WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Diana McLain Smith: Remaking the Space Between Us

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Diana McLain Smith joins WRFH to offer concrete strategies for people on both sides of the aisle to connect and collaborate to counteract the forces driving our country’s division. Smith has spent the past 35+ years helping organizations transform conflict into a constructive force for change. In her new book Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future for All, she brings her expertise to our current social and political rift. From 07/18/24.

This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Diana McLean Smith. She has spent the past 35 years, helping organizations transform inner-group conflict into a powerful force for change. She holds master's and doctor degrees from Harvard University and is a former partner at Monitor Group Consulting, former chair of Monitor University, and a former chief executive partner at New Profit. She has also served as an advisor to the Harvard Negotiation Project and, the Rebuild Congress Initiative. She is the author of Divider Conquer, The Elephant in the Room, and her most recent book, Remaking the Space Between Us, How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future for All. Diana, thanks for joining us. Happy to be here.

Delighted to be invited. I was wondering if to begin, you could tell us a bit about yourself, the work you do, maybe how you got into it, and why you love it. That's a great place to start, actually, especially because I believe this is a, is it a studio, a student radio? Yes, so it's at Hillsdale College, but it also plays to the larger city of Hillsdale.

Okay. So, but young people will be partly the audience that we're speaking to. Is that correct? Yes, that is correct. Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things I'd say is this was not a planned journey. And I think one thing that may or may not be reassuring for young people who today, I think, are so anxious about declaring a major and figuring out what they're going to do and what the path for it is, as so much is serendipity and taking advantage of opportunities you can't anticipate. And that is really the course of my life. So when I got out of college, I worked for a while as a community newspaper journalist. And I was working in the communities of Boston, and I was helping them publish community newspapers. And I had occasion to work in a neighborhood that was predominantly black for several years.

And then after that, a neighborhood that was predominantly white. and that was my first exposure to seeing the kind of alienation that had emerged. This is back in the 1970s during busing in Boston. And so there was an awful lot of fraught dialogue, lack of dialogue, fraught dynamics going on at that moment between racial groups, but also between ideological groups, groups that, you know, believed very different things about how the country ought to operate. And I was really taken by that and concerned about it.

And so when I then met somebody who suggested that I go get a degree at Harvard, I happened upon organizational change, which is a whole approach to working in organizations where you're often confronted with intergroup conflict. but it's very different from what I had experienced early on. So this was working in organizations where one function or one division might be fighting with another function or a division. And what I noticed is the more these groups fought with each other, the more they would turn to the CEO or to the person in charge to solve the conflict for them because they couldn't solve it themselves. And then they would get very upset because the people in charge became more and more controlling. And the people in charge got more and more overwhelmed and behaved and behaved worse and worse.

And so this kind of unusual dynamic of the less people were able to get along with each other, the more they put the conflict up the hierarchy, the more that led the system to go under stress. and during the pandemic, I began to see that happening in our country. And so I said, you know, the same kind of dynamics of groups fighting against each other. And I don't just mean demographic groups or ideological groups, but you have a lot of, you know, party conflict, intra-party conflict, extra-party conflict. You have all sorts of conflict. And I think that has been making it very hard for us. us to either solve problems that we have in common. We all share of the same problems. We may

differ over what to do about them, but they're all, the problems are affecting all of us. And we actually have a lot of the same goals and same values, believe it or not. I mean, we can talk about particular positions on things, but we're so busy fighting about the things we disagree on that we're not either finding or even more importantly creating common ground. So over the course of my life, I've gone from being a journalist to being an organizational interventionist to now thinking about our democracy, our country, our nation, and how it can move forward together. And I've become convinced that the most powerful way of moving forward together is people

becoming more responsible for dealing more constructively with our differences. Wow, that's a fascinating story. So based off of all that you've seen in conflict management, essentially, what would you say are the main causes of conflict and then the best are most common solutions? Well, it's a really great question. It's obviously a complicated one that would take more than 12 minutes to answer, but I'm going to try to talk about several of the big things that are most problematic. And I hope I remember them all. But anyway, the first one is, although we disagree deeply and passionately about certain topics and certain positions, certain policies, okay, ideas, we disagree passionately about that, sometimes sadly violently, right? The way in which we disagree is identical because we've all been so.

