask questions. What do you want? What makes this difficult for you? Why do you favor the change? Why do you oppose it? What is it about the change that you have doubts about? What life experiences have you had with change, etc.? So those are the kinds of questions that can sometimes lead to dialogue, and the dialogue then leads to deep understanding, and that leads to potential solutions.

martin: [00:49:48]
 We haven't gotten much into the structure of conversations during this podcast, so maybe could you spend just a couple of minutes talking about dialogue as a conversational form and maybe even argument? Those are all different forms and I think have their own value. Maybe you could just give us a little bit of insight into that.

Ken: [00:50:11]
 Sure, I'll do my best. The if we think about the problem is one of polarization. We can see that initially polarization is a positive result because it helps clarify alternatives. There are two paths. Let's distinguish between them. What are the possible outcomes of this path? What are the possible outcomes of that path? And now what we want to do after we have created a distinction between them, which is where the law ends. That's what the law is good at, but it's where the law ends. Then what we need to do is to create not a choice between them, but a dialogue between them in an effort to try to tease out what are the potential ways of combining them together that could result in something remarkable happening. If you imagine a couple an argument between a couple, one wants to save money and the other one's to spend it. What's the correct answer? And the answer is some combination of saving and spending where that combination rests. That is up to the dialogue to figure out. So dialogue is automatically agile. Nobody knows what's going to happen. But there's a fundamental difference between dialogue and monologue. And what happens most often in conflicts is monologues. That's what lawyers do. And it's what people who are angry and no longer trusting of the other person do. They engage in monologues. So the purpose of the dialogue is actually to search for the synthesis between two opposing views, almost kind of like a philosophical dialectic, to look for ways of combining things together. So here's my take on that. There are two fundamental ways of combining opposites. One. Take hot water and cold water and add them together and create lukewarm water. That's compromise. Way to take water. Add flour and yeast and heat and make bread. That's dialogue. It's collaborative. It has to be mixed in the right proportions. And nobody knows what those proportions are going to be in advance. And a small little error in those proportions can produce something brand new or something completely catastrophic.

martin: [00:52:34]
 When you add things together, making bread, there's a reaction. There's a potential interplay between people. How much of the creativity can come from conflict or dispute or agreement or deep listening? Those are different techniques potentially that fit into that reaction. Does that does that make sense? Yeah.

Ken: [00:53:02]
 Yeah, absolutely. The facilitator of a dialogue plays a number of roles, one of which is simply listening and respecting the diversity of views in the group that you're dealing with. And you want that diversity and you want to, in the first place, tease out the differences so that we don't start with the idea of just keep your mouth shut and go along. That's not conflict resolution. That's conflict suppression. The purpose of conflict resolution is to not avoid the conflict, but to find a way through it to the other side. And on the other side, you figured out how to get unstuck by mixing those two things together in the right way.

martin: [00:53:52]
 This is a little bit of a different question, but I wanted to ask it. You're now focused on projects for the Ukraine Russian war and climate change. How do you see the threats and opportunities that we're facing today about our future? Where does resolution fit? And I don't know if you're actively involved in mediation across borders, but if that is part of the answer, that would be lovely to hear about that.

Ken: [00:54:20]
 Sure. Well, I'll start at the end. Mediators Beyond Borders is a group that I started many years ago, and I am a member of the board emeritus and I continue to support the organization and work around the world. And what we try to do is to bring together people from around the world to build conflict resolution capacity, skills and capacities in countries around the world without regard to borders. So yes, in the first place, the problem, I think as we are now moving into negotiations between Ukraine and Russia is that we not lose sight of what creates war in the first place. And simply say, well, we can take that off the table now because we're about to solve, hopefully, this particular war. But what we need to see is I think that there are a number of ways in which we demonize our opponents at a small scale that can easily be ratcheted up to a large scale to end up in war. So we can think of war as the large scale organization of small scale hatreds. But if it weren't for those small scale hatreds, no one would be able to organize them into war. But because it touches a nerve inside of everybody, because the methodology that leads to war is so powerful, what we need to do is to figure out how we stop that methodology. For example, here is George Orwell saying essentially, I'm mostly quoting, every war starts by assuming that the opponent is a maniac and insane. And isn't this exactly what we have done with Putin and whether he is a maniac or insane or not isn't actually the principal question. The question we need to look at is, what do you lose in your capacity to prevent war by making that assumption? And what are the other ways in which it's possible to ratchet an entire country up into a state of war? And there's a wonderful sort of paragraph by Sigmund Freud describing exactly how this operates in periods of war.There is also brilliant little piece. There's a nice little article that was written called War is the Health of the State. And what it essentially says is that war unites people in a way that no politician could ever dream of uniting them. It suppresses dissent in a way that they could never imagine. It gives support for the political system and for the state in a way that is unprecedented. And so there is a kind of virtue for politicians in being in a state of war, so long as you're not losing and so long as the damage isn't so severe. But if you can sustain a kind of state of hostility that unites people in a way, you can think of that as optimal. And I'm not now trying to demonize politicians. I'm simply reflecting on the fact that this is how this system has operated for centuries, for millennia. And our task as conflict resolvers is really simple. It's to figure out how we work together to solve our problems. And what politics is fundamentally is social problem solving. So we need an interest based political system and a political system that is capable of mediation. And out of that political system, we're going to be able to discover what it is that the world needs going forward.

martin: [00:58:25]
 Thank you, Ken, for sharing your agility narrative today. A very rich 42 year history as a conflict resolver. You sketch for us a vivid picture of your life's journey, pre mediation, and how the encounter with mediation was a conversion and you shared your deep insights into conflict and resolution. You offered us great quotes. One particularly impactful for me was from Gerta, in reference to your book Mediating Dangerously. The dangers in life are infinite, and among them is safety. You live to say, making yourself open, vulnerable, and a great and inspiring practitioner and teacher of mediation. In your narrative, you focused on the fact that we are firstly humans who work and live in organizations. You have a deep understanding of how systems impact conflict in our relationships, in and across systems. You offer us hope through many artful techniques that help us evolve how we respond to and learn to destabilize the conflicts we face so that we can be agile and have pivotal, high impact conversations. We ended up where we started talking about activism, anti war and your vision for political system capable of mediation. I want to thank you deeply for sharing your agility narrative with us.

Ken: [00:59:44]
 This is great, Martin. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.