7

Embrace the Tension

How our differences can make a difference

Up until now, we have been working with you to get unstuck. If you are practicing the exercises, you have brought a conversation back to life that had previously been stuck. You named and acknowledged your old way of being and bait, perhaps in an explicit and public way. You shared what is meaningful and important to you, as well as the future you want to create for your relationship and the wider world. We expect this has helped you and the other person in the conversation to break through old patterns and begin moving forward together.

You may also notice other contexts in your life and work where you have no personal history of getting stuck, pre-existing pitfalls, or baggage. You’re not stuck yet, and you’d prefer it stayed that way. Yet there is still some bridge to cross, some tension between how you see the world and how (you think) “they” see the world. Perhaps you are part of a group, organization, or political party that has a polarized history with them, even if you haven’t personally been involved. Perhaps they have an expectation or stereotype about how you are going to be, and you have an expectation about how they are going to be. In those contexts you want to avoid pitfalls and instead have conversations that are authentic, powerful, engaging, and creative from the start.

The goal of this chapter is to teach you how to produce creative, positive outcomes anywhere with people across various lines. The key premise is this: we might think the tensions between “us” and “them” are a barrier to creative solutions, but in fact, the possibility for innovation and flourishing emerges from embracing the tension.

Think of the polarization between different points of view as potential energy. When it is fully charged, we avoid it because we don’t want to get zapped. But when we bring the charge down just enough, it can be very useful. It can fuel motion and creativity. To harness that power, we offer four steps for approaching new (or renewed) conversations in a polarized world:

1. Clarify values: Get beyond factual debates, and seek to understand the emotional truth of the conversation: what you each care most about.

2. Own the polarization: Acknowledge how you, your group, and others in your movement have contributed to a historical sense of trade-off, conflict, and polarization between those values. Confront your own inner tensions and ambivalence.

3. Expand the landscape: Declare an intention to break apparent trade-offs between values.

4. Dance in the new terrain: Brainstorm, search, connect, prototype, and create beyond the existing boundaries.

These steps are explained in the following sections.

Clarify values

When we get stuck with the bait of right, righteous, certain, and safe, our conversations tend to focus on the facts or content of what people are saying. For example, both of us have politically conservative relatives who will say things like “I don’t believe man-made climate change is real, and I think it’s an excuse for bigger government intrusion in the economy.” Our knee-jerk reaction is to argue with the factual content of this statement: to tell them why they are wrong about the science and prove to them that temperatures are rising, the weather is getting crazier, and human-driven greenhouse gas emissions are causing both. We find ourselves being rationalistic, argumentative, and frustrated. We ask questions that attempt to poke holes in their argument, like “What are your sources for that?”

Often, the tone of the conversation stays combative and defensive because they hear the subtext of our question, which sounds to them like “You don’t know what you are talking about.” At best, if we get through this, we’ll get a bunch of links and books in our in-box in support of “their side.”

Let’s pay attention to a different part of our relatives’ statement: “Climate change is an excuse for bigger government intrusion in the economy.” Lurking in this part of the statement is something beyond facts. Here they are exposing their values. What if we directed our attention toward that?

They have a future they want to create. They care about opportunity and liberty, a future where people live free of government domination. If scientists and environmentalists are telling them to give that up to tackle climate change, it will be a tough pill to swallow.¹ Yet we can lean into that value for ourselves. We too want a future of opportunity and freedom—and we want to mitigate climate change. Since we want both, that’s where a creative design space emerges.

People’s values are organized around spheres of care

Many models are available to help clarify underlying values. First we want to introduce our spheres of care. Spheres of care help articulate the scope of our aspirations for various parts and wholes of social life. Conversations “to create a better world” are always about the fate of wholes: whole school systems, whole companies, whole value chains, whole governments, whole societies, whole ecosystems, the whole planet. But those wholes are made up of parts, which are usually people, groups of people, or pieces of infrastructure and ecosystems that particular people care about. If we care about the future of a system, it is usually because we are a part of that system, or people we care about are part of that system. Figure 4 shows nested layers of parts-in-wholes, from me as an individual all the way to “all life.”