socialized in a culture, not consciously, it's just the way things work. We've been socialized to handle conflict the same way. And that is to push our own position and not listen to the other person's position, to get caught up in point, counterpoint dynamics, seek to win and not lose, to assume that we live in a zero-sum world so that if one person gets ahead, or one idea gets ahead, we're going to lose ours. So we don't think in terms of, wow, maybe if we really understood the concerns and interests behind people's views, maybe we could create something new that's never been done before, which, by the way, we need to do because we're dealing with really complicated

problems. But we don't do that because we've been socialized to think of it as zero-sum. And then the other thing is, in a very implicit way, not in an explicit way, we have have a way of thinking about people, whether it's an individual or whether it's a group, in lesser, better terms, as opposed to just describing who they are and understanding who they are. Okay. So that way of handling conflict where you're seeking to win and not lose, where you think of things in zero-sum terms, where you think of people as better or lesser, that makes it very difficult to resolve conflict. The outcome.

alternative to that, and I want to come back to the second cause, the alternative to that has been studied deeply by people who've looked at principled negotiation, where you try to understand different people's hopes, dreams, concerns, and interests. You then work together on trying to understand the problem together. There was a group in Tennessee called the Tennessee 11, which was made up of people who believe deeply in the Second Amendment and are gun right folks and then people who feel adamant about gun control. These 11 folks came together in Tennessee after the school shootings, which left, I think, nine kids and teachers dead. And they came up with a series of proposals that they all agreed on. I mean, it's an amazing story. It's worth

looking into. That's the kind of approach to conflict that helps. So there are other causes that I could go into, but that I think is the most important one, so I'll leave it at that. Wow, yeah, thank you for sharing that. I was going to ask if you have, you mentioned this Tennessee school, do you have any other true stories that you've seen about reconciliation through the work that you do? Trying to think of some of the best ones. I think rather than think about a story, of a specific story, the thing that, the thing that blew me away when I was writing the book is one of the things I saw happening that I also saw

happening in organizations is when groups get into a conflict. So you have a division or a function marketing and then you have sales and they fight with each other or you have a Democrat and you have a Republican. They fight with each other. The thing I notice that similar in both cases is when things go badly and people feel under threat and there are plenty of things that can make us feel under threat today, from immigration to climate change to wars, I mean, it's just it's an anxious time, the pandemic, okay? People tend to become more insular within their own group and hang out more and more with their own group and affirm their own group. And the more they do that, the more distant they become from groups that aren't like them, who think differently, who look differently, who believe differently. And then the more distant they become from those who are different from them,

the more insular they become. And then the more insular they become, the more distant they become. So the thing that I found that blew me away, that was just incredible, is that there are not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people, across our country who are working to open up what I call the mental space within groups and close the distance across groups. So they're working in communities at the local level. A lot of them are locally rooted.

They may be nationally connected, braver angels, not in our town. Sharon says so, who's on the Instagram. Okay, she has a million and one followers, okay? They're all trying to open the mental space within groups, so groups are exposed to ideas and facts and stories and experiences that they're not often exposed to because we live such isolated lives these days. And then the other thing they're doing is they're creating opportunities for people to work together across these divides on common problems.

It could be homelessness. It could be how to handle immigration in their city. Okay? It could be on any number of climate. How are we going to adapt to the climate? What are we going to do if the climate changes? Whether, you know, we could argue until the cows come home, whether it's caused by humans or caused by mother nature, it's changing.

And so what are we going to do? And people are coming together to try to plan for those kinds of things. And they're coming together across divides. And there are hundreds of thousands of people that I talk about in the book, and I strongly recommend people check it out for that reason alone. And then there's an organization called Starts with Us, which I'd also strongly recommend, where we ask people to look at their own assumptions or own biases. And so that we begin to see how we ourselves are contributing to the problem. It's not everyone else. It's us ourselves who are contributing to the problem.

And there are things we can do to become part of the solution. And then there's an organization called, or it's not a nonprofit, called Solutions Journalism Network. And they are an alternative to traditional news where traditional news really leads with what bleeds. They're very good at diagnosing problems, raising problems. But Solutions Journalism Network has gone around the world, finding communities that are solving these problems. so that people in other communities can learn how to solve them. And so I strongly encourage people to go to Solutions Journalism Network and to go to Starts with Us or to go to Braver Angels,

all these organizations that are helping us figure out how to repair our social fabric. We are now in a moment in time where we are at greater risk of our differences becoming more violent, and I think it behooves all of us to ensure that that does not happen. This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Diana McLean Smith. She is releasing a book, Remaking the Space Between Us, How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future for All. So, Diana, you actually just led into my next question

in the end to the former one that I just asked, which was, I hear a lot today that people say, we're more divided than ever in politics in America today. We're more divided than ever. But then I also hear people respond saying, actually, like, American politics have always been divisive and had extreme views in people fighting all the time. So what is your take on that?

