Nolan Martin :
Hello, welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. My name is Nolan Martin, with me as always, Aram Donigian. Aram, you want to introduce our guest for today?
Aram Donigian:
I will. Thanks, Nolan. As many of our listeners know, or perhaps don’t know, we often record our podcast episodes several months in advance. That means the world often changes between when we record something and when it airs. Now, we intentionally invited this episode’s guest knowing that we’d release right around the election. And our hope is that regardless of your view on the outcome of the election, today’s message gives you both hope and purpose.
Diana McLain Smith is a renowned thought leader who has led change efforts for 35 years in some of America’s most iconic businesses and cutting edge nonprofits. A former partner at The Monitor Group and a former chief executive partner at new profit, Smith developed an approach to conflict and change called Leading Through Relationships.
Smith’s frameworks and tools captured in The Elephant in the Room, Divide or Conquer, and dozens of articles have been used around the world to turn intergroup conflict into a powerful force for change. She shares her life with negotiation expert Bruce Patton, co-author of Getting to Yes and Difficult Conversations in Vermont and Massachusetts with their two rambunctious dogs, Atticus and Scout.
Now back in 2010, we had the pleasure of hosting Bruce as our keynote speaker for the first West Point Negotiation Project Conference. So today is a little bit of coming full circle. Diana’s most recent book is Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together To Build a Better Future for All. Diana, thanks so much for joining us today.
Diana McLain Smith :
It’s great to be here, and it’s wonderful to talk to somebody who’s been immersed in the negotiation world, a world near and dear to my heart.
AD:
Good. There was a question I wanted to put in here, which is, I assume, based on reading your book, knowing Bruce, you two never have any conflict.
DMS :
I’d like to say if we can make our marriage work, we can make America work. When we first got married, we had this really old zero, it is called a Sub-Zero refrigerator. But I kept slipping up and calling it a zero sum refrigerator because it kept melting my ice cream because the freezer didn’t work. And we’d have these really productive fights. We’re getting into a refrigerator. No, we’re not. Yes, we’re, no, we’re not. Eventually. We did come up with a creative solution, which was to buy a very inexpensive freezer and put it in the closet. That saved our marriage and we’re celebrating 30 years this fall.
AD:
Oh, congratulations. That’s wonderful. And listen, when it comes to melting ice cream, my wife would call that a national tragedy.
DMS :
It was a national tragedy. Believe me.
NM:
Diana, thank you for being here. We’re going to dig into your book in just a second. And before we do, I’d love to hear about your journey. What has led you to this point in your life, the work that you do, and especially the drive behind writing this book?
A Journey From Political Activism To Organizational Mastery [03:38]
DMS :
It’s always a little bit hard to condense longer and longer career into a short story. But the metaphor I always use is I’m the Goldilocks of systems change. So when I began working to try to change systems, I began in the late 60s, early 70s. I was a youngster at the time. I worked with the political candidates that were running for office. Those community organizing, I would take on different issues and work to try to change how the political system operated.
And after about six years of that, I said, my God, these systems are just too big. I can’t affect change the way I’d like to. And one of the people I met while community organizing was part of a community mental health center that work with kids, low income kids. And he said, you’d be great working with kids. Why don’t you come on over? We’ll train you how to counsel these kids, how to help them navigate the community that they live in, the schools, the courts, everything. And I said, sure. And so I got trained by some of the best people in the field, David Cantor, the founder of Family Therapy and some psychologists who are terrific.
And so I did that for about six years. I got somewhat burned out because it’s intense work. And at the end of it, I said, these systems are just a little too small. I just, one person at a time. Where are you going to get? So I went off to graduate school and really, by happenstance, came across a fellow by the name of Chris Argyris, who was one of the founders of the field of organizational learning.
And I discovered that there were a whole bunch of people trying to create a new kind of organization. One that was able to adapt and learn and was flexible and responsive, not just to the environment outside, but inside. And so I got very excited by that and I ended up working in organizations for about 30 years.