Issues, advocates, and movements arise because contradictions or conflicts are perceived between the interests of the individual and the interests of the collective, the part and the whole. Here are some examples:

Figure 4 Spheres of care

• It may be safe and convenient for my child to skip his or her immunizations, as long as all the other children get theirs, but if we all opt out, dangerous epidemics occur and many children become sick.

• It may be faster for me to get to work in my car than by bus or bicycle, but if everyone acts like me, we get traffic jams, underinvestment in public transit and bicycle infrastructure, and longer commuting times for everyone.

• We may want each decision about school admissions and employment to be based on individual merit, but those decisions can add up to reinforce patterns of inequality in society.

In the context of conflict, consider which sphere of care is most important to you and to the person you’re in conflict with. Is there a situation where caring for one whole seems to require compromising the liberty of a part of that whole? Once you’ve identified the tension, we will help you harness the creative potential.

As you start listing the person’s values in a positive way, you may be surprised to find yourself agreeing or resonating with those values.

One of our participants working on global sustainability faced resistance from his company’s chief financial officer. In considering the CFO’s values, he had an epiphany:

He actually thinks about sustainability every day. What he really values and cares about is the sustainability of the company. If we aren’t financially solvent into the future, we won’t be able to achieve any goals, sustainability or otherwise.

What emerged out of this realization? A newfound commitment to understand the economic costs and benefits—the business case—of an environmental initiative in the company. From there, he was able to generate a new approach.

Own the polarization

Once you have identified the different values in the conversation, the next step is to acknowledge how those values can become polarized and your own role in that process. This step requires a bit more vulnerability and authenticity, but it can also be the most fun.

Consider the spheres-of-care model we presented in figure 4. Given the conflicts that occur, we often experience parts and wholes as two opposite poles, as shown in figure 5.

Figure 5  Trade-offs between parts and wholes

This view of the world suggests a kind of trade-off, balance, or choice between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective. Within this trade-off perspective, we take sides: either I will protect my freedom to drive, eat, and enjoy my property, or I will sacrifice and be a bus-riding vegetarian and take a reduced salary to work for a nonprofit. Does this sound familiar?

When this is our mental model, the way we see the world, sometimes the best outcome we can envision is a “compromise”—a halfway point or middle ground, as shown in figure 6. We see this happen quite a bit in the commercial sphere. Have you ever used a “green cleaning” product that didn’t do quite as good a job taking mildew off a shower tile? Have you ever driven an “energy efficient” car that felt anemic when you hit the accelerator pedal? We bought both of those products! (And we’ve left less-than-sparkling showers at home and driven around town in our hybrids while feeling self-righteous for making the compromise.)

Figure 6  When we perceive a fundamental trade-off between values, the best we can imagine is compromising one for the other

Now, let’s acknowledge how the solutions of the past may have forced people to choose between these values or to compromise on one of their values to enjoy another. When we can only imagine behaviors, products, and policies that require a trade-off, our conversations will get stuck debating between them. I will likely find myself telling you what you should want, justifying why you should give up on your values to come closer to mine, and I fall into the pitfall of self-righteousness. Add up whole groups and movements of people taking that approach, and you get the cultural polarization we all suffer.

Owning the polarization means first acknowledging this history, validating that there is an underlying idea of a trade-off or zero-sum game and a precedent for why that idea exists. Then it means acknowledging our ambivalence. Given the opportunity, do I want to choose between my life and all life, between product performance and impact, or between my child and all children? Rather than arguing for one over the other, I would honestly like both.

Acknowledging our ambivalence can be difficult. You may even have a strong aversion to the word “ambivalence.” It comes from the Latin ambi, meaning “both,” and valentia, meaning “strength.” Sometimes we’re so dug in to one side, while making the other side wrong, that seeing beyond polarization takes serious internal reflection. But when we can see both values as valid, even desirable, and acknowledge our role in the polarization, something different becomes possible.