Do you think that we are more divided than ever? Yeah. It's a great question. First of all, I think we've always, you're right, we've always had divisions in our country and disagreements and, you know, from the time we were founded. I mean, the Constitution was not easily forged. There were deep disagreements over the Constitution. And we had a civil war, all right?

And then people opposed World War II, and people oppose Vietnam. I mean, we have always had disagreements. It has ebbed and flowed in terms of how badly or how well we have handled those disagreements. Okay. And we're in a period where the disagreements are more profound and where we are handling them less well. And this is, to me, the most important thing is the nature of our problems today, unlike in the past, require us to come up with solutions across groups and across nations because the problems themselves go across groups and across nations. Immigration, climate change, these are things that know, no boundaries. So it requires more of us now.

So while we've always disagreed, those disagreements have been more or less profound at different times, have been handled more or less well. But the imperative to handle them well has never been greater than now. Okay. So that's, I think, an important distinction that I think often gets lost. I want to say one other thing, which you got at is how divided are we really? Strongly recommend people go on the Internet and look up more in common. They have the best data on how and where we are most in agreement and disagreement, and they talk about the 67% exhausted majority of people who are flexible and pragmatic. They differ, by the way.

They disagree with each other along the political spectrum. But they're not as dug in as what they refer to the sort of more ideologically committed groups on the far left and the far right. Okay? And that group of 67% tends to be so exhausted that they become voiceless. And so one of the things I'm hoping to help galvanize, obviously not by myself, is to mobilize that 67% to come to the fore so that we can return to a center where people can disagree but not be so disagreeable. Yeah, and jumping into talk about your book, I was wondering if you've written, I think, two others before this. So what makes this one unique and different, and why should people read it? Well, just like you have the love of your life, this book is the love of my life. It is the culmination of 40 years of observing different kinds of social systems from when I was at

family therapist when I work with kids and communities and with a journalist. You know, then to working in organizations to, I also, you know, did work in communities, trying to organize communities. This is the culmination of everything I've learned in those different walks of life,

applied to a problem that means more to me than anything else, which is the future of our nation, the future of our democracy. I do not believe the best days are behind us. I believe we have an opportunity here to have the best days be in front of us. This book is my effort to inspire hope and inspiration in people so that they will take the responsibility. We need to take as citizens to create a country worthy of the work of those who've come before us. us. So it's essentially like a culmination of your work for the past 40 years. Wow. Exactly. And

something I'm extremely passionate about. Wow. And how does it compare to your other two books? Like what were those on and how do you compare? Well, those books were about leadership and about organizations and about how people get into conflicts, interpersonal conflicts. And this is much more about, I had in my mind, when I wrote those books, intergroup conflict. But it's very hard for leaders to get their heads around intergroup conflict, but they recognize and they live in a world of interpersonal conflict. And so I decided to focus those books on interpersonal conflict, knowing that I was not attending to a very important difficulty in organizations and in all systems, including

our nation, which is how groups relate to each other through those individuals, okay? And so this book really takes on the nature of intergroup conflict. Where does it come from? Why is it so difficult to resolve what some people are already doing to resolve it or to make progress on it? Why it's so important for our democracy, for citizens to take responsibility for working on that? This is a different focus on our nation groups, because I think that's going to be what determines the fate of our nation. nation, ultimately. We are a multi-group democracy now. Okay, we are not a unigroup democracy or multi-group democracy. Many groups have a seat at the table. And so figuring out how we're going to be with each other

at that table, how we're going to coexist in a way that doesn't make us less, but makes us greater than the sum of our parts is the challenge we face now. Well, Diana, those are all the questions I have for you. Is there anything that I didn't address that you want to share briefly? No, I think you said, you know, why should people buy the book? I think people are despairing or angry right now. And I think everybody could use a dose of hope and inspiration as well as greater understanding of why we're where we are today and how we can get out. And I think the book offers that. And I'm happy to say there are a lot who reviewed it on the left and on the left and on the right who agreed with that.

Well, Diana, thank you for coming on and talking. It was a privilege to talk to you and hear everything that you're doing. Well, it's wonderful talking with you, Michaela, and the future is in your hands, and we've given you a battered baton, my generation, and I look to you, and my generation still, to take us into a future that we can all be proud of. Yes, ma'am. I think, thank you for that. Thanks so much. All right. Make good care. You as well. See you. Bye.

Bye. Bye. That was Diana McLean Smith. She is releasing a book, Remaking the Space Between Us, How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future for All. And this is Michaela Eschuth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM.