Unknown

>> Thank you all very much. Um, I'd like to start by bringing this issue of conflict right into the room, all the way down to the level where we all work, where we live, where we raise our children, where we go to school. So if you'll bear with me, I'm going to ask you to stand up. Or if you're more comfortable, raise your hands if the following statement is true for you. Because we've just come through a very contentious two years with a very polarizing conflict in the Middle East, a really divisive presidential election, and

a lot of upset since the election. And so, if this statement holds true for you, I'm going to ask you to please stand up or raise your hands. Is there a relationship that was important to you? Could be a family member. It could be a coworker. It could be your old college roommate. It could be your child. Is there a relationship that is really important to you that has really been harmed, maybe even broken as a result of one of these conflicts. That's a lot of hands. Thank you. I'd like to spend more time with

those of you who didn't raise their hands, because I'll probably live longer. Um, those of you who raised your hands, you're really not alone. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently conducted a study looking at levels of political polarization, going all the way back to 1900 and looking at every region of the world. They found that the levels of political polarization, and by polarization, they don't mean just tough disagreement. They mean polarization in terms of one party seeing the other as an existential threat. Okay. So when you think of it that way, there's no such

good thing as good polarization. Seeing the other side as an existential threat is the first step to violence, right? They found that the levels of political polarization in every single region of the world were at the highest levels since 1900, with the exception of Europe during World War one and two. And they found that over the last 15 years, the increase, the rate of increase in polarization in every single region of the world was faster than at any other time since 1900, other than Europe during World War one and World War two. And so this

feeling of conflict and polarization and divisiveness is not just something that we are feeling in this room or that Americans are feeling more generally in this country. This is part of the human condition now. And so it really does beg the question, how can we turn conflict into progress? And the first thing that I'd like to raise for you is it's helpful to think about conflict. What conflict actually is? The best analogy I can think of for conflict is friction. If I were to ask you if friction is a good or a bad thing. I

suspect I would get a lot of blank stares. I'm not aware of any big anti-friction movement in the world. It just is. And just like friction, conflict when it's handled well can actually be a very generative and creative force. If you channel fire well, you can cook your food with it, you can weld things with it, you can build things, you can sterilize medical instruments, you can do all kinds of great things that you might not be able to do without it. But if you allow it to get out of control, you get the wildfires

in Los Angeles with friction and with conflict. You get a war in Ukraine, you get a war between Israel and Gaza. So conflict is inevitable. It's actually natural, but violence absolutely is not. And so the question really is how do we turn conflict into progress? And I'm going to share with you five main concepts, five keys to how we do that. I just first, very briefly, Greg was kind enough to make the introduction. Want to explain to you where these come from, because they don't come from me sitting and reading a lot of books. I

have the privilege of leading the world's largest non-governmental peacebuilding organization in the world, with hundreds of staff around the world and thousands more partners in very divisive societies, including. We have a team and a set of partners here in Texas, one in Pennsylvania. In Louisiana, we do work in the United States. We also have teams in Afghanistan and Myanmar, in Israel and Palestine, some of the more difficult conflict zones around the world. And so everything I'm going to share with you, I'm going to do my best to channel people who I respect a tremendous amount,

which are my colleagues who I have the privilege to be here and represent to you. Now, the first concept I want to share with you is multi partiality, which is a terrible world because there's too many syllables, but we chose it instead of impartiality or neutrality, because the way that our teams go about transforming conflict is not by being detached like third party mediators or arbitrators. That's an important role to play. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about those coalitions and networks and teams that are best able to turn conflict into something

positive. And I would say this is relevant not just whether you're dealing with war or trying to prevent war. This is true if you're in the C-suite of a corporation, if you're the principal of a school or the president of a university, or you're the head of the student council, or even you're just somebody who's trying to drive social change on something that's important to you. This notion of multi partiality really struck home to me. Actually, just over the last year, I had the privilege to talk to two of the probably greatest political communicators of

my generation, both Barack Obama and Jacinda Ardern. These were separate conversations. And Obama, everybody knows Ardern. For those who don't, she was the president, the prime minister of New Zealand. She rose to that position at the age of 37. And in both of those conversations, they reflected to me something that really stunned me. It was it was an admission. They almost used the same words. They talked about the degree to which they felt they had failed to unify their countries. Even though they saw themselves as unifying figures. They thought they ran as unifying figures. They

tried. They thought they governed as unifying figures. That's what they thought. Whatever you might think of either of them, that's kind of. And they were reflecting on this and President Obama shared with me, he said, you know, that the Republican pollster, Frank Luntz told him that the speech, the political speech that polled the best across partisan lines in this country, of all the speeches his firm has ever polled on, was Obama's speech on the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march. That that was the speech of all political speeches that really resonated the most.