The spheres-of-care model is meant to help you articulate and broaden your perspective. It is not a comprehensive model. However, it illustrates the tensions you’ll be navigating if you’re out to create a better world. You can see that your own life flourishing is part of all life flourishing, and yet they are also seemingly at odds with each other. Similarly, my success is bound up in and at odds with the success of my organization. Once we can see these relationships, it’s easier to recognize that the solutions we really want will break classical trade-offs and contribute to both values or objectives.

Values differ across political lines

In politically charged conversations, it can be helpful to enrich the spheres-of-care model by thinking about the “moral foundations” that underlie our parties and ideologies. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that humans are wired to care about six moral values: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.² While there are systematic differences in how liberals, libertarians, and conservatives prioritize and understand these values, each value is innate within each of us. Thus, when exploring what’s important, you might ask: What do they find sacred? And what do we find sacred? Whose liberty do they want to protect? And whose liberty do we want to protect? Whom do we each want to care for or treat fairly? To whom do we want to express loyalty, and what authority structures do we each consider to be important?

On the streets of Cleveland during the 2016 Republican National Convention, just before Donald Trump was about to be nominated as the Republican candidate for president, Owen Shroyer saw Van Jones walk past a bar where he was sitting. Shroyer was from Infowars, a news organization that stood for libertarian and constitutionalist ideas, representing the far political right. Jones founded several social and environmental justice organizations and served as President Obama’s special advisor for green jobs. He also was cast as the liberal pundit on CNN’s show Crossfire. The encounter happened amid nationwide clashes between police and protestors over the question of racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Shroyer and his cameraman jumped up from their drinks and ran down the sidewalk after Jones, asking him on camera to do an interview. Jones responded to specific questions about race and racism while dodging heckling from passing Trump supporters. Along the way he expressed several great examples of ambivalence and his relationship with Shroyer transformed.³

So, this is beautiful. I didn’t run from you. I didn’t not talk to you. Because this is what we’re supposed to do. I didn’t go get a gun, you didn’t go get a gun. I didn’t call you a name, you didn’t call me a name. We can argue back and forth

. . . . The only way this thing works is if you cry just as much when that black man dies in that police car and I cry just as much when that horrible bigoted sniper shot down those police. If you’re crying over those funerals and I’m crying over those funerals and we’re both crying together, we can find a way to get our cops to be better and to get our kids to be better. . . .

No one leader . . . has all the answers. Neither political party has all of the answers. When the country works right, the Republicans bring something to the table. They say, “How much does this cost and who’s going to pay for it?” That’s a good thing for Republicans to ask. Republicans ask, “Should the government be doing this any dadgum way?” That’s a good thing for the Republicans to ask. The Democrats say . . . ,” “Can you have a country that works only by doing what corporations can make money off of? What about other stuff?” That’s good for us to bring. We ask the question, “What about those subgroups that might get run over by the big majorities?” Those are good questions. . . . When we come together the right way, Republicans talk about liberty, individual freedom, limited government. Democrats talk about justice, what about those little guys getting run over? Liberty and justice for all. That’s America. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

. . . What’s happening now is, if you’re for liberty, I call you a racist. If I’m for justice, you call me a socialist. . . . That’s gotta stop.

At the end of the interview, Shroyer turned to the camera and said, “I’ve got to be honest. I’ve been one of the biggest haters of Van Jones, probably on the Internet, and I’m gonna go ahead and walk back some of my hate for Van Jones.” He then suggested Jones could come to Infowars to share his ideas with an audience outside his liberal circles.

We use the Van Jones story to illustrate that we are not asking you to simply reframe or cloak your values in language that you think the other person cares about. We are asking you to internalize someone else’s values (as you are asking the other person to do). Initially, we suggest you use these tools to explore what matters to you. By acknowledging your own ambivalence, you’ll be better equipped to navigate conversations with people you traditionally don’t agree with. And by training this muscle, you can learn to do it in real time in conversations that could otherwise be adversarial. We will show you how to use a diversity of values, especially values seemingly in conflict, as a source of flourishing and innovation.

