Does peace count?

Who counts the costs of war? Historically--and sadly, still in many "analyses," the costs of war are just two, referred to reflexively as "blood and treasure." 

Stop. Please stop. 

The battlefield deaths are the blood. The money it takes to wage war is the treasure. In truth, those are simply the obvious opening costs. More include, but are not limited to: 

·       pollution

·       infrastructure

·       mental health

·       education

·       healthcare

·       morals

·       norms and ethics

·       cultural care and compassion

·       regard for the humanity of all

These costs linger for years, sometimes generations. They produce populations whose distorted outlooks auger new destruction--the victors viewing others as inferior and the losers nursing deep desires for vengeance no matter how long it takes. 

Breaking the war cycle means unilateral sacrifice for the long-term greater good. This is hard. Often that unilateral sacrifice is destined to come from traumatized people, making it immeasurably harder. But it's been done, movingly so, from time-to-time. 

·       Liberian women set aside all legitimate desire for revenge and ended their poor country's godawful war.

·       Serbians who had been victimized horrifically by Slobodan Milosevic set aside their historical culture of vendetta and used mass nonviolence to bring down the dictator. 

·       Chileans, repressed violently for more than a decade and a half, rose up in joy and resistance, ending the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and restoring democracy.

·       Filipinos and Filipinas had been traumatized by brute force under Marcos for many years and yet set all the normal need for a bloodbath aside to nonviolently stop a civil war. 

The list goes on. People have proven again and again we are not irrevocably chained to the ultimate dysfunctional craving for vengeance and bloodshed. 

We cannot change the past. But the future is ours to create anew.

Hating hate, war on war, victory over political enemies, and other malfunctioning approaches

To transform conflict, transformative methods are required. If our primary goal is to gain decisive victory over others, we will quickly resort to destructive methods--demonizing the other, using parliamentary tricks that flout ethical standards, and lying when "necessary." 

As this is written we in the US are finishing the 2024 election season and one side is relying on this method every day. Opponents are called enemies, they are given pejorative nicknames, and the lies are both planned and spontaneous. When fact-checked and proven false, there is no acknowledgement, certainly no apology, I'm constantly reminded of Nixon's deplorable maxim, "Contrition is bullshit." 

While engaging in word battles in the political trenches isn't going to always give us infinite patience or good humor, it remains a polestar aspiration to heed Michele Obama, "When they go low, we go high." 

Or, in the poem[1] from more than a century ago by Edward Markham, 
“He drew a circle that shut me out—

Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!”

(Edwin Markham, 1852-1940)

This contrast in models is evident as well in evolving community organizing. While breakout organizers like Saul Alinsky showed us how to roll up our sleeves, do battle, and win, evolving approaches have given us a gentler paradigm, not meant to skirt tough struggles but to leave the door open a bit to unity, to consensus, and to growing, however slowly, toward Dr. King's Beloved Community. The best workbook on these newer models is one from a school of thought and action called Consensus Organizing (Ohmer & DeMasi, 2009).

From a focus on what works (asset mapping) to developing next-gen youth leadership to rigorous assessment and evaluation, community organizers are far more likely to succeed sustainably by creating the parallel structures based on egalitarian and transformative values and practices. 

Reference

Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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[1] https://hebfdn.org/echoes/outwitted/

What did you do when you were in power?

 JD Vance has called out Kamala Harris for making proposals--he said she's been in office for more than three years and so why hasn't she already done those things?

Right. Does Vance even understand the job he's trying for?

Vice-presidents in my lifetime are (or should be) nicknamed Seldom Seen, much like Ed Abbey's fictional character. They are given general briefs by their boss, sometimes wisely and sometimes stupidly. Joe Biden, for all his many good points, made some colossal goofs, such as his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan but also in his out-of-the-gate assignments for his VP. Go fix the immigration issue.

Yeah, Kamala was supposed to go to Central and South America and lie? Make false promises? Tell the unvarnished truth? She did none of that. 

Lying would only encourage larger waves of doomed refugees. 

False promises would have only increased that. 

Telling the truth--that the waves of refugees pouring north from Central America in particular were a consequence of the years when the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union was hot proxy wars in that region--not a winning message for a powerless Vice President. The US and the Soviets did to the region in the last two decades of the 20th century what the US and Iran are doing to Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel right now. Flood the zone with weapons and watch it burn.

So Biden gave Harris an undoable job, so she essentially just told Central Americans, Don't show up at our borders. She was powerless to do much else. 

In turn, then, JD, what did your boss Trump do for the four full years he was in office?

Now he's saying he will magically protect women. But he and his henchperson McConnell in the Senate engineered the MAGA takeover of the Supreme Court, which has taken away rights and freedoms from women. His four years in power were a disaster for women. 

He's making one wild claim and promise after another, about all the groovy things he's going to do once he's back in power. So, Trump, why did you do NONE of it when you were at the top of the command and control pyramid for four full years? 'Splain that, JD. 

No tax on tips? Trump had four years to get that one done, never did. 

No tax on Social Security? Yeah, why didn't you touch that when you controlled the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches? Why?

The list goes on. Trump and Vance are promising the moon that was there for Trump's 2017-2021 reign, the moon that was not even mentioned then, so stop already with the sad-assed rhetoric about why hasn't the powerless Kamala already achieved everything she has said she's ready to get done out of the gate once elected.

Kamala won't give everyone in America a money ton and a perfect life, but Trump will break all his campaign promises, except those he's already made to his fellow citizens of Richistan.

When principal principles produce problems

Some come to discussions armed with data and other evidentiary arguments. Some come with principles so ironclad they preclude negotiation as they "refuse even to consider the other side's case" (Fisher, Ury & Patton, 2011, p. 90). But those inviolable principles are not what the authors mean by "principled negotiation." 

Data, standards, and evidence gathered, curated, organized, and presented to advance one argument should inform all parties--it's a bit like watching a fictionalized film in the sense that you the viewer are suspending your disbelief so you can enter into viewership and fully experience the story. Suspend your disbelief as a party to a conflict; listen prepared to accept actual facts. Express appreciation for that body of evidence. 

Then present your own case. Just as you absorbed the evidence of the other side, expect all parties to treat your facts as legitimate. Acknowledge the truths on all sides and return to a commitment to seek fairness, not the zero-sum, winner-take-all, hard positional commitment to one outcome only. 

A commitment to a fair outcome is something that might seem obvious, but it is not necessarily. If we look at the adversarial systems such as the legal system or legislative bodies, we see that, for many of the parties, the goal is total victory and the methods include shutting down the opportunities of others to present evidence. This is not how principled negotiation works and, sure enough, many decisions are made by the courts and by legislatures that were achieved by unfair processes, often including technical methods of shutting down part or all of a party's argument. "Objection!" "Sustained." 

The principle of principled negotiation is commitment to fair process and fair outcome, not to other principles touted by parties arguing over their beliefs.

When Hamas attacked Israel 7 October 2023 they did so based on their positions. Israel then attacked based on their positions. Both sides had very legitimate arguments and evidence. Both sides operate as deeply traumatized people. But the methods chosen by both sides are destructive, constructing nothing, transmogrifying rather than transforming. The rest of the world--Iran, the US, and all who supply arms to both sides--are simply spraying gasoline on the fire, adding to misery, not promoting any wise outcomes at all. Both sides--Hamas and Israel--are engaged in genocidal actions so driven by utter hatred that principles we might associate with life--protection of children, for example--are not features of either side's actions. Hamas isn't hesitant to call for the annihilation of the Jewish people, as evidenced in their original 1987 Charter and as evidenced by documents discovered[1] by Israel in Hamas war rooms. Israel continues to commit genocidal attacks that "target" Hamas leaders and kill everyone around those leaders, including babies.

Principled negotiation is hard sometimes. But war is harder.

Reference

Fisher, Roger; Ury, William; Patton, Bruce (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. (3^rd ed.). New York, NY: Penguin. 

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/10/12/exclusive-hamas-documents-sinwar-planning-iran/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3f47a5d%2F670b9a269d95b43d9f313b6d%2F596d40a4ae7e8a44e70297c3%2F8%2F50%2F670b9a269d95b43d9f313b6d

 

Setting the stage

Whenever possible, especially when listing factors that come out of a group session, the use of priorities is helpful. For instance, there may be things that fall into the "want" list that need to be ranked so a great deal of time isn't wasted negotiating toward perfection when it's often unachievable. 