And as Obama was retelling this to me, he said, and yet, I bet if you polled those same people now, half of them think I'm the anti-Christ. Ardern was saying to me that she's convinced that when she was prime minister, it was a small proportion of the country, maybe even less than 5%, that were dead set against some of the things they were trying to do. But she said they were so effective at pumping fear and anger into the population and convincing the population that it was polarized, that it became polarized. And then she said,

you know, that's a very American thing, actually. We don't traditionally we don't get very polarized in New Zealand, even around very polarizing topics. But we do now. And as I walked away from those conversations, it really stuck to me that if these people who really did make quite an effort to unify their countries feel like they failed, I think it's really very difficult, very, very difficult to be a unifying individual leader in a world that's being more and more pulled apart with that polarization. And I really feel for anyone in a leadership position, whether you're

a teacher in the classroom or you're the head of the student council or you're the CEO of a company or whatever it might be, it's very, very difficult because all it takes is a small number of people to be pumping fear and anger and division among the people you're trying to to shepherd and lead, right? Well, what's not easy to divide are multi-party coalitions. A multi-party coalition is not just a diverse coalition for diverse sakes. It's a network or a team or a coalition of people who represent the communities in conflict. If you visit our

teams anywhere in the world, you would find that our team in Sri Lanka is Sinhalese and Tamil and Buddhist and Muslim. Our team here and our network of partners here in Texas is multiracial, multi-faith and importantly, bipartisan. And our team in Israel and Palestine is equal parts Israeli and Palestinian and not just people who get along easily with with themselves, but some of them are staunch Israeli Zionists and staunch Palestinian nationalists. Now it takes a lot longer to build that kind of team than it does to build a team of the like minded. It's a

lot harder work. Abraham Lincoln once said, if you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I'll take four hours to sharpen the axe. Well, we spent four hours building those teams, because the thing that happens once you have that team is they have superpowers. Absolute superpowers. Build those teams, foster that trust, and then get out of their way because the things they can accomplish are extraordinary. And their superpowers are five first. They have unparalleled credibility because they're from the communities that they represent. I was recently in Kenya, and I met the Pentecostal minister

on along the coast of Kenya, who's a key leader in this multi-faith council that developed over the last couple of decades. And I sat with him and I asked him, you know, tell me how this all started. And he said, actually started in 1999, in the midst of the worst sectarian violence we'd had here in Kenya in years. And I was summoned to a meeting that I almost didn't go to. But I finally decided I'm going to go and meet with the Muslim leaders. And he said, I opened the leader by the meeting by saying

this. He said, if one more church is burned down, I'm going to have five mosques burned down. And as he was telling me this story, he sort of leaned in and paused for dramatic effect, and he said, and I could have done it. There are a lot of people here who listen to me. But then I had to listen to the Muslim leader's response and hear about their fear and anger as well. And he said, you know, we agreed we would do one thing there, which is just prevent any further violence to the extent that

we could. But that initial start then developed into a coalition. One of the breakthrough moments is when there was a death threat against this minister's life, and he was alerted to it by one of his Muslim counterparts in the council and protected from it. Now they're in a coalition that has joined, has a joint lobbying effort against legislation that they feel is going to hurt religious liberty in their country. But this is decades later. He's not just part of the coalition of the willing. He's credible because his community knows that he's there to defend them.

He represents them. He's got their back. So there's unparalleled credibility in these coalitions. There's collective wisdom. These are the kind of coalitions that can say, you know what? If you use that word, nobody in my community will listen to us. So please, let's not use that word. Or you know what? If we make something happen in this neighborhood, all the doors are going to open to us. Because trust me, that's that's the key to everything in my community. And you can imagine if you're trying to deal with police community relations here in Austin. I don't

know if that's even a problem, but it's a problem in a lot of cities. It would really help if your coalition include retired cops, youth activists, community leaders, former gang leaders sitting on the same side of the table, problem solving and strategizing together and bringing that collective wisdom. The third thing that these coalitions bring is unparalleled authenticity. One of the most used terms in social change is Gandhi's term. It's attributed to him anyway. Be the change you want to see in the world. Well, multi-party coalitions look like the societies they're trying to bring about. They're

bonded together across their diversity and their different points of view. They're committed to the fact that they can only survive and thrive together rather than alone, and they can achieve things together that they can't achieve on their own. The fourth thing is Pragmatism in this era of social media and sloganeering. One of the things that we found is that a lot of the slogans that mobilize popular movements, they don't actually work on the ground where people actually live and pay the price. Our team in Afghanistan can say, that's great. People can say whatever they want

about the Taliban. We have to deal with them every day. So, you know, all that slogan and stuff, that's not really going to help us here. So multi-party coalitions are very pragmatic about what will actually work in the real world that they live in. And finally, they have a huge bias towards action. You know, if you're trying to bridge dividing lines, dialogue is always necessary, but it's also insufficient, especially if the conflict is really tough. If a lot of bad things have happened, if there's been violence, if people because at a certain point, if dialogue

doesn't deliver change. Dialogue itself will become a dirty word. Why should I keep talking to the police when they're killing my people? Why am I still participating in this conversation when you know nothing's getting better? So we have to find ways to translate dialogue into action that meets people's interests. And so forming a partial coalition is tough, but once it's there, it's incredibly powerful. So what are those coalitions do? That's the second concept. The second key. They kick off and drive a cycle of trust. I talked about being action oriented, where the first step is

to just start doing something together. It almost doesn't matter what it is. I say almost, because if it's a bunch of people getting together to hurt another person, that's not what I mean. But short of that, it doesn't matter. Whatever they are willing and able to do together, I can't tell you the number of soccer tournaments our teams have organized between police and youth gangs, because it's the only thing that will get them together without killing each other. But that first soccer tournament over the weekend turns into a series of tournaments, and then they start

spending the weekend together, and the rooms get mixed up of who's staying with whom. And then they start identifying which police and which youth. Gang leaders are starting to get it, and they pull them aside. And they said, how do you think we could translate this into something more meaningful? Not just soccer tournaments, but something that might start addressing the tensions between your communities. So cooperative action, no matter how small, is the beginning point. But shared success is the thing that builds trust. And as you build more trust, people are willing to cooperate on more

and more difficult issues. Now, they're not just going to soccer tournaments, they're actually strategizing on something really big and difficult to do together. And so that's the second piece that I want to share with you is the value of translating dialogue into cooperative action, whatever it may be. The third thing is sort of what we track along the way. And I want to pause here for a second, because one of the big revolutions in medicine globally was when. And there are probably people who know this better than I do here, so forgive me if I

have this wrong. But when there was a shift from treating disease to preventing disease by fostering a healthy lifestyle, they started saying, let's not just study sick people, let's study healthy people and figure out how do you keep people healthy before they stumble into your emergency room? And one of the key pillars of that shift in medicine was identifying what are the vital signs of a healthy human being. And there's enough consensus about this now that if you go to a doctor anywhere in the world, the first thing they're going to do is take your

vital signs. The same. It's the same five vital signs everywhere. Your temperature, your pain levels. ET cetera. ET cetera. We haven't had that for healthy communities. What are the vital signs of a healthy community? I don't mean what are all the good things we want to see in a community. That would be a lot more than five. There'd be probably 500. But I'm talking about what are the things that tell me if conflict is inevitable, that when this society comes across conflict, it's likely to stick together, maybe even rally together, or it's likely to fall

apart into polarization and even violence. What are those vital signs? And there are five. And I would say to you, as I go through these, that however you are active in the world, whether you think of yourself as an activist or you just think about the things you repost on social media or however you engage in the world either feeds these vital signs in a healthy direction or depletes them. So whenever we're talking to activists, particularly people who are trying to drive movement forward, we ask them to reflect openly what is the impact that I'm

having on these five things? The first is intercommunal trust black, white, Muslim, Jewish, Republican, Democrat, Hutu, Tutsi, whatever the whatever the dividing lines are in your society or in your community, what's the level of trust between people? Institutional legitimacy. Do people trust the institutions that govern and serve them? Could be the police we've already talked about that could be Parliament. It could be the CDC during the pandemic. It doesn't have to be a government. It could be it could be the media. Do people trust the media? Do people trust, you know, whatever it might be?

What's the level of trust that people have for the institutions that are there to govern and serve them. The third is just safety. Because violence begets more violence. The fourth is really subjective. It's people's sense of agency. Do people feel like they can do anything that improves their well-being, that improves their kids future, that it protects their communities like that Pentecostal minister? Do they feel like they have any agency to make any difference? And the fifth is resourcing. Where where's the budget going in that society or in your school or wherever it might be? Is

it going to more reactive things that reflect the failure to resolve conflict? Is it going to more prisons and more guns and more top down controls, or is it going to stuff that prevents conflict in the first place? More community problem solving, more non-violent conflict resolution techniques? Where are the resources? So we look at this everywhere. These are these are like the vital signs that we're constantly measuring everywhere, from Myanmar and Afghanistan to here in the United States. The fourth concept I want to share with you is how does change really sustain at scale? You

know, the the kind of change that the teams that I have the privilege to represent have driven has changed at a very large scale. The generals, the Israeli and Jordanian retired generals who we brought together discreetly for years in the early 90s, drafted language. That word for word ended up in the official Israeli-jordanian peace accord, which still is holding to this day despite all the conflict there. Secretary of State John Kerry credited our team in East Africa, in Burundi with playing a lead role in preventing genocide in that country during and after the genocide in

neighboring Rwanda. In that same speech, he publicly thanked our organization for providing breakthrough ideas to the Us-iran nuclear, to the Iran nuclear accord that his team helped to negotiate under President Obama. So we're looking for change that sustains that scale. We're not just trying to resolve individual disputes, right? So what does that look like? It looks exactly like an iceberg calving. And I say that because when the change comes, it's big. And it looks like it happened all of a sudden. But the reality is that trust cycle has been chipping away and chipping away for

months, oftentimes years, so that when the change comes, it's big and it's sustained. It sticks and it sticks at scale because one of three things happens. Either market forces sustain it. I'll give you an example from Kenya. In Kenya you might have remembered many years ago the US embassy was bombed in Nairobi back in 1998, same day that the embassy was bombed in neighboring Tanzania in Dar es Salaam. Many years later, there was a horrible attack by the same group on a mall, the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. I think that was 2013, and the government

learned that the people who perpetrated that last attack had infiltrated the country by posing as night fishermen. So. Night fishing is huge to the economy along the coast of Kenya. Fishermen go out all night. They come in before dawn. They get their stuff to market. That's how the. That's a big part of the economy. So what did the government do? They banned night fishing along the coast. Okay. This is very typical of how governments deal with non violent extremist groups that don't wear uniforms and are hard to find. Oftentimes the cure is worse than the

disease. So you can imagine what the results of that were. Huge uproar along the coast there were clashes between the police and the fishermen. There was a recruiting bonanza for al-Shabab, the extremist group there, because there were a bunch of young men who didn't have economic prospects in front of them. Human rights organizations were either leading demonstrations or filing lawsuits. And our multi partial team, our team that has people very close with the fishermen, youth activists, former police officers, the multi partial team in there in Kenya got to work on this, started shuttling between the

parties using everything they could to bring them together creatively and carefully. And so eventually they had built enough trust between them that they could start talking about the real issue, what was going on. And a lot of things came out of that. But one idea in particular was transformational. They came up with the basic idea that since every fisherman has to be registered with the government anyway, they should all get something called a movie card. A movie card is an electronic scan card, and they equip the police along the coast with scanners and the fishermen

