Heidi Burgess: I want to welcome our viewers today. I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and I'm talking with Grande Lum, who is currently the Director of the Stanford Gould Program of Negotiation and Mediation. Did I get that right?

Grande: Yes. That's one of the programs. It's the Gold Center for Conflict Resolution, and it has a negotiation and mediation program and a research initiative as well.

Heidi: And Grande has been involved in a great number of very interesting positions in the past, and we want to talk about several of them. The first one that I got to know about him, I didn't know him, was when he was the Girector of the Community Relations Service. And Guy and I and a former Community Relations Service Conciliator and Regional Director, Dick Salem, had done a project, an oral history project on CRS in about 2000, 2001. So we knew something about the agency. And when Grande came in to direct it afterwards, I was aware of that but didn't interact with him. But I was really thrilled when I got a call or an email, I don't remember which, from him asking whether Guy and I would be interested in updating that oral history project. And we were very much. And so now we're doing that with Grande and Bill Froelich at Ohio State University, who is at the Divided Communities Project, which it turns out, Grant is also the Founding Director of that.

The other really interesting thing that Grande has done, which we want to talk about today, is that he worked with the Rebuilding Congress Initiative, which is a private initiative run out of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard and Issue One to try to look at what isn't working with Congress and how to make it work better. So all that stuff is really, really interesting. And I'm hoping you'll tell us about that in the context of a few themes — and you're welcome to vary from those themes too. But the two things that I'm really interested in are your view of civil rights in the past, going all the way up to the present. You've got a really strong knowledge of the history of civil rights relations and civil rights mediation. And I want to pick this up and show it to folks if I could get it in the camera. This is Grande's book. It's called America's Peacemakers. And the first edition was written by former CRS conciliator Bert Levine. And Grande put out the second edition with a lot of updates in it. The amount of research that you did for that is just staggering or your knowledge is staggering —one or the other. So I'd like you to kind of think back over the whole history that you talk about in that book and compare what was going on back in the day to what's going on now and what you think can be done to make things go better now.

And then also looking at what's going on with democracy now. And in addition to what you did with Rebuilding Congress, what else can we do to try to reduce polarization, which is our big concern, or otherwise stabilize democracy, which most people agree is on the ropes. So why don't we start, if it's okay with you, with race and CRS?

Grande: Sure. So Heidi, first of all, thank you for interviewing me here. I've been looking forward to it. And also, I mean, where you mentioned the very beginning, the connection you had with Guy Burgess and with Dick Salem in creating the Oral History Project. And you did interviews with CRS mediators and conciliators. I think that work is so important, right?

As we think about race, it is still a huge issue in this country. Polarization, as you note, and many others note, has been on the rise, especially political polarization. And I just think it was so important to capture, right, for the future, for future mediators, for future people, for those of us now who care about these issues, to see how people worked in order to deal with seemingly very intractable disputes.

And you know I was very lucky that Bertram Levine's children gave me the freedom to build on the book that he wrote. And you know up until 1989, and I focused on CRS work, most of it, after that time, though I did write a chapter about Dick Salem's work at Skokie, Illinois, in dealing with the Nazis who came there and were seeking to protest in Skokie, Illinois, and in Chicago at the time.

And certainly, Dick's work was just amazing. I didn't know a lot, you know, before I started CRS, I honestly didn't know a lot about the history of CRS. I was a little bit aware of it because the organization I worked with at the time was Conflict Management Inc., which was started by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton and others. It was doing work and was actually providing training to CRS. That was the first time I became aware of CRS. And as it became a possibility that I might join as its director, I looked at the Oral History Project. I looked at Bert Levine's first book. And I was just stunned. I mean, these are people who have operated in confidentiality, without much publicity, who've been just doing really important work to help people figure out their differences, to help people understand each other better, to help calm down communities and to make progress in these difficult issues, many of them which involve race.

And since 2009, because of the Matthew Shepherd, James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also covers beyond race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and disability as well. So, I think the times have called for really examining how do we think about dealing with these hard identity-based issues? These are always hard issues and they are especially difficult now, when we are seeing more of an "us-versus-them" approach to things and where people are less willing to talk to each other and we're more willing to cancel each other at this time.

So I think the work at CRS in dealing with race issues, which have been difficult throughout our history is exemplary.  But I also think it's important to acknowledge that we've made progress over time on those issues. And what we've learned from dealing with them, and what CRS has learned, I think, will be helpful going forward in the challenges that we're facing today and we'll be facing for a number of years, of course.

Heidi: So a lot of people have told us since we've been focused on polarization for the last couple of years, "Oh, there's always been polarization. That's nothing new." Or even, "polarization is good because it shows that the oppressed are rising up and beginning to gain ground on their oppressor." Do you think it's more of a problem now than it used to be? Or do you think it's a sign of good things happening? How would you reflect on current day polarization as opposed to what was in the past?