And then, we’ll talk more about this later, but then a few years ago, as things began to go to hell in a handbasket in our nation, I began to see parallels between the intergroup conflict that I saw and worked on in organizations and the intergroup conflict I was seeing in our nation. And so I began to shift full circle back 360 degrees to working in political systems.
NM:
How did you personally grow or change as you tackled this writing project over the past couple of years?
The Crucial Role Of Individuals In Transforming Systems [05:46]
DMS :
I’d say the biggest shift was really understanding the unbelievable, I wouldn’t say it was a shift as much as a deepening of my understanding of the power that people have to transform systems. So many of us think about systems change as formal structures. We’ve got to change the laws. We’ve got to change the policies. No question. That’s true. But who the heck is going to change them? Okay. People. And if people can’t get their acts together, they’re not going to change them. Right?
So I began to see basically the power of the powerless, as Vaclav Havel called it in a book of the same name and he inspired the solidarity movement in Poland and the power of the powerless ended up bringing down the Soviet regime. So I think I began to not only appreciate but understand what is it about the power of people? Why is it so critical? Why is it that we ignore it? We don’t look at it. We don’t see it. How can we harness it? So that all of that is what I began to learn while I was writing the book.
NM:
Yeah. Power of the powerless.
DMS :
Yeah, it is.
AD:
I wanted to back up for one second. You got a chance to work with Chris Ardress, who’s no longer with us, but his work lives on. All of us who work in this field use, whether it’s ladder of inference or double loop learning or any of the sort of concepts. What was it like to work with Chris?
Learning Systemic Change With Chris Argyris & Don Schön [07:07]
DMS :
Well, it was an extraordinary privilege, first of all. He has to be one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of brilliant people, including Roger Fisher, who you all know. And one of the things that people don’t fully appreciate is that it was the Chris Argyris and Donald Schön show. In other words, Chris’s closest colleague and friend was Don Shurn, who was over at MIT. The two of them together wrote two seminal books.
One was called Theory in Practice and the other one was On Organizational Learning. And it was their partnership that was so extraordinary. And I would say Don was the other most brilliant person I’ve ever met in my life. There’s that, but there’s also they had the capacity to really see the person they were talking with and really be present in a way that was extraordinary.
And Chris, in particular, had an extraordinary capacity for empathy. At the same time, he did not suffer fools. He was very tough and very confrontational. And when he got triggered, which he did, he was a human being. He was extremely formidable. And I think one of the reasons why we got along so well for as long as we did is I had three older brothers who were exactly the same way and a father cut from the same cloth.
So it was like, ho-hum, what else are you going to throw my way? So it didn’t bother me as much as it bothered many other people. So I’ve just learned an enormous amount from him about, I’d say the most important thing I learned from him is that you really can’t understand a system deeply until you try to change it.
Because until you try to change it, you won’t see the defenses that are holding a system in place. You have to surface the defenses of a system in order to change the defenses. And you won’t get at them until you try to fundamentally change them. You said double loop learning. Until you try to go to the fundamental norms, beliefs, and so on. And that has stayed with me all my life, both as a researcher and as a social scientist trying to understand the world.
AD:
I find that powerful given my own experience trying to do organizational change. It’s amazing the things that come out of the woodwork. Nowhere is that going to be more complex than as we get into talking about, affecting American society and political culture and so forth as we get into the book.
And as we do you mentioned earlier, kind of these patterns that you were seeing both in organizational systems, but then happening nationally. Could you share a little bit about the context in which you wrote this book and how you just the basis and recent crisis and the fact that this is an election year where a nation is in a very precarious position. Many different perceptions amongst Americans. How do you view the current situation?
Navigating Crises:
A Reflection On Polarization, Pandemic & Racial Reckoning [09:50]
DMS :
Sure thing. I first started writing the book during the pandemic. My husband and I lived between Vermont and Massachusetts, as you mentioned. And we were in Vermont. We spent a lot of time in Vermont, yet we were very connected to what was happening in the country.
And I was watching the Trump presidency become more and more polarizing, camps starting to form for and against him in a way that was very vitriolic, very emotionally driven, and becoming increasingly intractable. That was one. The second is the pandemic. And the pandemic really caught my attention because it was awful and it killed lots of people.