who registered with these cards. That single intervention led to the reopening of night fishing after six years. Six years. This is some of the team and partners in Pennsylvania. The second way that change sustains at scale is when there's a shift in social norms, a shift in the way a critical mass of a population talks about or deals with its differences. Social norms are fuzzy. Their culture, you know, what do people do? How do people react? You know, we had been working to build a coalition of people across partisan political lines, racial lines and religious

lines across Pennsylvania, including in western Pennsylvania. And immediately after the first assassination attempt against then candidate and now President Trump, this team kicked into gear. They went a multi-faith coalition, went to the Butler Fairgrounds, where the attempted assassination had happened, and where that fireman was killed. And they publicly reconsecrated the space for what it was originally established for as a communal gathering space where the community should feel safe and every member of the community should be welcome. They generated talking points. The attack happened on a Saturday. They had talking points to religious leaders, including church

leaders across that region, by Sunday morning, if they wanted to use it or not. This is how these are some things you could say that might help to tamp down tensions within your congregation and prevent further violence. They worked with a local congressperson, MAGA endorsed congressperson, who went on to Truth Social and pushed back against some of the scapegoating against the Haitian community in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. They got two talking heads that have a debate show in public television in Pennsylvania for the first time to turn the format of their show from a debate show to

a dialogue about how to prevent further political violence. This was all done by a community of people who had decided and normalized social norms where when something bad happens, we don't retreat into our own. We reach out to each other. One of the ways that polarization really takes hold is that when people get scared or when something bad happens, they retreat to where they feel safe. And you don't have these relationships across dividing lines. You just retreat to your own. But when you have these relationships, it's incredibly enriching and supportive to reach out across those

dividing lines and mobilize together. And that's the social norm that they've established there. And the third way that change can really stick, and we've all seen this is when institutions change peacebuilding work in Nigeria, particularly around the very contentious issue of land reforms. And herder. Uh, herders and farmers. Herder farmer conflict, which if people don't know, is one of the biggest conflict dynamics across the whole continent of Africa. A lot of peace building work that prevented violence between these communities, who also happened to break down along Christian and Muslim lines. A lot of peace building

work had proven to be quite effective by our team there, so much so that the government took notice and eventually established a state office in the biggest state in Nigeria, Plateau State, for community relations to prep communities when new land reforms were coming and to involve them in the conversations. That's an institutional change that lasts to this day. The thing about this kind of change, if there's a shift in market forces, a shift in social norms or a shift in institutions, it all sounds very abstract, but what it means is that the change is now

so owned locally by parties, locally, because it's in their own benefit that they're not looking for outside organizations like ours or anyone else to facilitate it. They own it. They're driving it because it's in their own interests. There's one more concept I want to share with you, and it has to do with the issue of power and opposition. Well, how does this all work when you're under attack or you feel like the other side isn't acting in good faith? And for this, if I could invite back out our wonderful co-founder who very kindly introduced me.

Yeah, come on out. We're going to do a little demonstration. Yeah. Give him a hand. Okay. Hopefully neither of us are going to get hurt. Is there is there anyone in here who actually knows the martial art of aikido? You've studied aikido a little bit. All right, all right, so don't say anything if I get this completely wrong. Um, so look, the the the goal of the martial art of aikido is a really powerful one. And we're going to try and demonstrate it here, and we're going to do the same thing three times. So you're

going to put your hands on my shoulders and you're going to shove me. Okay. That's one response to conflict that we all know. That's the flight response. We can do it again. Okay. That's another response to conflict. What's that? That's the fight response. We're going to do it one more time. Thank you. Let's give him a hand. They literally said we might have to talk to lawyers before that so nobody would get hurt. Um, so what did you notice about that third response? First, if you think that the flight response is weak, raise your hand.

If you think the flight response is strong, close your fist. Could everybody just give me either a hand for weak or a fist? The flight response. Okay, a fair number of fists. Some hands. If you think the fight response is weak, raise your hand. If you think the fight response is strong, close your fist. A lot of hands. A lot of hands. More hands than fists. Okay. I would suggest that both are weak. Because. Both. Which is unfair. I gave you a choice, and then I. Because both both allow your adversary to completely determine your

behavior. In the first exercise, you capitulate and run away the way they want you to. In the second exercise, you debase yourself and adopt the very same posture towards them that they took towards you. I don't want to hurt Greg, but now I'm going to act that way just because he acted that way towards me. The third response reflects the profound goal of the martial art of Aikido, which is to get both you and your opponent to a safe space, to get both you and your opponent to a safe space. Now, I find this really

profound, and I find this also to be completely consistent with the kind of social change that the heroes of mine have driven Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. They were not seeking to just flip the power dynamic or to hurt their oppressors. They were seeking to create a future that was better for everybody, where everybody's dignity could be reflected and protected. You can clap for them. That's great. Yes. Um. And I want to give you some concrete examples of what that looks like in some very difficult circumstances. So I mentioned that we work in

