John Blomster: Hello, and welcome to Discovery an all new podcast presented by the 红桃视频. I'm your host, John Blomster. And today we're speaking with Ken Cloke, author, mediator and founder of the Center for Dispute Resolution. Ken is an expert in the field of mediation and conflict resolution. And he has spent the past three plus decades working with a wide range of clients to resolve complex multi-party disputes and design in during conflict resolution systems. His latest book, Politics, Dialogue in the Evolution of Democracy focuses on how we discussed divisive issues amid a polarized social landscape. Ken, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today.
Ken Cloke: Thank you.
Blomster: Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do with the Conflict Resolution Center?
Cloke: Sure. I guess the best description of it is to just say that I work with everybody who鈥檚 got conflicts. And that's a pretty broad range of people. In fact, it's very difficult to go anywhere where you don't face conflicts of one sort or another. So I work with organizations. I was just on a Skype call just a few minutes ago with an international organization that's experiencing鈥攁n international environmental organization鈥攖hat is experiencing lots of conflicts.
I work with divorcing couples, with families, with people who want to get married, but are having conflicts and don't know how to resolve them, with neighbors, with small family businesses鈥攅ven do a lot of work internationally. Some involved right now in an effort in the Middle East working with an organization called Combatants for Peace, which is trying to expand the importance of non-violence and use it to resolve differences between Palestinians and Israelis.
Blomster: So pretty, pretty broad range.
Cloke: Pretty broad range, yeah.
Blomster: Absolutely. So the focus of the book really focuses on what's going on in our society and social political landscape today. You know, today's political climate media cycle feels to have really amplified the divisions with us within society. Do you think that's the case? Are we farther apart as it feels like than we've ever been in terms of how we talk to each other?
Cloke: I wouldn't say than we've ever been, certainly the Civil War was a high point in disagreement. But we have, are certainly further apart than we have been in the last--in my memory鈥攃ertainly, in maybe over the last, well, possibly since the Great Depression, maybe since the 1950s and McCarthyism. There's an enormous divide and it is growing. And it is destructive not only of political relationships, not only of interpersonal relationships, but fundamentally of our capacity for problem solving.
Blomster: What are the factors that play into that? There鈥檚 always been difficult conversations and, you know, disagreements. Why does it feel right now, it's just, just so animus?
Cloke: Well, here's a place where conflict resolution offers a different perspective. If you approach it from a political point of view, you will get stuck in thinking about, kind of, the inner workings of various political issues. But if you look at from, edit from a conflict resolution point of view, what you will see is that in every conflict, there are two or more truths. And those truths can either be close together or very far apart. But without communication, without conversation without connection between them, their natural tendency is to separate. So you can look at it as increasing polarization, or you can look at it as decreasing communication. Both are valid points of view, in order to have a political conflict, there has to be an issue that people care about. And so what I think the increasing conflict represents is a fork in the road, two different futures, two different directions for our country, and a lack of ability to talk about those.
Blomster: And that's the thing, socially in the workplace, even around the dinner table at holidays, you know, the conversation takes a turn and you risk igniting a discussion, that's really difficult to put out. So where do you even begin? Where do you coach people to start to be able to talk about this in a more human way?
Cloke: Great. So when you're describing that conversation that ignites and is difficult to put out, one way of looking at that is simply as a lack of skill at being able to handle a particular kind of conversation. So we're looking at skill building, which is, we can start at a very basic level, which is, is it possible for you to sit and listen to someone who disagrees with you, without becoming emotionally upset without becoming furious about it? What would be needed in order for you to be able to do that? And so, one part of the book is about how to organize dialogues, which are conversations between people, where the emphasis is on learning, rather than winning. In debate, you try to win, but a dialogue, what you're there for, is to see if you can discover something new. And so one of the skills are simply skills in being able to listen to the person who's opposed to you. A deeper border of skills, is being able to reach consensus over things that you agree on. And I think that what we can say is that what we are facing as a political system today is an increasing demand for higher order skills. And those skills are, for the most part, not being taught and not being implemented. But in conflict resolution, we use those skills every day: active listening skills, negotiation skills, collaborative negotiation skills, dialogue, skills, problem solving skills. And so what the book is kind of about is a way of saying, if you look at political conflicts, not as political but as conflicts, what you will discover is that there are a number of ways of responding to them that are actually quite constructive, and very useful, and move you forward.