Grande: Yeah. I think there have been very difficult times in American history, right? We can go back to — however far you would like, to the Civil War, to the 1960s, around civil rights, around Vietnam, around a number of shootings and assassinations that happened to many of our leaders at the time. So I wouldn't be Pollyannish about it and look in the past and say, "Oh, it was so much better than it is today." I think there's something called recency bias, right? We see our current situation as the most difficult it's ever been. I think most historians would say that's probably not objectively the case, in whatever measures one would want to use with it. So I think it's a complicated answer, right?

And I think polarization often leads us to simplifying, rather than complexifying. And I think part of the answer is we need to see the complexity of it. For sure, it's difficult today when you see what's happening in Congress, in the presidency, with this upcoming election, with a presidential candidate who has 91 felony allegations against him. It is a very troubling time, I'm not going to deny it. It is incredibly difficult. Something you said, Heidi, about polarization, I am a person who believes — and this is something I think I really have thought about throughout my career in conflict resolution—  is that, yes, conflict can be helpful and useful if it leads to change, right?

We've talked in the past about the fact that there was often huge adversarialism against gay marriage and conflict, right, protesting and getting the conflict out into the open helped change that for the better. So I do think polarization often means if it's fighting over something that is a moral issue, like race, like sexual orientation, often does and has led to a better society.

But when we have toxic polarization, you know Ezra Klein wrote, I think, a really good book about polarization. And  I would also go back to Amanda Ripley, who wrote a recent book called High Conflict. When the conflict becomes toxic, when it paralyzes us, when it prevents change, yeah, that's not good. If it prevents change from happening or makes it so hard, or makes it harder to resolve these issues, that's not good either. And we see some of that, right?

I think in Congress's dysfunction, for example, the inability to work on legislation is a big problem. Just right this past week, it looked like there might be the possibility of having a bipartisan agreement in the Congress around immigration, around the border. But maybe it'll come back, but it's become so hard to do so.

Heidi: We make a distinction between what we call hyperpolarization — most other people call it toxic polarization — and constructive conflict. And I think that's one of the things that a lot of people have confused is they think that when we're saying that we need to lower polarization or depolarize the society, that we're saying we have to all agree with each other. And that's definitely not the case. I think anybody who studies conflict, conflict 101, you learn that conflict is good. Guy has a line that it's the engine of social learning. So you certainly have to have conflict. And conflict's the only way you're going to get social change — for good or for bad. But I think you hit the key well, one of many key points, which is when the conflict gets simplified into an us-versus-them, we're right-they're wrong, everything's their fault. All we have to do is make them change or them disappear — that's a recipe for intractability, and it's just going to make things worse and worse and more difficult, if not impossible, to solve. So I think a key is getting people to recognize constructive ways of dealing with conflict. And that's what I think one of the things that was so exceptional about CRS is that they were able to go into these super polarized, hateful, fearful situations where people had been killed and were, in many cases, ready to kill again. And yet CRS was able to calm things down and get people to begin to listen to each other and recognize the legitimacy of each side's point of view. And that enabled them to move forward. What would you say ought to be done at this point? What is CRS doing?  And what can other people outside of CRS do to try to turn down the heat a little bit and start constructively dealing with the racial issues that we're looking at now?

Grande: I really appreciate the question, Heidi, in terms of what CRS is doing, what it will do, and what we can all do. My bet is many of the folks who are listening to this interview have some familiarity with facilitation and mediation and other dispute resolution processes. You know there's a difference — whether it's a court case, a litigation or a contract dispute between labor and management or a neighbor-to-neighbor dispute over a barking dog or something like that. There is a power to having a third party who comes in with the intention of just trying to help the parties succeed and helping them find a resolution to their problem here. And I think that's been the beauty of CRS in terms of bringing to the table, mediating between the parties, or just facilitating a conversation. And how I differentiate is mediation is often about a specific dispute and facilitation is just a little bit more general, and saying, "Let's just have a conversation, moderate a conversation to help the group figure out what it wants to do, right? There may not be a court case, there may not be a very specific thing, but there's a benefit to that. Or providing even training, right? Training on reconciliation, or training on a cultural competency, or training on just how to have a conversation around something. Those are things that I think work very well. The current acting director is a gentleman named Justin Lock. He is doing, I think, a terrific job right now rebuilding  the agency. They are hiring a high number of people, and they're looking to get the people with experience, people who've done this in communities. They've hired some terrific people who have a background in human relations commissions, in working with communities, and worked with a number of parties in a community to help them succeed.

