8
Widen the Circle
Building inclusive movements
Remember the story about migrant labor activist Cesar Chavez back in chapter 1? He built his movement by talking to one person, then another person, and then another person. Inspired by that idea, this book has focused on interpersonal conversations, helping you engage people one by one, beyond “preaching to the choir” of people who agree with you.
Fundamentally, there is no shortcut. You can’t change collective conversations without changing individual conversations. As we’ll see, however, your individual conversations will train and prepare you for changing a larger conversation. Using the tools of this book, you can widen the circle of inquiry and impact.
Gabriel shared his recycling story as a personal example at a green business conference in 2015. A director at a major automotive company said, “We’ve re-created your recycling conversation with tens of thousands of people.” Gabriel asked what that looked like, and the director said, “Well, for instance, we know that when we send out a communication about oily-rag contamination in the cardboard recycling, contamination goes up. We have data on that. But we still send out those communications. Our e-mails have likely discouraged thousands of people from doing something they perhaps previously enjoyed contributing toward. I’ve already scheduled a meeting for our team. We’re going to change that immediately.”
Remember the story about Laura and her friend Nick in chapter 6—how she learned to have a courageous and vulnerable conversation about climate change? Here is the next chapter of that story:
During a summer internship with the Indiana state government in 2015, I had the opportunity to meet Vice President Mike Pence, who was the Republican governor of Indiana at the time. He hosted a reception in his office for about thirty interns from the Governor’s Public Service Summer Internship program, including me. For years, then governor Pence had been a very vocal opponent of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, and he wasn’t known for supporting the environment. In the past, I would have avoided engaging with him. I probably would have skipped the reception, having thoughts like “It’s not worth my time” or “I couldn’t possibly have an impact.” That way of being would have been self-fulfilling, whether I decided to engage or not.
Based on my experience with Nick, I showed up embodying compassion and understanding. I asked Pence a question about the future of Indiana’s environmental leadership and, to my surprise, he asked for my opinion. I told him I was working toward graduate degrees in public policy and environmental science because I was committed to protecting human and environmental health.
I shared about an Indiana program I was proud of that provides small businesses with free technical support in navigating complex environmental regulations, ensuring economic success and environmental health.
To the wild surprise of my colleagues and me, he was inspired to give an impromptu speech to our entire class of interns on the beauty of Indiana’s natural resources and the importance of environmental stewardship at the highest levels of state government. It was the most pro-environment speech I’ve heard from Pence, delivered to a group of people who will likely be making important policy decisions in years to come.
A year later, then governor Pence was traveling the country, campaigning for vice president alongside Donald Trump. After a mention of climate change in the first presidential debate, Trump’s campaign manager issued a statement saying Trump “does not believe global warming is a man-made phenomenon.” During a CNN interview later that week, Pence was asked by Chris Cuomo about the Trump campaign’s position on global warming, and he responded: “There’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate.”1
I was shocked by this declaration, which directly contradicted a core policy position of Trump and the GOP leadership. I can’t know whether our conversation at the intern reception produced any direct policy outcomes or how much it influenced Pence’s personal beliefs. What I can say is that I am so profoundly grateful that I decided to show up that day and have a difficult conversation.
Start where you are. As you take on conversations with those who are closest to you, you’ll learn how to unlock the conversations the world needs unlocked. You’ll build confidence and discover new pathways forward you can share with others. Maybe you’ll create a whole language for your cause, like John at HPE with trainings and materials, or perhaps you’ll inspire an entire industry to transform, like Melissa and Joyce at Interface. Know that there is someone whom only you could possibly reach, perhaps someone who will be voting in the next election or moving into a position of influence. You need not get too hung up on where to start practicing. First you talk to one person, then another person.
Shared inquiry is required to change the collective conversation
At some point, however, you may want to pull back and see what this could look like on a collective scale.
What happens when groups of people or whole movements fall into pitfalls? What would be possible if people in our movements systematically let go of the bait, brought conversations back to life, and embraced tensions in a creative way? What new conversations would emerge and define our movements? What would be people’s experience of us? What outcomes would become possible?
Our goal in this book is to create pathways together to break through gridlock and polarization. Just as our pitfalls and tensions can be inherited and transcend us, so can our pathways forward. A pathway takes us from a specific set of individual conversations to collective conversations that become possible through their accumulation and to powerful collective outcomes. To get there, we’ll apply the tools of this book to a wider context: identifying core tensions and pitfalls, working to embrace and transform them, and taking constructive action to create a new discourse.
Throughout this chapter, we will build on our own experience in the sustainability movement and our reflections on the tensions and pitfalls we are familiar with. Our intention, however, is for our example to be relevant to other movements and conversations. We have seen parallels with people fighting for social justice (e.g., education and criminal justice reform) and for public health and safety (e.g., healthcare reform and campaigns dealing with smoking, obesity, and gun violence). The processes in this chapter are relevant to leaders in any movement that is driven by a vision for a better world and that cannot succeed without getting beyond polarization and gridlock.
Each social movement has core tensions and pitfalls
What does it mean to take the pitfalls-and-tensions perspective from individual conversations to a whole movement?
Let’s consider what happens when we assemble a whole crowd of people and organizations that have taken a stand for sustainability. Here is our experience. We are wrestling with a core set of tensions:
• We care for ourselves and the poor in the current moment who seem best served by inclusive economic growth. But we also care for our children and grandchildren (and those of the poor) whose well-being may be undermined by growth that destroys the environment.
• We care for oppressed people and species that we want to protect with standards, rules, and regulations. But we also want the freedom to make our own choices as consumers and businesspeople.
• We want to reduce our consumption and selectively buy products, services, and investments that mitigate social and environmental harm. But we also want the same performance (comfort, power, speed, etc.) that anyone in our society has come to expect.
• We want to be optimistic about the potential of human ingenuity and goodness to create a positive future. But we also look at the current state and direction of inequality and environmental degradation and feel disillusioned about that future.
In talking with colleagues immersed in other groups, movements, and collective conversations, we have heard different tensions. In healthcare reform, we often hear thoughtful practitioners say that on the one hand they want to provide the best healthcare to the patient in front of them. On the other hand, they want to spend time, money, and other resources in a way that ensures the best health outcomes for our society (even if that means holding back with an individual patient). This tension gets mapped across organizational groups and leads to friction and strife, for example, between frontline providers and financial administrators.
In social justice movements, advocates strive for representativeness. An organization pursuing criminal justice reform should have formerly incarcerated individuals and people of color at the helm, ensuring they have voices and are contributing directly to their own empowerment. At the same time, there is no guarantee that these directly impacted people will have an effective strategy for change. Furthermore, white Ivy League lawyers and consultants often have an easier time raising money and building partnerships with other elites. As a result, organizations that maximize representativeness may be perceived as not having the capacity for systemic change. Swinging the other direction, an organization maximizing effectiveness might believe it has to give up representativeness and hire people from privileged backgrounds. In so doing, however, it faces serious critiques from the grass roots about its legitimacy: “Those people don’t speak for us.”
Frictions arise among people with complementary or common goals and can diminish everyone’s energy and cohesive impact. At the center is a tension between representativeness and effectiveness, between the health of the individual and the health of the whole, or between being visionary and being realistic. Yet we need to build organizations and coalitions that are both representative and effective at making change. We need strategies that draw from the unique capabilities of marginalized and privileged groups. We contribute toward the health of the whole by caring for the individuals. And we need visionary approaches that are well grounded in current realities.
These are core tensions at the heart of our movements. When expressed in a healthy way, these tensions drive our learning and innovation. They give our pursuits meaning and purpose. They inspire engagement and pathways forward. Too often we instead let these tensions turn into polarization within ourselves, between organizations, and on the wider political stage. The tensions become sources of resignation and cynicism, frustration and burnout. They create divisiveness outside the choir and infighting within. They become the source of our pitfalls.
Realist-visionary tensions are present in all social movements
First, we’ll expand on a tension between realist and visionary perspectives that we have seen in all social movements we have encountered. Consider for a moment exercise 24 in chapter 7 on creating two-dimensional conversations. In a one-dimensional conversation, you’re either a realist or a visionary. From the perspective of a realist, what we need is incremental change. The realist has heard people talk about vision, and yet, looking back, sees that all change is incremental. From the perspective of the visionary, what we need is transformative change. Incremental change is inadequate for the problems at hand, and we can’t possibly get where we want to go without first being able to imagine it. The realist sees the visionary as delusional, and the visionary sees the realist as disillusioned. You could say delusion and disillusion are two pitfalls that emerge from the tension between being realistic and being visionary.
In practice, when the realist hears a visionary conversation, he’s tempted to interject, to represent the “voice of reality.” When the visionary hears realism, she thinks “a bigger perspective” is needed. What ensues is a one-dimensional debate or oscillation, each person reaffirming to the other that his or her perspective is even more needed. Polarization ensues.
The truth is, we are all visionaries, and we are all realists. You may find yourself arguing for one unrepresented perspective in one group and the other in another. You may grow to be known as the realist in one community and the visionary in another yet fail to create the impact you want in either conversation.
A pathway emerges when we step from a one-dimensional visionary-versus-realist space into a two-dimensional conversation. When both perspectives are present, we have healthy creative tension.2 We create a possibility space that is both grounded in current reality and has access to the power of vision.
As an example, consider this additional excerpt from the Van Jones Infowars interview that transformed Jones’s relationship with Owen Shroyer, which we shared in chapter 7.
If we’re going to be one country, and . . . we’ve got no choice, we’ve got every color, every category, every gender, every sexuality, every faith, every kind of human being ever born living in the United States. We are a miracle in the history of humanity. There’s no country that’s ever even tried to do what we do every day in this country. You’ve got countries that have got two ethnic groups and they can’t get along with two. . . .
But now among Americans, we have to be honest. America has always been two things and not one thing. We start out with that great founding reality that was disappointing even to the founders. You go to the Jefferson memorial, Thomas Jefferson in marble and stone says, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” . . . he’s talking about slavery. . . . That is a founding reality. . . . But the good thing is that there is also the founding dream. That same Thomas Jefferson said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal.”
Now that’s America. The ugly founding reality . . . and that beautiful dream. And what makes us Americans is that we have a process of debate, of amendment, to close that gap, every generation, a little bit more, between that founding reality and that founding dream. That’s what makes us Americans. . . . So if you make the mistake of [denying] that founding dream and just look at the ugliness of that founding reality, you’re wrong. We’re more than just that founding reality. But if, on the other hand, you won’t look at that founding reality and you won’t look at the pain of people whose immediate family members suffered in that founding reality, and you tell us that we’re wrong, you also don’t get the joke, you also don’t understand America.
If you have stuck with us so far, you are already holding this visionary-realist tension. The letter-writing exercise we shared with you in chapter 6 is an interpersonal exercise that guided you through communicating both the current reality and your vision more powerfully than you had before. The current reality is your relationship to the bait (chapter 4), and the vision is what you really want (chapter 5). Sharing either of those, alone, would fall short of inviting the conversation into a space of healthy creative tension.
In this chapter we’ll invite you to build on this skill to create multidimensional spaces of healthy creative tension for your movement. The first step is to identify your movement’s core tensions.
Movements can have collective bait and pitfalls
How do we let go of the bait and embrace the tension at a movement level? In chapters 3 through 7, transforming a conversation and bringing it back to life was something that you could do as an individual. You personally have the power of reflecting on your conversation and courageously re-engaging. Releasing a collective pitfall is partly a matter of doing exactly that and changing a series of individual conversations. But you can also look at the collective conversation and discourse as a whole. In releasing the collective bait and climbing out of a collective pitfall, it can be helpful to take a close look at the words people use such as “sustainability,” “social justice,” and “public health,” which become tags of identity and loyalty as well as intellectual ideas. We want to suggest that the building blocks of bait and pitfalls exist inside these very ideas and in the broader idea of a “better world.”
Consider that any vision or movement for a “better world,” is not one thing. What we are playing with is a vision for a whole system. Systems are made up of collections of elements—teams and organizations of people, communities of people and infrastructure, value chains, nations, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. Very often those assemblies of elements are complex: large numbers of elements interact in a large variety of ways. “Sustainability” describes something about how the whole system works. We can’t understand the sustainability of the system by looking at the behavior or health of only a part of the system. Similarly, “social justice” and “public health” are whole-system visions.