But aside from that, to me it was the archetype of the kinds of problems we face as a species today, which is it’s problems that cross boundaries. You can’t confine them. They require us to work across nations, and they require us to work across groups. And this is something I learned while writing the book, but this is what first caught my attention, is that’s going to require us to take another evolutionary step, and we come back to that.
And then the third thing was the very public murder of George Floyd and other African American men and women and the subsequent racial reckoning. It was as if people went to sleep for about 30 years. Everybody’s oh wow, that’s right. We got a problem with race in this country. Whoa, geez, and it’s and people are talking about being woke. And I was like, when did we go to sleep? Because we went to sleep. Because that was not news to anybody who was around in the sixties. This was not news. So it was, how is it that this is like an awakening or a reckoning? So I was looking at that and I was saying, wow, this is not right. And so I began to think about it.
And I said, there’s something going on here. There’s a story behind the story. Yes, there’s polarization, but what’s really at the root of that? And I began to hypothesize, ever since our founding and actually long before, we have lived separate lives as a nation. We’ve lived separate lives in groups that are divided across demographic and ideological lines. Now, almost every podcast I’ve been on has focused on our ideological differences and acted as if somehow the demographic differences don’t matter or they’re not as important or as salient.
First of all, those two are tightly coupled. And secondly, the demographic divides have been around since our founding and before, and they feed ideological differences and polarization. So it really is, we have been divided along both demographic and ideological lines. And at different points throughout our history when different threats have emerged that have made people anxious, we have tended to get more and more closed and insular within like minded groups of the same ilk. And we’ve tended to get more distant and fearful of groups that are different from us.
So that then leads us to become more insular, as we get more fearful, and more closed within. And the more insular and closed within, the more distant, hateful, and fearful we get across. The more distant and hateful we get across, the more insular within. And it becomes this escalating cycle. And you can see it escalate over the last 50 years. And it’s just gotten worse and worse.
Now, the thing about this that’s so important is twofold. And this is something I think people don’t really appreciate. People say what I just said and it’s oh yeah, that’s bad. We got to do something about it. But the question is, why do we have to do something about it? Why is it bad? What’s, why should we care? Okay. And there are two reasons why I think we should care. One is, we have a bunch of problems that we have to solve from immigration to climate change to global economies to authoritarianism rising in the world to wars to pandemics, okay?
All of these cross boundaries, okay? All of these require us to come together and come up with a solution we can agree on. And as long as we are living these separate lives in these groups that are more and more insular, we are not going to be able to solve problems that are going to affect our fate as a species. Okay, so that’s one. And then the other one is authoritarianism is rising around the world, not at a chance. It’s rising because of this dynamic. The more insular people get within and distant across, the more they look up the hierarchy for their conflicts to get solved. The more they look to a strong leader, the more they want someone to solve the problems for them, because they’ve given up on their ability to solve it themselves.
So they want an authoritarian leader. So what do authoritarian leaders do? People who want to be authoritarian, they play on that. They immediately put a wedge between groups so that they can consolidate their power. And this is part of an authoritarian playbook. Anne Applebaum talks about it. Rachel Kleinfeld talks about it. These are known tactics used by authoritarians. So we are being played for chumps by folks who want to keep us divided so they can consolidate their power, both politically and economically.
It’s the Elon Musk, the Peter Thiel’s of the world, the Putin’s, the list goes on and on in the political and economic front of people who are advantaged by keeping the space between us closed within and distant across. It’s not just distant across, it’s closed within.
NM:
You mentioned fear as something that causes us to be insular there. How do we tackle fear as a society?
Confronting Fear & Anxiety In A Polarized World [15:27]
DMS :
I think Freud talked about that in a lot of books. It’s a very primal emotion, obviously. Fear, anxiety, and part of it is, let’s talk about what fear really is. Fear is our amygdala responding to a threat and part of what I think will help us, and this is true of an individual, it’s true of groups, it’s true of nations, is to really try and step back and say, okay, I’m afraid. Name it. Say, I’m afraid. This is scaring the bejeezus, and I do this frequently, this is scaring the bejeezus out of me.
And then say, okay, so what is it that I’m afraid of? And one of the things that I think causes enormous anxiety. It’s just uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We want to survive. So we imagine the worst thing that’s going to happen so that we can be prepared for it. And so we start to focus on the worst thing that could happen. And that’s a really bad thing to do. Because you’re not focusing on the things that could avoid it. First of all, you’re not focusing on solutions and you’re getting yourself more and more scared, which is constraining your thinking more and more. So this is an understandable, but maladaptive response to understandably uncertain and anxiety producing circumstances.
AD:
It’s interesting, what struck me there, we read so much today about the rising level of anxiety in our nation all the way down to, at the child down the children suffering from it, a lot of blame is put on devices and on social media and not trying to excuse those two things as potentially being factors. What I haven’t heard a lot about, which kind of what you just said, which was this fear, which may be triggered by both ideological and demographic differences, two divides, is potentially leading to this uncertainty. And that’s what’s causing the anxiety. I don’t hear anybody talking about that.
DMS :
There are people who do talk about uncertainty as a contributing factor. I don’t know if people fully appreciate how troubling that is for human beings. And it’s, by the way, reporters are human beings. They don’t like uncertainty any more than you and I do. And they know their readers don’t like uncertainty. So what do they do? They start making predictions. And in today’s world, that’s almost the most ridiculous thing you could possibly do, because who the hell knows what’s going to happen.
As I said, in a recent post on Substack, we’re over the edge of the wild. Anybody who tries to predict, it’s good luck with that. Okay. I think what we have to understand is that we are in for a rough ride and we better get ourselves ready. It’s like, I would be getting ourselves ready. Like you get ready for a marathon or for a bike race. We got to get our emotional muscles, our mental muscles and our physical health prepared for what’s going to be a rough ride. We cannot predict what’s going to happen.
The only thing we can control is how do we respond to it? Not just as an individual, but in our communities, how do we and our family respond in our communities? And how do we make sure that we are protecting our nation against threats to our body politic?
AD:
Now you wrote this beautiful challenge that I think echoes what you were just saying. How do we get ready for what lies ahead? Here’s what you wrote in your book, “We forget that our power as citizens lies not just in our rights as individuals, but in our responsibilities as people for working together to build a better future.”
And I just, I love that for so many reasons. I was a history major. So I love the historical anecdotes you use in the book, but this also reminded me of, you know, the past when I’ve read Aristotle when he wrote about citizenship and obviously inspired by Plato and Socrates Ben Franklin’s quote, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Okay. So why do you believe that mindset is so important for Americans as we sit here in 2024 with a population of over 333 million people.
Navigating The Complexities Of Individual Freedoms & Collective Duties [19:17]
DMS :
We were a country that was founded on rights. And the reason we were founded on rights is because we didn’t have them relative to Britain. Okay. So we wanted our independence and we wanted the right to vote. We wanted the right to property. We wanted rights. And that was the big gestalt in terms of political theory at the time. It was the rights of man. Okay. And so we come from a heritage of right. And what it has inadvertently given rise to is a competition over who has the right to do what. Lack of understanding that one person’s rights can infringe on another person’s rights.
It’s almost as if we’ve become spoiled brats looking to our parents to get our way, it’s, I got to write it, I get to, it’s my night to watch TV, it’s not, it’s just gotten out of control. And so I was trying to understand what is this about? And I thought, we’ve never tempered this pursuit of rights by cultivating a sense of responsibility for the whole of the enterprise, which, by the way, we each have an individual interested.
It’s not like many in the past were called a mommy concern. The whole no, if it goes, it goes on all of us. We’re all screwed. Okay. So we all have an interest, a vested interest in the survival of the nation. And that means we’ve got to take responsibility for that. That has not been cultivated. And, I don’t know if I’d call it a mindset or an orientation, but that is where I think our future lies. And because if you do not see responsibility, you also don’t see your power.
NM:
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for part A of this show. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast, if you haven’t already. And also join us next week for part B of this awesome interview.