So I think just scaling that up in very important. And that's what CRS is doing. And I think as a country, we need to scale up conflict resolution tools. I just had a conversation with Kristen Hansen, who is with the Civic Health Project here in the Stanford area. She's really thinking about how do we help community mediation centers get engaged or other folks who are third-party interveners work with communities in need. And I think that's what we can do as a whole society. Part of the issue in hyperpolarization, as you and Guy often talk about, is clearly we just need people who are more skilled. It's not easy to have difficult conversations. And whether that's the parties involved being better at talking to each other or being able to access a third party, maybe it's artificial intelligence that can also help us scale this up. That will make a difference. I think Braver Angels can play an important role in this as well, in how we talk across political lines, too. So you know that's what I think is important, is getting the people who are good at this, matched with the communities who are in need of this.

Heidi: Scale's been one of the things that we've really been interested in and concerned about for a long time, and it's something that's always struck me as kind of the Achilles heel of CRS, is that even when it's at its biggest, CRS is tiny, and it's gone through periods I gather, through some really lean times, too. Recently, its numbers have been down very, very low. And the racial incidents have been happening all over all the time. So how much of this can be picked up and is being picked up by state agencies, community mediation centers? Is more of the CRS type stuff going on by others not CRS than used to happen?

Grande: I think there is really good stuff going on, and I'm happy to speak to it. And I think absolutely more needs to occur as well. You mentioned Bill Froehlich and the Divided Community Project where I was the Founding Director. I think folks there have really thought a lot about that infrastructure perspective. Nancy Rogers, who was the former Dean at the law school, wrote a terrific article that we need more CRSs. We need state-based CRSs and local-based CRSs as well. And the Divided Community Project, I think, has helped run academies with the help of certainly with JAMS and AAA - ICDR to fund academies, to bring in communities, colleges, so leadership can get the training to better manage their conflicts and to utilize it, to bring about change. Conflict is the way we get to change—  if we do it well. If we can manage it and work with it to come out with compromise and collaborative solutions around that. So I think there's terrific work being done by Divided Community Project at Ohio State to think about these things. There have been state agencies. Becky Monroe, who had been the acting director of CRS, has started a mediation component in the state of California, for example, and hired an ex-CRSers to be involved in that. New Jersey has created a mediation unit within the Civil Rights Department that is doing terrific work. So there's all that. We have to think about the larger infrastructure as well. That includes community mediation centers, the Trust Network, human relations commissions, all those. There are good things going on in US attorney's offices, other agencies, city managers, police chiefs. There are folks within all those organizations or committees that think about the community relations issues in ways that they might not have decades ago. And that's going to continue to be important.

Heidi:  Let me back up a minute and look at another aspect of CRS that's always struck me as interesting and important. And that is the notion that —and tell me if I've got this right — CRS was formed as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the intent, I think I remember reading in America's Peacemakers, originally was to help communities deal with the conflicts that they expected would develop from that act. And I remember that it was either one of the people we interviewed or somebody in that book, I don't know who, who said that it was an effort to bring the civil rights movement into the government. So there was the implication that the CRS personnel were going to be fighting for the minorities, as opposed to being your traditional "neutral" mediator. And somehow it seems that CRS has always been able to walk that fine line where they have been seen as defending the people of color and LGBTQ populations and are trusted by those populations.  But yet they also are trusted by the white administrations. And I've always thought that that was a really interesting line that you walked and wonder how you do it and how you balance out partiality and impartiality.

Grande: Right. And that is, I would say, a really important aspect of CRS as a dispute resolution organization, right? It's really started, and it is the brainchild of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was a white Southerner politician from the Texas, right, from the south, who — one of his famous quotes was, "Let us reason together."  And he's known as an important negotiator who helped pass some of the most —arguably the most— important legislation of the 20th century, right? Including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Immigration Act of 1965. They fundamentally changed this country. And they led to some of the shifting that is still affecting us today — the political realignment. So it had a huge impact, right, there.

The first director of CRS was a man named Leroy Collins, who is the former governor of Florida. He was a white man, a former governor, who was very much focused on the New South at the time. The second director was the director who is the person who made the comment that you alluded to earlier about bringing the civil rights into the government. It was Roger Wilkins, who was the nephew of Roy Wilkins, who was within the NAACP.  Roger Wilkins was the highest-ranking black official in the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration. He was very focused on civil rights and very focused on economic empowerment. He was very focused on, not just what happens that leads to a protest, that leads to violence — remember in the '60s, there was also those things—but, he was focused on what are the underlying issues that lead to these things happening? H was looking at how you can change the protests and violence by getting at those underlying problems. You can't just you can't run from protest to protest. That won't change the bigger arc of the issue. That was his perspective here. And it was a unique time, and he was a unique leader for the agency in the late '60s there.

I want to respond to the latter portion of your question. It has been, throughout its history, incredibly important that CRS maintain credibility with all the different community parties that it deals with: with the protesters, with different protest groups. In those days whether it was SNCC or whether it was black pastors or whether it was the leadership conference on whoever they were dealing with at the time. It was also important to have credibility with the mayors, with the police chiefs, with the business leaders here.