Notice that if I care about the future of a system, it is usually because I am a part of that system, or people I care about are part of that system. In the context of climate change, Jason and Gabriel both live in coastal cities. We have family living in precarious places like the coast of Florida and near Bangladesh. You may have an uncle who farms in California’s Central Valley and worries about drought or a friend in the coal industry who worries about climate regulations. All of us, when we try to act on whole systems, are acting as parts of the whole.
Now consider the temptation to be right, righteous, certain, and safe in this context—the common forms of bait we identified in chapter 4.
Letting go of “right”
When I am a part of a system, how much of the system do I really get to see? How well do I really understand the thoughts going through someone’s mind when she is addicted to an intravenous drug and deciding whether to reuse a needle and risk the spread of disease? How well do I understand the experience of a young black man trying to survive in a city that fears him and the experience of a police officer’s spouse who hopes he will come home safe each day? Do I really know the motivations and perspectives of Florida homeowners when they build, buy, and insure their homes on an increasingly vulnerable coastline? As a part of a system, I have only a limited perspective on the whole.
Sometimes my view of the situation will align with others’ views, and sometimes it won’t. If I am holding on to the need to be right, I am in fact almost certainly wrong because I can’t understand the situation in its full complexity. And because I’m sure that I’m right, I won’t engage others whose perspectives could expand and contribute toward my own.
At the same time, what if we were to give up being right? We would have to act according to our values without knowing we were taking the “right” action. We would have to express ourselves without knowing our words are the “right” words. What would we do? What would we say? Would we act at all? This uncertainty may feel like an uncomfortable place, but allowing it is a key step on the pathway. It drives us from advocacy to inquiry: to ask questions, to listen, and to understand new perspectives.
Most of the time, however, we just act as though we’re right, and the world keeps turning. You can see how being right (and making others wrong) is sticky bait when we’re striving to create a better world.
Letting go of “righteous”
In each of the examples above, you or I have a particular stake in the system. I care about my ability to eat fish, you care about your uncle in California, we care about our grandkids’ ability to enjoy a comfortable life. As a part of a system, I care about my part as well as the whole.
Sometimes my self-interests (particularly the longterm ones) are aligned with the health of the whole system, aka “a better world.” My kids will get to eat fish too if the fishery is sustainable. But sometimes my individual interests and others’ interests, or the collective interests, are in conflict. I want to eat fish now or take long hot showers, or whatever your guilty pleasure, even though I know it might undermine the system as a whole, particularly if we all do it. In this context of inner ambivalence and conflict, and interpersonal conflict, how do we cope? The more righteous I feel, the less I need to reflect on my own multiple motives or to consider whether my pursuit of my goals might be imposing on others’ pursuit of theirs.
What would it look like for your group or movement to give up being righteous? How would we keep ourselves motivated? Again, we invite you to sit in that place of uncertainty and inquiry. Try to understand what positive values motivate people on “the other side.”
Letting go of “certain”
Consider our quest to feel certain inside movements to make change in complex systems and societies. The future of a complex system is inherently uncertain. How many times have our predictions failed to come true? How many times have we averted an environmental catastrophe? Or are we merely postponing it and making it larger? The future is all the more uncertain in a complex system, where we have limited information about the present and where small changes can have large ripple effects. Are we inventing new means to farm salmon for the masses, or are we creating a “Trojan horse” species that could destroy entire fisheries? To say with full confidence that my lifestyle or my company’s product is “sustainable,” meaning that it is aligned with the sustainability of the whole, is to assume you know the future.
Nonetheless, we want a lot of people to adopt a lot of solutions if we are going to change the course of the whole system. That makes appearing certain about the problems and the benefits of our suggested solutions seem all the more important. In some cases, this approach is successful: when people are fearful and uncertain about the future, we want to provide a clear comforting answer. What does it feel like to admit uncertainty? What new sources of information might we seek?
Letting go of “safe”
Amid all the uncertain scenarios for the future of the system, many that we can conjure up are quite unpleasant. We try to prevent the oppression of minorities, the destabilization of societies, the bankruptcy of governments, the depletion of natural resources, the disruption of the climate, and so on.
But taking action to change the future is also incredibly risky. On a large scale, our solutions may have unintended consequences that we will not foresee. For example, corn-based ethanol, once touted as a solution to energy security concerns, had an upward effect on food prices that helped destabilize the Middle East in the 2000s, undermining security. Every course of action has risks in a complex system.
Getting to feel safe is almost always an illusion. At a personal level, the risks of action are also acute: we might find ourselves rejected. Individual “change agents” bear risk as well, and this is another example of a tension between the welfare of the parts and the welfare of the whole. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is a dramatic example of risk, yet we all face risks as advocates who step out onto a more public stage. And if we don’t take action, we run the very personal risk of feeling regret.
What would it look like to let go of the bait of feeling safe? What new risks might you take?
Find the possibility at the heart of our movements
What if we, as a community, let go of the bait? What if we see the contradictions and inauthenticity involved in acting right, righteous, certain, and safe and take a step back?
The truth is, we don’t know what progress is. We don’t know what it looks like. We don’t have a clear shared vision for a future together, let alone a defined trajectory of how to get there, and we may never have that clarity. Progress—as a vessel that contains the future we want—means anything to everyone and therefore nothing to anyone.
What if we understand “sustainability,” “social justice,” or “public health” to be an empty vessel?
When we stand in this uncomfortable place, one choice is to rebrand the movement to more clearly define what we are for. For example, we could rebrand sustainability as being for regenerative systems, resilience, or flourishing. Or we could rebrand criminal justice reform as public safety and strong communities. Perhaps we could bring all of these movements together into one for health or wholeness. There are, in fact, elegant and well-argued manifestos for each of these moves.3
Any of these new terms, however, are vessels that will fill with their own meaning, their own collective hang-ups, their own shadows. This is because regeneration, resilience, flourishing, and wholeness are all emergent properties of whole complex systems, yet we still get to act as only parts of the whole. The bait of right, righteous, certain, and safe still lurks in any effort to mobilize behind an idea for a better world.
So, just for a moment, let’s explore the choice to hold on to the empty vessel instead.
What if we see that emptiness in a different way? Rather than being a thing, what if we relate to our movements as a possibility? Consider social justice, public health, and sustainability—consider your movement—as a possibility.
Possibility lives in the present and future simultaneously. It is forever just out of your reach, and yet it is something that you create and re-create as you bring the future into the present moment. Being right, righteous, certain, or safe about a possibility is much harder. Your movement, as a possibility, is an inquiry. It’s a set of questions, not answers. It’s a conversation you can invite others into.
When we relate to our movement as an inquiry, rather than a fixed thing others must understand, we can use a whole host of conversations to invite others in. Rather than having to share a fixed vision, we are free to invite others into a conversation for envisioning alongside us. Rather than being embarrassed about chasing our bait, we have an opportunity to explore our humanity alongside each other together.
In chapter 5 we shared a guided meditation and the results from our workshops when people sat through it and then shared their way of being inside the future they want to create. Those results are depicted again in figure 12.
Figure 12 Ways of being expressed inside a positive future4
Look at this word cloud again. What occurs when we take the bold step to let go of the bait and dwell in this space? For us, the experience recalls a thirteenth-century poem by Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.5
Standing in this place, from the ways of being in figure 3, how would you articulate the core possibility of your movement?
John Ehrenfeld, in a moment of inquiry like this, made a statement that became the basis of his writing and has inspired our work: “Sustainability is the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.” “Flourishing” is a useful description of what the world would look like if everything works out—when we successfully unite with others and mobilize to handle the “unsustainabilities.” Like us, Ehrenfeld has articulated ways that the sustainability movement has not been authentic in creating that kind of future.6 And this creative tension between who we want to be for the world and who we have been gives us a powerful conversational starting point with people outside the movement. We can empathize with people who think we’ve been a bunch of holier-than-thou jerks because, well, we have been. And we can share powerfully with them what matters most to us.
Take a moment to articulate your vision or the possibility of your movement. Notice what pitfalls have emerged or where you’ve been inauthentic in pursuit of that possibility. How do people experience you in the world? Is that way of being consistent with the future you want? What bait holds you in past patterns? What do you gain when conversations lose? What way of being would be consistent with the future you want to create? What do you really want? Who are you willing to share that with?
While we’re not suggesting you publish it, draft a letter that could inspire the transformation you want to create within your movement. This may require going through some of the earlier exercises in the book with other people in your organization and movement.
Here is a story of a moment like this in the social justice movement.
In 1988, Molly Baldwin started Roca, an organization dedicated to the highest risk young people in Massachusetts, many of whom were in and out of jail. At first she saw law enforcement members as adversaries, both for the kids and for her work. Taking a stand for the youth meant taking a stand against the system that held them down. Soon, however, she started to see the limits of her approach. Youth were spending time in her programs but continuing to get in trouble. Police saw her nascent community center and after-school program as a haven for gang members and did not trust her efforts.
Molly tried holding peacekeeping circles that brought youth and police together to share their hopes and fears in a safe space. At first there was nothing safe about it. “Forty people came—young people, police and probation officers, community members, and friends,” recalls Molly. “Halfway through the opening session, everything blew up. People were screaming, the kids were swearing, everyone was saying, ‘See! This is never going to work!’ Watching the session break down was wrenching, but eventually I understood how committed I was to divisiveness and not unity, how far I was from being a peacemaker. I understood on a visceral level the problems with ‘us and them’ thinking, and how I perpetuated that, personally and for the organization. Continuing to insist, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong! The issue is you, not us, because we hold the moral high ground!’ was a big source of what was limiting our ability to truly help people and situations.”7
Molly and her team approached the chief of police and shared these reflections, acknowledging their role in the conflict. Starting with that moment, the relationship shifted to a different footing. Subsequent peacekeeping circles gradually became more and more able to create real dialogue. “We have come a long way in terms of our work with the police in all the cities we are privileged to serve. Authentic and meaningful conversations with cops at all ranks are not ‘nice to have’—they are an inseparable part of helping high-risk young people change their lives. It takes time, honesty, and long-term commitment to overcome bumpy times, but for the work we do, this kind of dialogue is key.”
Today, Roca is at the forefront of innovation to reduce recidivism, largely as a result of Molly and her team’s ability to work with gangs, police, courts, parole boards, schools, and social service agencies as effective collaborators. They are becoming an exemplar for work that marries youth justice and strong, safe communities, contributing to a wider shift in developing effective interventions for young adults in the justice system.
We have only just begun to discover the pathways forward
From this place—a new way of being, liberated from our attachment to the bait—what becomes visible as a course of action? What are the pathways for you as an individual and as a part of a collective that may allow you to fulfill your aspirations?
We are certain that we don’t know the answers to those questions. If we’ve done our job well, we’ve equipped you to generate conversations full of healthy creative tension, inside of which you can’t possibly know what will emerge. We wrote this book so that our readers would generate pathways, walk along them, produce stunning results, and share them with us.
What we have envisioned and observed so far is the following sampling of possible alternative pathways. These are new approaches to try when you face the specific pitfalls we identified in chapter 4 (table 3). However, we will leave it to you to identify the pitfalls and possible pathways within your own movement.
Table 6 Pathways forward
Engage in this inquiry with others within your family and in classrooms, organizations, and communities. Invite others to a conversation about the future they want to create—for themselves, for their grandchildren, and for people they’ve never met. Just as we have dug collective pitfalls for ourselves, we can create collective pathways forward. You can create a possibility; we can create new possibilities together.
In this process, we can be humble and patient because sometimes the first outcomes are “just” conversations. And we can be bold, taking on the conversations that matter most.
Imagine if we did this work. Imagine that movements toward a better world are inviting inquiries characterized by bold conversations and healthy spaces of possibility.
A whole new discourse is possible in conversations toward economic, social, and environmental change. We can transform tensions from sources of stuckness and polarization into drivers of creativity and innovation. Rather than being a source of frustration, our movements can become a source of flourishing on the way toward the flourishing of all life. As that happens, our efforts will be inviting and expansive. They will hold more and more diverse people and viewpoints. They will grow to the quality and scale needed to create a world that works for all. Along the way, we will improve our relationships with the people who matter most in our lives and we will more fully and authentically express ourselves.
May you take on significant challenges to humanity and find within them profound opportunities to express our humanity.
Let’s get to work.