Afghanistan. The only Afghan woman who leads an international organization in Afghanistan today is our director, Zahra Bahman, an incredibly courageous human being and a black belt in aikido politics, in my view. The first night that the Taliban took over, our team was scared and they were in their homes and they were texting with each other. They were on WhatsApp, they were doing the most Afghan thing I've ever heard of. They had a poetry competition where somebody would type in a verse, and then the next person would take the last word of that verse and type

the next verse. And so that's what they're doing. Um, and one of them said, what are we going to do tomorrow? And I said, look, why don't the women stay home? And the men see if you can get to our office and if you can give me a call. That happened the next day. The men got to the office and right in front of the office, as there had always been, there was a police checkpoint, except now there were about 20 armed Taliban soldiers there instead of the police. And so Zura directed our head of

program. She said, go out there and offer them the same thing that we offered the police. And so he went out and he said, look, it's very hot. It's August, you don't have any water. And we have a spout on the outside of our office building. If you want to fill your canteens anytime, you know, feel free to go ahead. Less than an hour later, there was a heavy thud on the door. They opened the door and all these guys are there. Sweaty guys with machine guns. Are there big thank yous. And hey, we we

saw that you have a courtyard. Outside your office. Can we pray there? Because there are a lot of us and the streets are really busy. There is on the phone, and she says this is awkward. And so they say, look, we understand your problem, but we are a community organization. If people see a lot of men with guns at our front door, they're going to be scared to come. But we understand your challenge. Could you maybe do that for no more than a week, but find another solution by the end of the week? And they

agreed, and they did find another solution. And every day has been this kind of negotiation. It's because of that that under his leadership, the team there has actually tripled in size since the Taliban took over. And I don't want to pretend that it's easy, but I do want to use that extreme example because frankly, the flight response would have been very easy. The flight response would have been near suicidal. And yet what the team did was stand their ground but be flexible. Demonstrate respect. You all know people who do this in your families or in

your companies or at your schools. The person who uses humor to deflect an otherwise tense situation, the person who grants respect to somebody who's not being very respectful for them, and in the in the doing of it, sort of shames the person into being a better person. Right? We all have seen this. One of my favorite examples was when I was in Burundi with our team there towards the end of the civil war. There was a negotiation process and the mediator of the negotiating process, Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, died, just suddenly died. And

so people were scared. What's going to happen with the peace process now? There were like 17 parties. And then word broke that Nelson Mandela agreed to take it over and the country went insane. People were so excited, like colonels in the military to illiterate farmers, to kids. People were just gleeful. And in one of the first meetings where Mandela met all of the belligerents, the heads of all the armed groups and the army and the leadership, he was going down the line. And he got to one particularly notorious rebel leader, and he held out his

hand and he shook his hand and he said, oh, I've heard of you. I've heard a lot about you, actually. And the man kind of perked up like, and he said, I don't like what you've been doing for the last ten years. And just let it land there. And the guy shrunk. And then he leaned out and he put his arm on his shoulder and he said, but I really like what you're doing now. Keep at it. Now, Mandela stories are always tricky because, sure, it's Mandela who's here is Mandela. But the fact of the

matter is, we all have it in ourselves to appeal to the better nature of the people across from us. We all have it in ourselves to take somebody obnoxious comment or objectionable behavior and disagree with it, while holding on and insisting that there's a better person in there somewhere, that that one behavior or that one comment doesn't fully define them any more than we would want to be defined by the most objectionable thing we've said or done. And so we all have the power to practice a bit of aikido politics. So this is really the

closing for me, and I'm going to leave you with a few resources at the end and a QR code if you want to read up on any of those resources. And my email, I'm happy to hear from anyone. And I'll be at the I forget the name of the place, but I'll be at the closing party something Pearl. Anyway, I'll be there and be happy to talk to anyone. So that's it. I know there are going to be questions that are coming through the platform. Um. Let's see. How do we identify likely partners who would

be willing to work with a multi-party coalition? What qualities will lead to the best results? So how do you start? Right. How do you reach out across a dividing line? Actually, the hardest time to do this work is the first time you reach out. It's daunting. A lot of times we built up the other side to be caricatures of themselves. We figure they're all beyond the pale. We've imagined all kinds of things about them. It can be really daunting any time that we. I don't know if anyone here has heard the term appreciative inquiry. Has

anyone ever heard this term I learned about? There are a few people here, so I first read the term Appreciative inquiry in the Harvard Business Review. It had nothing to do with war and peace. It was about how you change the culture in your organization. And Appreciative Inquiry apparently is very well researched field that says the worst way to change behavior is to punish bad behavior. The best way to change behavior is to identify, incentivize, celebrate, amplify every step towards the desired behavior. Even the most incremental step. And as a father of daughters, I can

tell you, like you know, if I yell at my daughter for not putting the shoes in the bin I got for that very specific purpose. It works much worse than if I praise her like crazy because she got one shoe in today. She's much more likely to put two in tomorrow. And they've done really funny experiences with this. They've had college professors who stand behind a lectern, and everybody, all the students, pretend they're falling asleep until he or she steps over there, and then they perk up, and then they fall asleep again. And then he

steps over here and they perk up. And by the end of the class, the professor's all the way over here. So people respond to these positive things. So what does that have to do with reaching out across dividing lines? One of the things that we've found is that in even the most hopeless situations, 100% of the time, if you ask a different set of questions, you get a very different and more hopeful set of answers. If you ask across this ethnic divide, is there anyone who you actually trust in this corrupt government? Is there one

minister who's actually seen as trying to help the people in this out-of-control police force? Is there one captain, maybe a beat cop, who's on good terms with the community? And one thing that we found is, 100% of the time when you ask those kinds of questions, you get a lot of answers, and people like answering those questions. And so as you're thinking about whatever dividing lines exist in your own community or in your own family or whatever it might be, I would look for those nodes. We sometimes call them positive deviants, but that sounds kind

of insulting. Look for those things. Look for where? Where is there somebody who I trust where I could just start this conversation, maybe kind of ask them for help, get their advice, start the conversation, initiate that that that one step. So that's one way that I would do it. Do you think the media and journalists play a big part in creating polarization, and how can they help create more bridges, not walls? Yeah, that would be hard to deny. I mean, one of the theories as to why the world is seeing this global polarization is because

of the information ecosystem, because of the impact on social media platforms. I know there are a lot of tech people here. I'm not anti-tech at all. I can tell you that when we talk to communities all around the world, one of the things they're most struggling with is the overwhelming tsunami of misinformation hate extremist groups trying to recruit young people on various anonymous platforms and various social media platforms. And while you know these platforms in theory, in theory, give us access to more sources of information than we ever had before, in practice, most of us

subscribe to those sources of information that reinforce our pre-existing worldviews. And it's been demonstrated again and again and again that when you bond yourself increasingly with just those who agree with you, it's not just that you become more rigid, you actually become more extreme. You start bonding over how much we also hate her or whatever it might be. It's just it's just what happens in those kinds of communities. So that is a real challenge. The most important threshold experience for somebody to have in order to be a more constructive and willing participant in a diverse

group of any kind, is the experience of being heard and respected, not the experience of being agreed with. That's actually irrelevant when somebody has the genuine experience of feeling heard and respected, even when disagreed with, they become a much more willing. They ask more questions, they show up more, they're more curious. They're more willing eventually to acknowledge that maybe they have something off themselves, or at least that somebody else has something to offer. But when people have the opposite experience, where they have the experience of being ignored or insulted, they go the other route. And

too many of our social media platforms do not maximize for the experience of being heard and respected across dividing lines. They maximize for engagement and what's engaging outrageous content. Stuff that makes you angry. That's what gets you coming back again and again, even though it makes you feel less and less happy. It's what gets you engaging, right? So whether you're talking about the social media platforms or our traditional, you know, to the extent it still exists, traditional media, I think it really does have a really difficult and devastating effect. Now, it could have a really

positive effect. I'll never forget. You might remember there used to be a television show hosted by a guy named Ted Koppel at ABC news. It was called Nightline. It got its start during the Iran hostage crisis. And I'll never forget that Koppel went to South Africa the week that Mandela was being released, and he decided that he was going to record. He was going to do all all five days of his Nightline show from South Africa. Right. And in one of those shows, it was in a room just like this, a big conference room. And

on the stage and on the screens were exiled leaders and some leaders who had never sat together publicly before, members of the apartheid government and the armed groups, exiled members of the African National Congress, other activists. And it was crackling with tension. There was I've never read there was a guy who who came down with a bag down the middle, and he was pushed away because they thought he might have an explosive or something. So it was that tense. And Koppel started the conversation this way. He said, you've each had to take big risks within

your own communities just to be here. Could you talk a little bit about the pressure that you're under? And he got them each reflecting a little bit, just how much their respective communities felt hurt or suspicious about their outreach. He didn't get them going at each other's throats right away, which is so often the case in our media environment. He got them to that place first, and it had an I've used that. When we've done some training for journalists, I've used that as an example of it's not any less true. In fact, it's deeply true.

It's very entertaining, actually, for media to find people, big leaders and generals talk with some vulnerability. Right. But oftentimes journalists and media professionals don't go to that space. We do too much. We go too much towards sensationalism and all that. You know, I'll say one other thing about diverse groups, because I know diversity is under a lot of debate and discussion. Now. Um, there's plenty of, um, reports. Again, you can find this in Harvard Business Review or the MIT Management Report or whatever. Let's say that the most effective groups, the most dynamic leadership groups, are

the most diverse groups. What they don't say is that the least effective groups are also the most diverse groups. The mediocre middle is tends to be populated by the less diverse groups. And why is that? If you go back to the multi partial coalitions thing. Well it's a lot easier to build trust across a non diverse group. I mean we went to the same schools, we followed the same media. We liked the same sports. We were kind of you know I'm not sitting there wondering is she going to think oddly of me if I say

this or you know, it's very easy to get there's there's not a lot of distrust that we've got to overcome. There's a lot more distrust and friction with a diverse group. The difference is when you can build trust within a diverse team, that team will outperform every other team every single time. And so this is a microcosm for our communities, for our schools, for the international system, for our own government. What do we need to do to build or rebuild trust with across the diversity of, of our communities? Because if we can do that, then

we can accomplish a lot of things. Um. Is there a line in the sand where you don't invite someone to the table. This is a great question. And we get if we're going to get critiqued for something and we do. It's being willing to work with so many parties I got criticized for after the Taliban took over. I went there six months after they took over to meet with some of the leadership, to try to ensure that our team would have the space to operate. And, you know, people even in our own field, some people

criticized me. Our teams get criticized a lot for working across dividing lines. I can tell you our Israeli-Palestinian team are getting all kinds of heat from both of their communities for even engaging with one another right now. So there is a line in the sand, and one of the worst things that you can do is to try to push somebody who feels victimized that no, you should really empathize with, you should really reach out to the very community that is victimizing you. That's just a way to kind of traumatize somebody and revictimize them again and

again and again. That's not what I'm talking about. It's really not what I'm talking about. I think what's really important is for people to, first of all, understand what they need, what you need. Whenever somebody asks me how to get into this kind of work. They often think I'll go straight to how to reach out across dividing lines, but I always start with first. Get really grounded. Get really grounded and clear on what's important to you. What are the lines that you're not willing to cross? One of the reasons I like that Aikido metaphor is

because the last time I got into a physical altercation was in grade school, and I was sort of a weak kid, and I threw another kid down the stairs. I won the fight. And as he was falling down the stairs, I remember feeling the deepest shame that I've ever felt before since then. And I remember saying, no matter what, I'm not going to do that again. That's not going to be me. I was doing to him exactly what I was always sort of fearing others would do to me. Right. So it's very sort of typical

thing, well, find out what is the no go line for you. Second, surround yourself with at least some people, not everybody, but at least some people who understand what you're doing and are going to support you in doing it. Because especially in today's world, the very act of reaching out across difference can be seen by a lot of people as a traitorous act. How dare you talk to those people? They're horrible. How dare you humanize those people, right? You get the most slings and arrows from your own tribe, you know. And so you want to

have at least some people around you who are going to support you and also, frankly, will keep you humble when things are going great and lift your spirits when they're not going so great. So find some people who understand why you want to reach out and are going to support you in doing it, because maybe a lot of people won't, or not everybody will. Those are two steps that I think are really important. And then figure out you got to make your own determination whether somebody is engaging you in bad faith or not. I mean,

if somebody is coming to a quiet meeting with you so they can secretly record you and then broadcast it to shame you or dox you, that, you know, that's you're not wanting to go down that path. The issue that I'm concerned about is that in today's world, I think that we are drawing the bounds of who is beyond the pale. Way too close to ourselves. And so that's not a case for us to just reach out to anybody, no matter how mean they're being to us, or abandon your own self-care in order to make somebody

else feel good. No. But if you feel like you've got that support network, if you feel like you're in a comfortable space, if you feel like you can find out and ask questions about whether there's anyone you trust across on the political other side or racial other side or whatever it might be in your community. Um, then I encourage you to do it. I encourage you to do it and to try. But yes, there are lines that you got to draw around self-care. What do we have to gain by finding ground? Common ground with people

who support those who want to see my erasure or the erasure of my neighbors? This is a great point. And look, this goes straight to, um, what I was trying the point I was just trying to make. So that statement, that summary of what someone is trying to do. They're seeking the erasure, my erasure, or the erasure of my neighbors. That is one way to articulate what someone else is doing. You might be right. Right. Um, one of the things that I found is that there are a ton of reasons why people say or do

things, a ton of reasons. Oftentimes, the most aggressive behavior comes out of profound insecurity. I the one time I was bitten by a dog, I was selling spaghetti dinner tickets as a fourth grader. And I go to this house and this dog comes running at me. And the the owner saw him coming and didn't do anything. The dog jumped and bit me on the back of my leg. I'll never forget it. My dad got out of the car and kicked the dog off of me, and the man came up and he said, I'm sorry. He

was just scared. Which wasn't a lot of solace for me at the time because I was bleeding. Um, I'm not trying to excuse horrible behavior. Racist behavior. Really not what I have found. And what I've oftentimes learned from our teams around the world is that you oftentimes don't know what's really driving people until you engage with them. That goes for individuals. It definitely goes for groups. I promise you, there are groups. There are people within every category, whether it's a political party or a government or a any group that has all kinds of fissures in

it has all kinds of people in it, even the most authoritarian governments where we work. I can tell you, in most of the places where we work, our teams would say, this place is crazy, but the Ministry of Communications has our back. He gave me his cell phone number and he said, call me if anything ever happens. I'll make sure that you're okay. Right. Um, and and so again, I don't want to be even hinting that you should be reaching out to people who have demonstrated that they're trying to destroy you or that they are,

um, doing it in bad faith to hurt you. I would suggest that we oftentimes don't really know people well and what's motivating them or what they really believe. Until we actually engage with them. And so where you feel like you can do so safely, I think there's a lot of power in doing it. Um. In what ways will the dismantling of the Department of Education impact finding common ground and progression toward unity? Um, there are a lot more people here. I'm not an educator, actually, and there are a lot more people here who would have

insights into this than I would. Um, there's a lot of destruction. I mean, my organization, until a month ago, my organization was getting some of its money from the State Department or USAID. So we're having a lot of fun dealing with the sudden overnight cancellation of some of that funding. Um, and I feel for everybody who's from one night to the next had, you know, real dislocation, unemployment, or even worse, the communities that we work with, um, have been really directly impacted by this. And look, we all know everybody here has either been laid off

or know somebody who's been laid off. And we know the difference between a company that tells you at 459 that you're locked out at 5:00 pm and we're going to go after your pension and get out, you know. And a company who treats you with some respect. So there's the way things are being done and there's what's being done and the way things are being done. It seems sometimes that the cruelty is the point. Let's just set that aside for a second and just talk about like the actual I. It's an unpopular thing to say,

but I'll give you an example. When I was at the UN, there was a politician who famously said you could get rid of the top seven floors of the UN and nobody would notice. And everybody in the UN system who knew this guy, if I named him, he would know his name, hated that he said this and knew that he was coming from a place of just hating the UN to begin with, and would also say he's kind of right in the sense of seeing all of the problems and all the things in ways and

ways in which things are not working in the system that we have, you know. And I think that I don't know enough about what works and what doesn't work with the Department of Education. What I do feel is one of the dynamics that's happening is that when people sometimes support the most disruptive change, when they feel like the system that's being disrupted has allowed way too narrow a range of change to be driven. This is on both the left and the right. You see a health care executive get assassinated in New York, and you see

some people celebrating or shrugging their shoulders. Why not? Because they're anarchists, but because, you know, they say that system is sick. The way that it's running is wrong. There's a lot of injustice there. It should be changed. It shouldn't be changed like that. It shouldn't be changed like that. That's crazy. But and I'm worried that and I talk with a lot of leaders of other organizations that are doing everything they can to protect democracy. You know, they talk about protecting democracy, protecting democratic institutions. What we have seen around the world. That's very sobering to me

is if you go back to those five vital signs, what are the five vital signs of a healthy society? Inter-communal trust, institutional legitimacy, levels of physical violence, people's sense of agency and resourcing. You would think that democratic societies consistently outperform autocratic societies on at least some of those markers. Institutional legitimacy. If you get to elect your leaders, I would think the institutions would have a little bit more legitimacy than in a country where you don't get to elect people agency. If you have a vote. I would think you feel more agency than somebody who doesn't

have a vote. Over the last 10 to 15 years, what we've been seeing is that democratic societies are not outperforming autocratic societies on those vital signs, and that is very troubling. And so when I talk to people who are trying to protect democracy, I say, look, I, I agree with you. I only want to live in a democratic society. But if we don't address the ways in which people feel like the democratic society is not serving them, it's not. It hasn't allowed for decades real reform of that health care system. Right. It hasn't allowed for

decades all kinds of reforms that need to happen. Then we're going to lose democracy. A lot of people here are educators. You work with a lot of young people. You know that the young people's support for democracy is tanking, and not because they don't understand anything about democracy, but they're looking at a society in which tremendous injustices are allowed to just fester and continue. And so you get more radicalism in response to that. There was a report that came out a couple of years ago in The Lancet. You know, it's like the ancient British Medical

Journal. And I don't read The Lancet, but the findings were so shocking to the researchers that it made mainstream news. So I think I came across it in the Washington Post and it was a report that was it's the largest ever study, I think, to date still of effective Covid response, and it measured the efficacy of response across 177 countries based on two metrics infection rate and death rate. And all of the things that the researchers thought would correlate to an effective Covid response did not. The strength of the health infrastructure in your country did

not. The level of education in your country did not. The amount of wealth in your country did not. Whether you lived in a democratic or an autocratic system did not. The number one correlation was trust, both inter-communal trust and trust for institutions. And again and again, because democratic societies are not necessarily outperforming autocratic societies even on that trust metric, when you looked at the top 20 countries, they were all over the map on all of those metrics. I think the number one country was Vietnam. And so I don't mean to go so far afield on

the Department of Education. And I've got I really, I don't have I'm not trying to be political. I don't know enough. I do know that I don't like how things are happening, where people are just being summarily victimized and kicked out of places. Um, but I do think that we have to pay attention to whether our government, our system of government is really addressing the things that are important to people and delivering. Because if it's not, then people will lose faith in the system as a whole. And I feel like that's the more troubling place

that we are. And the last thing that I will share on this is I'm seeing two trends globally. I'm seeing one trend towards authoritarianism and another one towards anarchy. And even the examples that we have so far, the, you know, the killing of the health care executive, that's an anarchic way to deal with your frustrations about a health care system. Right. And authoritarianism. We're seeing plenty of that. And this is globally. This is not just in one place. We're seeing this in countries all around the world. And those two dynamics feed off of one another.

Every time somebody sees more authoritarianism. You know, their responses towards just burn it all down, you know, anarchy and vice versa. The more people feel uncertain about anarchy or or that they're losing control, the more they kind of embrace authoritarian approaches. And what I would encourage all of us to be doing is trying not to get so caught up in that back and forth and pay attention to the same seedbed that feeds both of those dynamics, which is collapsing trust. When people lose trust in each other and in the institutions that govern and serve them,

they either go in the direction of burn it all down, or we have to elect a strongman to rescue us one way or the other. And we're seeing this globally. And so I think that effort and this is where build a multi partial team across those very dividing lines, take the hard work of building trust across that team, because people hugely overestimate what you can accomplish with a really adversarial campaign among people who think like you. And they really underestimate what you can accomplish. If you take the time to build that multi partial coalition, you

are only going to get that iceberg calving through that kind of collaborative action, in my view. So take the time to build that, build that trust through collaborative action. Pay attention to those vital signs. Are you fostering more trust? Are you reducing violence? Are you reducing the divides between societies? Use aikido politics if you can. Whenever people come at you or are trying to block you, don't let them engage you frontally. Don't be baited into reacting to them in the same way that they're attacking you. And always keep your eye on the prize of change

that can be sustained at scale. So I have. There's one more question. Um. Thinking about future citizens, what are the key skills they should be taught to learn how to live in such a polarized world and with so much bias? Yeah, I'd like to ask that question of a lot of the educators here, honestly, because you're really on the front lines of seeing what's what's working and what's not. I would go back if I could maximize the experience for young people and frankly, old people and all of us. If I could maximize and multiply the

experience of people feeling genuinely heard and respected across their political, racial, religious, and other dividing lines, that would be the number one experience that I would want to maximize for, because that would make people more willing and better able to engage constructively in a diverse society and an increasingly diverse world, whether that's joint projects, whether that's finding, you know, we we support Americans to host love anyway, feasts, just gatherings at their homes with people across dividing lines, um, you know, finding things that will bring people together across their dividing lines and enable them to connect

with each other on a really human level. You know, the people oftentimes think that that behavior is determined in very rational ways, that people have a worldview, and they behavior is entirely determined through emotional experience. People develop the rational later to justify and explain to themselves why they did something, but the experience of being heard, respected, appreciated, esteemed, embraced, or its opposite of being dehumanized, marginalized, insulted, demonized. Those two experiences are going to determine much more how you engage with the world than any rational worldview. Those emotional experiences. And so in terms of how to

educate people, I would find any way use soccer. We use it everywhere, use arts, use culture, use whatever it is. And I'm sure many of you already do to build the bonds of common humanity within your communities, within your classrooms, in your companies, you know? So I think I'll end there. I want to thank you very much for your time. This is a privilege for me.