Expand the landscape

Once we start to acknowledge both our values and the other person’s values as valid, as well as the history of trade-off and polarization, it becomes time to change the basic assumption in the conversation. Rather than seeing the world in one polarized dimension, we can create a two-dimensional conversation. Sean Kenney and Rob Wilson at MFS Investment Management faced a conundrum. They had been working to help both MFS’s investment team and MFS’s clients more thoroughly integrate the analysis of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria into their investment decision-making processes. Their goal was to find companies that would outperform in the market (performance) and better manage their social and environmental risks and opportunities (impact). When they went to engage their clients—pension funds, endowments, and other institutional investors—they found themselves repeatedly hearing opposition: “We don’t do socially responsible investment. We have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the returns of our portfolio.” In essence, people weren’t buying the “win-win” argument. They believed there must be a strong trade-off between the economic performance and social impact of the investment strategy, as illustrated in figure 7.

Figure 7  A one-dimensional conversation in the corporate and investing world

This mental model of a trade-off is very common and is a pervasive background conversation that halts sustainability efforts.

Sean and Rob recognized that arguing “There is no trade-off” to people who believed “There is always a trade-off” wasn’t getting them anywhere.

Instead, as they engaged their clients, Sean and Rob showed a slide depicting a graph of return on investment (ROI) versus social value as not just one dimension but two dimensions: a rational, long-term-oriented investor should care about both social impact and performance. They drew a downward-sloping trade-off line (the more social value, the less return) similar to the one shown in figure 8. They said, “This is a very common way of seeing the investment landscape. And in fact it’s true. There are investments that would get a lower return with more social impact, and vice versa.” They even gave examples to validate this point of view. These included the immediate negative impact that higher wages could have on near-term financial results, and a high short-term return from investments in toxic industries if externalities are not properly managed by society.⁴

“And,” they said, “it’s also true that we could imagine shifting this line outward—finding clever investment strategies that could break the trade-offs. We could do that by paying attention to information that other investors aren’t paying attention to.” At this point, they showed examples of how well-designed environmental and socially informed strategies can outperform the financial benchmarks.

Figure 8  A common mental model of trade-offs between performance and impact

We depict this shift in figure 9 as a push into new territory beyond the frontier of perceived trade-offs. Doing this requires innovation but it moves in the direction of flourishing—achieving benefits for individuals, companies, and society.

The results were significant: the MFS team’s clients responded positively to this conversation and began seriously considering their ESG approach. The conversation created an opening where one had not existed before.

Figure 9  Breaking trade-offs through innovation

We can look at this pathway as a rhetorical strategy:

• Describe the implicit “trade-off” or “either-or” mental model.

• Validate it with examples to show that you understand its basis.

• Invite the other person to consider a space of possibilities beyond the trade-off.

• Together, consider options in that space and how well they meet “both-and” goals.

Of course, trade-off-breaking “both-and” solutions won’t always be apparent. But you can navigate your way into the conversational space where those solutions could possibly be uncovered. This is the creative frontier that is possible only by being in dialogue with people who will challenge you to expand your value set.

Dance in the new terrain

You may notice that this approach looks like an iterative process of innovation—considering a space of possibility, generating options, and evaluating them. In fact, that is the fundamental opportunity here. We can shift the focus from the past and present, where people believe trade-offs are required, to a focus on a future we can create together. We can use multiple competing values as drivers of creativity and innovation.

When families, organizations, communities, and governments are stuck in gridlock, it is often because the existing solutions are too strong a compromise for all involved. Breaking through requires new ideas. If we can come together across the lines, clarify what matters most, and embrace the tension between values, we might generate optimal outcomes we never before envisioned. The fuel for that journey, amazingly enough, may be the same polarization that seems to keep us stuck.