One technique that can help a facilitator of any mediation or a consensus process is the pre-survey. In it, for instance, each participant is asked to list five desired outcomes, but also rank each of those desired outcomes on a scale (e.g., 1-10). This gives the moderator a great deal of information ahead of time. If a particular desired outcome is mentioned by someone in the actual meeting and it hasn't appeared in anyone's survey, the facilitator can mention that and ask for consensus on regarding that stated desired outcome as beyond the scope of the current process. Of course, if a groundswell seems to be growing to include it, that is a time to flex and even reformulate the proposal under consideration.

The same logic applies to a desired outcome mentioned by a few participants but ranked low (1-4). Honing in on what matters most to most of the participants can both honor the longer consensus process but also make it more efficient. 

Having said that, the facilitator needs to see if something can go to the participants who listed that desired outcome, ranked it lower, and are then asked to give up on getting it done. Do those people seem to share one or more desired outcomes they rank very highly? If so, the facilitator can test it to the group by saying something like, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is that some of you have a high priority on addressing racism in our organization and a somewhat lower priority on achieving great fiscal position. Some of you might flip that priority. Is there a way to achieve enough of both to feel successful?"

This is harder without an outside expert facilitator, but if one of the organization is also the facilitator, it should be someone with fewer strong opinions, so the facilitator isn't frequently taking an advocacy stance, which can corrode the perception of a decent process.  

What about consensus in massive complex government projects?

In complex government projects some innovative consensus methods have helped to reduce non-expert but fully stakeholder conflict with experts by a modified consensus approach that seeks the basic elements of consensus but in a streamlined fashion to reduce the high costs of a longer, classical consensus process. This may not only reduce costs and timelines on the front end, but may very well reduce subsequent resistance and slowdowns from the classical command-and-control approach.

"In this way, collective intelligence across different subgroups of society can be leveraged simultaneously, involving experts and non-experts, called heterogeneous decision-makers in this study" (Singh, Baranwal & Tripathi, 2023, p. 3936).

References

Singh, M., Baranwal, G., & Tripathi, A. K. (2023). A novel 2-phase consensus with customized feedback based group decision-making involving heterogeneous decision-makers. Journal of Supercomputing, 79(4), 3936–3973. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1007/s11227-022-04796-7

Who should decide?

Consensus is a slow process, and is usually reserved for the decisions that require real buy-in and commitment to follow through. It is the day-to-day minor decisions that don't benefit from that time requirement that shouldn't be a consensus process. We make those decisions every day in our families, in our work, and in our community affairs. So part of the art in leadership is figuring out when to flatten that hierarchy and engage in a process that is more inclusive than any other, consensus. The decision spectrum is, in a simplistic sense: 

Command-and-control_______representative democracy________consensus process

Each of these models is good for something and absolutely terrible at other things. The extremists who want one and only one are not wise, just doctrinaire. We see that in politics but also in so many areas of life. 

Feel a draft? Be a peace church.

Of course we will never have a world free from conflict, but we can radically reduce destructive conflict while engaging in constructive, creative conflict.

Social norms are important, and of course they are fed by home life, school life, all forms of media, and the norms of all organizations to which we belong. 

For example, some years ago I testified to a church council as they considered whether to formally declare that the Just War Doctrine was antithetical to their faith. I made two primary points: 

1. The Just War Doctrine requires a nation to exhaust all avenues before launching a war. Since there are literally hundreds of potential nonviolent acts of resisting injustice, it is essentially impossible to satisfy that criterion. 

2. Any faith that officially rejects the Just War Doctrine is not only changing its own internal practices, norms, and culture, it also protects its young people against conscription into an unjust war. For example, during the Vietnam War there was a draft and young men who were born and raised in one of the historic peace churches--most Quaker sects, many Anabaptist sects, and other recognized sects--those young men were virtually always granted Conscientious Objector status. Of course they could go off to war if they wished, but they were not usually conscripted.

Conflict on the team

Continuing to draw the naturally divergent views on how to achieve a goal back to the basic shared interest of everyone is a way to ground the conversation in civility and shared purpose. Whether someone is a facilitator or simply a participating member of a work team, reminding everyone that we share more than we don't is one factor in keeping the contamination of egos and stubbornness at a minimum.

Doing so is always easier when we can credit others with that reminder, e.g., "I for one appreciate our search for the best way to serve our clients, as Kerry reminded us last week. All these ideas are pointed toward that one mandate and even when we seem to disagree we are all just seeking that same good outcome." Everyone thus shares in the credit and is less alienated by the process.

A role that was a part of a large group I worked with back in the 90s was Vibeswatcher. One person, who also participated in the group process, was tasked with just looking at body language, tone, side communications, and general emotional content of the group and group members. They had no direct input into facilitation unless they felt the emotional content was getting seriously escalated. Then they had the power to interrupt the process, make their observations, and the group attempted to find ways to deescalate. This is especially valuable in larger groups with one or more verbose speakers, as the emotional signs frequently begin to come from those who feel unheard, not called on, or shut out. 

The power of one vs groupthink

 Groupthink may be the biggest threat to our species in some ways, especially when it is augmented by the notion you mention, that, as "everybody knows," one person can't really do much. 

Rosa Parks was just one seamstress in one town in the South, but she sparked a movement that showed others what one person can do, offering a model that others emulated for a decade of nonviolent civil rights victories.

Greta Thunberg was just one Swedish girl in her teens, but she sparked a movement that sent thousands of schoolchildren out of school and into the streets in "Climate Strike Fridays," even resulting in insults from Trump when he was in the White House.

Julia Butterfly Hill was just one preacher's daughter from the South who climbed a Redwood tree that was slated to be cut down by a corporation taking down old growth Redwoods faster than ever. She stopped it, saved the tree, and launched a national movement to fight against logging the last of the old growth. 

A group of high school kids from Florida who had survived a mass shooting that killed 17 of their classmates refused to just be another group of young victims and they grew a movement in the US that drew millions into the streets to protest the easy availability of assault rifles. Now they are affecting dozens of races for seats in Congress to get gun control advocates in office.

Does standing up against the odds always work? No, and that's not the question. Can it work? Yes, and there are many more examples. When "everybody knows" feels wrong, it just might be. 

Striving for consensus: when the work is a burden

Whether the decision under consideration is one of public policy, institutional policy, or corporate policy, the traps that doom consensus are only avoided when two things happen. 

1. Facilitation is skilled. 

2. Those included in the process have honest and beneficial intentions. 

So, for example, when the actual effort is being put forth to use a robust consensus process, that implies that the time has been set aside to pursue it properly. This hearkens back to an original decision made by the person or small group of people to actually engage in a consensus process. 

Overuse of this can lead to frustrated groups who rush things. When an executive decision can get something accomplished in a relatively minor question, but people are put through a rigorous process of seemingly endless discussion and debate over minor issues, consensus begins to look like a chore and a waste of time. A balanced approach, with all minor decisions simply made by the person tasked with that authority, and a serious consensus process undertaken only in the truly weighty decisions, gives consensus its proper role. 

Consensus vs hierarchy

Virtually all forms of decision-making tend to favor a hierarchical organizational structure except for consensus. Ah, one might say, so consensus is anarchy! No hierarchy!

Well, if so, it is the most solid, informed, deliberate form of anarchy imaginable. And, in many cases, like some situations of anarchy, it's only briefly anarchical before returning to some form of hierarchy. 

But when a group commits to making a particular decision using consensus, the hierarchy is flattened. Positions with titles--President, Chief Operating Officer, Grand Poobah--are all checked at the door, as are all intelligence-gathering for purposes of revenge. No disagreements that flare up in a consensus process may be used for later punitive purposes. 

In short, willingness to engage in a real consensus process involves trust. Any violation of that trust may doom future use of consensus, and that is crucial for the facilitator to emphasize. 

It is not a coincidence that many feminist-value groups use consensus, as they usually feature a nurturing, flatter hierarchy than typical command-and-control organizations. This is partially why consensus is a natural component of a conflict transformation practice (or degree program).