Dialog across difference #12: Judgy? Try assessment

One version of the Tao te Ching offers, "No fight, no blame." 

In the toughest conversations about what went wrong, blame is unhelpful. Thinking about how each party helped produce an undesirable outcome is more helpful. Then all can plan a stronger process and better results next time.

So. Yesterday, our peace team did a training. At the end, we asked the 40+ participants to please fill out evaluations, our simple set of questions that are meant to elicit open-ended assessments about what worked and what didn't. Most were happy about most aspects of our training, though they wanted more roleplays, less lecturing. Good, we can learn from that logical critique.

There was a unique subtext to this training, however. It was meant to help a campus community learn more about deëscalation and bystander intervention in the wake of a campus cop shooting an African American man dead. 

I set it up to foreground two of our top trainers, both African American, both highly qualified practitioners and deeply experienced trainers. I explained to the team that because of the nature of the training circumstances, they were the premier leads. 

Four of us were white males. 

To my horror, while two of us white males said almost nothing, the other two chimed in frequently. 

One, in fact, had very little experience with either our peace team in the street or in trainings. He is highly intelligent, but also highly interruptive in conversations, eager to share his insights, which are frequently very smart, though not much grounded in our team's experience. His intellectual brilliance contrasted with his tone-deaf failure to honor either the racial overtones or the voices of peace team experience. 

The second white man who spoke far too much is deeply experienced. He has a fine mind for the strategic aspects of nonviolence but very subpar verbal facility and clearly entirely missed the repeated messaging to give pretty much all the space to the BIPOC leadership.

It is far more likely that time for roleplays would have been adequate if the two lead trainers had been the voices, and who had set up the flow of the training without frequent unsolicited supplementary mic-grabbing by the white men.

Le sigh. 

Here is where I take the advice of dialog experts in the field of conflict transformation and stop at the cusp of blame, back off, and assess. 

I designed the training. Why on earth did I slot in four white men when two African American trainers of extraordinary skill were committed to conduct it? Why didn't I explain much more bluntly about the primacy of the two voices, the two BIPOC professionals who should have led at every step?

My contribution to the problem was key. Instead of blame on those who overshared and deprived everyone of the wisdom of the key trainers, I need to take primary credit for my contribution, my careless belief that my broad hints were sufficient, and my tendency to overschedule the number of trainers needed for any particular training.

Lessons learned are far more valuable than judgment apportioned.