Blomster: How do you how, do you start to break down those barriers, though, you know, like in a marital dispute or something like that, where you have one person who is open to listening, or you have one person that's very adversarial, or in any other situation? How do you start to get them to that point that your place that you're speaking of?
Cloke: I would say the very beginning would be to come up with a question that can't be answered within that system. So for example, if you ask 鈥淲ho's right?鈥 and 鈥淲ho's wrong?鈥 that's a question that will lead to an answer that somebody is not going to accept. But if you ask someone why they care so deeply about this issue, that's completely different. Or 鈥淲hat life experiences have you had that have led you to feel so deeply about this issue?鈥 Or 鈥淲hat matters most to you?鈥 and thinking about it. And then once you try to set up are, if at all possible, ways of looking for what you could call the higher middle ground. So there's a lower middle ground, which is compromise. But the higher middle ground is finding out what these two people have in common, what interests they share. So for example, if we say, if we can just take, for example, the issue of abortion, that's divided in half, we've got people who are pro-life and pro-choice. So we can take any group of people who are pro-life and pro-choice and ask a very simple question, raise your hand, if you're not in favor of life.
Raise raise your hand, if you're not in favor of choice, no hands will come up. Now, what? Now is when the conversation begins, the rest of it is just posturing. It's just people trying to figure out how to say what's important to them in the wrong way, in a way that can鈥檛 be understood by the other person except us and attack.
Blomster: What are some practices that a listener myself can, can take away from this and start practicing today?
Cloke: I would say the most important thing is the realization that virtually all political conflicts take a very simple form. And the form is us versus them. But if you actually look at that a little bit more closely, what you will eventually come to is the realization that there is no them.
There's just us. Now, that's a really profound and deep realization. And if you start from the idea that there is no them, that we're in this together, and we're struggling with it, then what will come to you is a second kind of intervention, which is to just get curious about what the other person really thinks, to ask some questions, that actually challenge the person to think a little bit more clearly about it. But as long as you stay within the framework that has been set up by the adversaries, and tried to talk about the issue from within that framework, you're just going to get as adversarial as they are. So you have to step out of the framework. And that's the hard part, being able to figure out how do you step outside of this, and have a conversation that鈥檚 really important and really useful.
I can give you an example of this, if you would like. I started several years ago, an organization called Mediators Beyond Borders. And we're a group of people around the world who try to work with each other to improve conflict resolution capacity. So a group of us went to Athens to work to create dialogues between Greek citizens and immigrants. Very hot topic in Athens. And people are in exactly that kind of state where they're hostile to each other and adversarial. Nobody wants to talk to anybody else. And we had three incredibly powerful conversations, including people from across the spectrum, which started with a very simple question. And the question鈥攖wo questions: One question was: Have you personally ever in your life, in a family, or neighborhood, or school, or workplace, been the new one, and everybody else has been there for a while? What did that feel like? And have you ever in a family or school or neighborhood or workplace been the one who's been there for a while and now these new people are coming in and they're changing everything? And what did that feel like? And in two questions, everybody can begin to feel a little bit of empathy for the people on the other side, and from the place of empathy, and from the place of curiosity, you can then begin to have a conversation that will be interesting and useful. Otherwise, you'll just go around upsetting each other.
Blomster: For young people, for young attorneys who want to get into the field that you have spent your career so passionate about, what advice would you give them?
Cloke: I think the most important thing is to recognize the limits of whatever process it is that you are using. So the law has a series of limits attached to it. One of those limits is a lack of ability to handle intense emotion except by suppressing it. In mediation, we have the ability to handle intense emotion, we have various skills that can be used to resolve issues even though few people feel very emotionally about them. And so I would say,
probably the best advice is the one given by Gandhi, who was after all a lawyer. And what he said was that he discovered the true purpose of law, which was not to attack other people, but to find ways of solving problems that draw both of them in.
Blomste: Ken Cloke is an author, mediator and founder of the Center for Dispute Resolution. His latest book, Politics, Dialogue and Evolution of Democracy deals with how we discussed race, abortion, climate change, and other hot topics in a divided society. Ken, thank you again so much for joining us here on Discovery.
Cloke: Thank you very much for inviting me.