Conflict is fundamentally still a people issue. It is a human issue. And CRS could not operate if it didn't have credibility or trust of different parties. And I think if I were to boil it down to something fundamental, it is something that any good conflict intervener would speak to here. And actually, what's coming to my mind is another terrific CRS conciliator who goes further later on in his career to be an academic in conflict resolution, Wallace Warfield. Wallace thought a lot about exactly the issue you're talking about, which is making change for the betterment of society, right? You're trying to create social justice. Actually, he uses the words "social justice" earlier than many others do. But also that dispute resolution is often seen as a systems maintenance platform here as well. So how do you think about the relationship—especially at an organization like CRS? 

I think fundamentally, it is still doing what a good mediator does. All the people that you interact with, are you respecting them?  Are making them feel safe in that room with you? Because if you don't have their trust, you're not going to get anything done, fundamentally, as a conciliator there. It is also recognizing that everybody wants to be seen in their identity, whatever they are,  whether they're Asian or they're white or they're black and whatever their role happens to be.

So I think recognizing and helping and seeing people and humanizing them and giving them dignity is all a part of it. I'm thinking now about writing America's Peacemakers and thinking about the work we did in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was killed by not a police officer, but a wannabe watchman kind of person there. And the town of Sanford, which is a very small town in Florida, which has a long history, unfortunately, of difficulties on race issues, was all sudden under the spotlight of the country. And they turned to CRS. Norton Bonaparte, who is the city manager, and the mayor of the city,  they didn't know what to do. But CRS worked with them. Another part of this is a gentleman named Andrew Thomas who had run a mediation center in Rochester, New York for many decades, happens to have moved to Sanford and was working for the Sanford City. So they really use conflict resolution as a way of keeping people safe, right [after the initial incident]. Whether it's the residents of Sanford, whether it's the protesters who were coming in. At that time, it was National Action Network with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. And CRS was introducing a lot of the local officials to the protesters. They were working in a collaborative way to make them feel welcome. There are dozens and dozens of protests. There are other groups there called the Dream Defenders. And they really provide safety and security and also the space for the protestors to protest and make a difference. It was a big story. We may forget. In 2012, the most reported on story — bigger than the presidential reelection that year of President Barack Obama is — what's going on in Sanford, Florida.

And Thomas Battles, who's the conciliator from CRS working there, brings together white and black pastors in an effort to reduce all the rumors and to prevent violence. And I think and helps, along with other CRS conciliators there to have people be able to protest, but not have it done with violence. I think that is important. That is the line. "Please go ahead and protest, but let's see if we can do it in a peaceful manner here." Let's see what we can do. And they really do help the community. And even years laterwhen I talked to Andrew and Thomas, they tell me that the community has continued to figure out ways that their community can move forward with this on their own.  Andrew worked for them for a number of years afterward to move forward from what happened in that time.

Heidi: And as I remember, there wasn't any violence that followed that one incident.

Grande: There were no arrests. There were no bottles broken. I wasn't in every protest, but that's what I think the folks have told me. No arrests, no gunshots. But there were dozens and dozens of protests and thousands and thousands of people who came there. The Florida governor's house was actually taken over by protesters, by the Dream Defenders, demanding — a lot of this was concerning the stand your ground law yeah at the time. There was a lot of coverage. It was a big deal. The Reverend Al Sharpton afterwards said that he thought the way that the community and that they, the protestors, dealt with it, was an important exemplar for the country. And I would make a strong argument it was. They moved from a real tragic situation, right, a really unfortunate tragedy. But people worked, they got together. It really starts the movement. As you may remember, Black Lives Matter gets created after the innocent verdict of George Zimmerman. That's when it gets started. So you can see the trajectory that gets created from that point.

Heidi: So that, in part, answers the question that I was thinking of as you were talking, but there might be more aspects to it, which is, did it result in any long-term structural changes? So the creation of Black Lives Matter would certainly be one. Other changes?  I mean, does the community still have a stand your ground law, or did they get rid of that?

Grande: Unfortunately, the law did not change. Even though part of the result was that the Dream Defenders had the opportunity to present their concerns directly to legislative members, for example. And there was a great movement to change the laws, but it did not happen.  It certainly raised the issue, put a spotlight on it. There certainly has been a spotlight on gun control, which is a very difficult issue here. More focus was made, I think, for Sanford in dealing with some of the unemployment issues that especially black young people were facing. I think there has been an institutional structural effort that started back then in 2012 that has had a positive impact on the community. There was a task force. There was these recommendations. Many of them were passed. And the pastor group continued to meet for a number of years, and it did make a difference for the cross-racial alliances that were created in the city. So I think a lot of good things did happen there and are continuing.

Heidi: You said something a few minutes ago that got me thinking about again, it's the tension between, in a sense, partiality and impartiality, but it's also the status quo and change. And I know that there are some activists who don't like to enter into mediations because they assert that that's just a tool to maintain the status quo. It's a tool of the power structure to subdue us and stop us from protesting and getting the changes that we want to get on the street. And we talked before, a little bit, about whether or not that's a bigger problem now for CRS than it used to be. I expected it would be, which was one of the reasons why I was really interested to do the new round of interviews. But the people I talked to didn't seem to think that there was a big change in attitudes towards mediation and concerns about the power structure. What's your view on that?

Grande: Yeah, Heidi, I understand the skepticism, right? If I'm an activist and I see the offering of any sort of conflict resolution service, I can see it as, "Oh, this is someone just trying to maintain the status quo in some fashion," right? We see it in consumer arbitration clauses. We see it in employment arbitration. This is a broader issue. It's not just in these sort of disputes. And so I can see why someone comes into it that way. 

This was true, to an extent, in Ferguson when there were a lot of newer protesters — which is great! From the perspective of wanting people to care about an issue, and you want people to then take action, to make change, right?  That's the way any change, as you noted, happens. What we noticed in Ferguson, was with a lot of new people on the scene, and it was changing even within the time frame of the Michael Brown shooting, is that folks weren't as familiar with CRS, right? If you're a young person and this is the first time you're protesting, you could see why there'd be a suspicion of the Department of Justice there.

It was less true in other situations, because in many of those situations, it's the community civil rights advocacy organizations who call CRS to come and help in the first place. And it was actually true in Ferguson as well. The first call we got was from someone from an advocacy, a civil rights, organization who called us to say, "Hey, you guys might want to come down. — you guys need to come down here." 

So yeah, there were definitely groups or individuals twho wouldsay, "Get out of here. We don't want you from DOJ in our meeting. This is just for us as protesters." But over time, we had a high number of people stationed in Ferguson. People who were not living at home for the better part of a year, who basically moved to the St. Louis area, you get to meet them and know them, and then you can begin to trust them.

Or they talk to other advocacy organizations, and somebody can say, "Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're good." Right? Because the benefit of CRS or the benefit of any mediator in hyperpolarized conflicts is that you've had experience with them before. You've known them, especially when these sort of conflicts are so difficult. And so that's what has enabled CRS to be involved in these disputes for all these six decades. It  is the fact that CRS has 15 offices throughout the country. The concilators, over time, get to know a lot of the different players, including civil rights organizations, advocacy organizations, neighborhood organizations, city managers, police chiefs, faith leaders, business leaders, other civic leaders. That enables the ability to come in when the weather is bad, right? You can't wait until it is stormy to say, "I'm here to help." It's like, "Who the heck are you?" And everybody's flooding in. So I think part of the distrust problem is that there's a lot of protesters who are new. And CRS personnel, their responsibility and accountability is to get them to know them, get them to understand CRS's services, and see the benefit of that.

And so that's why, I think, to your point, you're not hearing people concerned about it. Most people in these sort of conflicts, if you're actually going to help, they will welcome it.

Heidi: Yeah I think everybody knows how dangerous it is. The other thing that we should make clear, that, is that CRS doesn't try to stop protests. As a matter of fact, they facilitate protests a lot, not meaning encouraging them, but helped the protesters do so in a safe and productive way, train them on how to monitor their own behavior and that kind of thing. So we should go on the record and say that they've been helpful with protests. They're not in the business of trying to shut them down. They're just trying to shut down the violence and trying to shut down the sort of thing like happened in Charlottesville, where you had counter-protests and even a death. \

Grande: Yep. It's an incredibly important distinction that CRS often plays the role of liaison with police, mayor's office and protesters because in low trust, high conflict situations, there's a lot of miscommunication. There's a lot of rumors. And what CRS is doing in those situations is saying "let's prevent unnecessary violence. Let's prevent violence at all, of course." But you are working with the groups. Group wants to protest. CRS is not there to make it happen or not make it happen, but making sure that it's safe, making sure that people are able to do what they want to do.

This was true when Dick Salem went to work with Skokie. He met with the Nazi group when no one else would.  He knew that a lot of bad things can happen if there's just miscommunication there. And Dick was credited very much with preventing harm and injury along with Werner Patterson, his fellow mediator, in that situation many, many years ago. So I think that is an incredibly important distinction. And CRS has had experience working in so many protests that they can sort of ask questions like, "How are you thinking about this here?" to help them do what they're going to do and to do it safely?" And I think police, citizen groups, civic leaders appreciate that, right? They appreciate the fact that there's more communication, even if it's adversarial, even when it's difficult to keep things safe and peaceful.

Heidi: So I'm wondering how this translates into political conflicts that aren't race or sexual orientation-related. I don't remember how broadly CRS's mandate got redefined, but is it defined widely enough that if, for instance, there is unrest over the coming election, either before the election or —heaven forbid a repeat of January 6th—, would this be something that CRS would be involved in?

Grande: Nope, because the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 2009 Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is very explicit on the jurisdictional ability of CRS. The conflict has to do with those identity-based issues and for good reason. You can see why if it becomes political, the role can be highly questioned. So that's a hard line. And that's why we need other groups, I think, to work on such issues, to be moderators and facilitators when it comes to political partisan issues when they become toxic or they become hyperpolarized.

Heidi: Do you see much of that sort of work going on now?

Grande: I think there are a lot of people who are thinking about how do we disagree better? How do we focus on these things constructively? The Rebuild Congress Initiative works on these issues, and I'm happy to talk a little bit about that.

Heidi: Let's talk about that.

Grande: Yeah. Sure. I think one really good example of how the Rebuild Congress Initiative utilizes dispute resolution techniques and frameworks to help — and much of this happened before I started with them— but about five years ago, Bruce Patton, one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes along with J.B. Lyon, the other co-founder of RCI, went to House members and asked them very open questions, right? Most people go to their House member to lobby for something very specific. Instead, RCI went to the House leaders, and any House member —and I think they met with like 50 members or so and said, "Well, what's working well about Congress? And what's not working well around Congress?" And they had some really constructive dialogue. On their own, Derek Kilmer, who was a Congress member who will not be running for reelection, though he's still a Congressmember right now, from Washington, along with William Timmons, a Republican Congress member who later becomes the vice chair, started to have these conversations. RCI facilitated some of their retreats, and they very much use conflict resolution strategies. They asked "how can we create a committee to help Congress function better? And they call it the House Select Committee on Modernization." And they just approach their work very differently. They don't sit on a dais, right? They actually sit at round tables. So that way, what Kilmer will say is " it's hard to have a conversation when you're just looking the back of each other's heads? You want to be actually facing them in conversation.

Most of their agreed-upon items were done in unanimity, right? They threw out the idea of, "Oh, time limits." So they just had conversations amongst them. They actually did a retreat. They were doing a retreat every year to say, "What do we want to accomplish this year?" Very much utilizing the question: how do we create a more inclusive body. And to their credit, they passed nearly 200 items.

They called it "modernization" because you couldn't call it "bipartisanship" because that wouldn't convey it. But they passed all these things to help Congress modernize. And they looked at a number of things — for instance, how they did orientation. For the first time in, maybe, ever, they had freshmen members in this past beginning of Congress attend trainings together, right [Democrats and Republicans together]?

They improved the HR function of the House Select Committee. You know when you listen to Timmins and there's a video that I helped produce, he said, "It's very clear the way they talk to each other [on that committee], the way they cooperate, is unique right now in this moment for this committee. When they go to other places, they cannot do this, right?

Heidi: So I gather they haven't been able to spread that operating procedure beyond their committee.

Grande: So they haven't convinced other committees to behave the same way. I think Timmon said he has not been able to. I think Kilmer and others probably have done their best to bring it further. But, you know, you need that pilot project. You need to demonstrate a model so that when it's appropriate and when you can, it does spread to other committees.

And we've certainly heard about Congress members who actually have worked across the aisle. Historically, it has happened, right? You can go to a number of issues where that's what happened— when Kennedy and Orrin Hatch used to work together, you know, I interned for Senator Ted Kennedy many years ago. And they were very tough partisan folks, but they were able to collaborate on certain issues. We certainly remember when Senator Patsy Murray and Paul Ryan, I think, in 2013, were able to break through the budget stalling then.  When Congress is  functioning well, it is a body where people are compromising and collaborating. You can even go back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, of course. We think of it as a Democratic law, but more Republicans voted for it than Democrats did, both in the House and the Senate, right, because the Southern Democrats didn't vote for it. It was the Northeastern and Midwestern Republicans who did.

Heidi: Interesting!

Grande:  Yeah. So you go back. Throughout history, in order to pass important legislation, much of it often was bipartisan.. And even the Infrastructure Act recently. Biden has helped very much in that regard, right, and for some climate change issues.  The creation of jobs act that was passed as well, and the possibility of creating computer chips, which is incredibly important to our security, was also passed by the Congress and by Biden here as well. So I think that RCI has really helped Congress to utilize conflict resolution techniques in how it works with folks. And in my time there, you know it was actually really powerful to bring together people from across partisan divides and have them have a constructive dialogue. People want to make a difference.

I'd go back to the idea of one of the problems in polarization is that it starts to lead to increased othering. And any effective mediator tries to separate the people from the problem, right?

Heidi: Hah!  I've heard that one before! [It was a key idea in Fisher, Ury, and Patton's book Getting to Yes.]

Grande: Yes, you've heard that one before. Not original from me, but certainly, Roger and Bruce really emphasized that. And I think it's important, right? You want to respect other people. And so, when we would moderate these sort of conversations, you'd ask a question and say, "Tell us what in your background makes you proud to be an American." "Tell us what you would like to see to happen for America in the future." And we did this with people from the far right to the far left. But then they're hearing each other, right? They're hearing each other's stories. There's something there when they're in the room together actually listening to each other, talk around an issue. That can help them, I think, talk more reasonably with each other, create a sense of trust, and a sense of common ground, and figuring out, "Well, what can we do with each other?" That's the important thing.

And yes, you know unfortunately, in a time of polarization, we're going to need to disagree better. Let's not pretend to come to some sort of agreement when it's not possible on an issue. But you can still understand each other better, right? That's important. And can you just keep communication channels strong for when the time comes, when you will need to talk to each other.

I was struck by one of the sessions when we brought folks together. They said, "Oh, I used to work with those organizations, you know from the right to the left, but haven't been able to for the last few years. And it's important that they continue to be in conversation, even though they fundamentally disagree on so many things, or they are in conflict.  They are in public criticizing each other because that's part of how they advocate. But that doesn't mean they still shouldn't be talking, because there will be moments on whatever it is, immigration, gun control, how do we deal with the fentanyl crisis, where we actually do need, I mean, for the country's sake, to figure it out.

Heidi: Explain to me, I'm confused about the relationship between the Rebuilding Congress Initiative and the House Select Committee on Modernization. Were they intertwined?

Grande: No.

Heidi: Were they completely separate?

Grande: They were completely separate. I think you know RCI plays a resource to them. And the committee talked to several organizations and several people to help them think through how they wanted to approach their committee work. So they did talk to psychologists and coaches and different folks because they wanted to operate differently than the standard committee. And folks from RCI played a resource role in that and were asked to facilitate some conversations of the committee, for example, provide some background on things.

Heidi: So I'm just curious about the name Rebuild Congress. That sounds like something that would happen within Congress, not something that would happen outside. What was the original intent of that program?

Grande: Yeah. And my understanding of it was that Congress is incredibly important to the functioning of our democracy, right? This is the people's house. And if Congress is functioning well, the country is better off —passing legislation, being the voice of the people, more so than the judiciary or the executive, right? This is where people are actually represented. And I think the founders of RCI and many of the folks who have worked there since were really focused on the fact that, "Hey, if this is such a linchpin to American democracy, let's see how we can be supportive, helpful to Congress to making it so." 

Heidi: Okay. So the primary goal was helping Congress do its job better.

Grande: Yeah. It certainly broadened over time. In my time there, I worked with different groups, different business leaders, black faith leaders. I think the idea there is how we make change in Congress is also reflective of those who are represented and those who care about Congress as well.

Heidi: Let's go back a little bit to your statement that we need to learn how to disagree better. When we talked before, we talked about Governor Cox's Disagree Better campaign. He started it when he was chair of the National Governors Association, which is a role, I think, that has now been taken over by Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who's continuing that initiative, and they're spreading it. But beyond that, what do you think both politicians need to do, and the general American public needs to do, to disagree better? What does that mean?

Grande: Well, we'll start with what you raised with Spencer Cox and Jared Polis. I think we need to see our political leaders model disagreement well, that they're not making personal insults when they are criticizing someone who holds the position on the other side. In Utah, in the governor's race, both candidates agree that they will uphold the election results.  So I think that sort of modeling of what to do in the political arena is one that brings us closer to cultural norms about how we disagree.

It's one of those fundamental things. We, as a society, are going to need to actively listen better to each other. In moments of othering and in this us-and-them world, nobody is thinking about listening to the other side. We're all preparing our argument in response to the other side, right? We're simplifying, rather than complexifying ,here. That's why any work of mediation  and facilitation that helps people be in an environment where people feel emotionally safe, not operating out of fear, not operating out of anger, but operating even from a place would call curiosity.

Heidi: How do you do that?  How do you get them there?

Grande: I think you can do that when you're with them in a group and you talk with them, and you say "what are you trying to accomplish here?" Most people want to understand better. You're like, "I don't get why that person thinks that way. Well, let's see what we can figure out. Let's ask them. But we're often on stage, especially political officials, where they are incentivized very differently, right?

We've talked about this in the past. I mean, I absolutely think we need to increase our skill level to disagree, increase our skill level in cooperating. That's fundamental. In a time where we are more at odds with each other, we're going to need to do that. We're going to have to prevent things like reactive devaluation from happening. 

Heidi: Explain what that means, please.

Grande: Reactive devaluation is when I don't like an idea because of who is saying it, not because the idea is bad. If I'm angry with my wife and she makes a suggestion of what I want to do, well, I don't judge the idea on its merits. I just don't like it because my wife, who I'm angry at, just said it to me. And I think that's not so uncommon experience.

And that happens in lots of the research with Israel and Palestine, for example. If you told a citizen, "This is an idea from the other side," they'll reject it. But if you told them it's an idea from their side, they'll like it! When we're really in the throes of hyperpolarization, we are likely to be plagued and victimized by reactive evaluation.

And that's just one of many phenomena. Kahneman and Tversky, two folks who did a lot on rationality in psychology and economics, talked about it. There are all these behaviors that we have that aren't rational, but because of the way the human mind works, we are likely to succumb to them. So I do think there's a lot we need to do on that end for sure.

And we also need to focus on improving our democracy, you know on the structural changes it takes to make it better. It means voting rights, right? Making sure people have the right to vote. It means thinking about having a multi-member districts, which means that in a certain area, you vote and then there's a percentage representation within the area versus single districts.

I don't want this to be a democratic conversation, but top two primary, right? In California, we're having a senatorial primary, and there are three Democratic candidates— Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, and Katie Porter, all Democrats. Steve Garvey is the Republican. I'm not sure it's a perfect example, but I'm just trying to demonstrate what top two means. The top two candidates from this primary will then go to the election in November.

Heidi: So it's a nonpartisan primary? I

Grande: t's a nonpartisan primary, which could lead to not going from the extremes or wings of any party, but will potentially help create representatives that really may truly more represent the population, because then you're not just having the Democrat and the Republican at the far end.  It could be two Democrats, right? And it will likely be two Democrats. We'll see. I don't want to predict. I'm not a political pundit here. But that's a way that you can do it. And there's open primaries, right, where people can switch, declare themselves independent, and do that work, or you can just vote for whoever. And the benefits is that you may be getting more toward a better representation of the people as a whole versus who might come out. So there are all these things I think you can do structurally. We have to do things like make sure poll workers are safe, right? You've got to do all these things to make sure the democracy works. The Electoral Reform Act where it should make it less likely that someone can game the system or to get rid of vagueness.

So I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the structural side of things that can make a democracy, especially in America's case, a multiracial democracy, work better here.

Heidi: And what besides structure? It strikes me that there's a lot of other things. My mind says "social work," but I don't mean social work in the traditional ""social work" sense. But we have to work on relations between people. I think there's perhaps been overreliance, and I've been really interested in some of these structural changes too. But I think some of the people who are advocating them think they're going to be the one-stop solution that if we can just get ranked-choice voting, then everything else will work. And I'm quite dubious. We need to work on a lot of other things too.

Grande:  Yeah. Can we improve the skill level of folks and how they manage conflict, how they have conversations. I also would go back to the idea of how do we scale up third-party interveners at the community level, at the neighborhood level? How do we utilize community mediation centers better? How do we utilize ideas from Peace Tech or technology that brings people together rather than dividing them? 

I do think we have to work on that. There's that whole technology, the social media question, right? In the old days, in TV, "if it bleeds, it leads, right? Violence would be the story that would lead it. In social media, what's sticky is what divides leads, right? So I don't think this is necessarily the root cause of all our conflict, but it is for sure a major exacerbator of it, a magnifier of it. So it has to be dealt with. We as a society have to figure out how to deal with it. Social media is relatively new, even though it's, for sure, in our lives every day all around the world.  And it's caused exacerbated division and has hurt democracy. I don't think that would be a surprise to anyone. And so therefore, we've got to figure out how to make it less so and to do the opposite.

We need to learn how does it can be used in positive ways — to help bring us together in positive ways, which it does, which social media does. With it, we have the ability to talk to relatives everywhere, to make new friendships across lines. I think we have to think about large-scale change that helps bring people together, versus tearing them apart.

My wife is a marriage and family therapist, and the way we view mental health today is different than it was three decades ago. It was so difficult to go see a therapist. We have become more accepting of wellness from a mental health standpoint, which is a really positive thing. Let's bring that idea to mediation and community dysfunction, the more willingness and openness to using mediators and facilitators as well. That would be a way, I think, that we structurally can help deal with this problem that we're facing today.

Heidi: You're implying something really interesting that I haven't heard anybody say before, if I'm interpreting you right. I'm hearing that it used to be that there was a stigma about going to a psychiatrist or psychologist. You kept it secret. And now you don't need to so much anymore. But you think there's a still a stigma to going to a mediator?

Grande: I would say there might be a stigma to saying we need outside help, right? I think i think the field of conflict resolution can do better on marketing. You know In terms of getting the word out there. It's also a mom-and-pop industry, for the most part. So you don't get big brands of mediation. JAMS and AAA on the commercial side are very big. Community mediation centers are all tiny little centers.

Heidi: And they're volunteer mostly. 

Grande: But they do great work, right? I mean, NAFCM represents all the community mediation centers, and they're trying to, I think, doing a good job of trying to get the word out as well. But I do think we need to fund it better. We need to get the word out more so people know how to use it. There's all these matching services, right, for everything else in the world, to finding better a handy person. You know I can go to the Task Rabbit now, right, and find somebody to come fix something. I think we need to help people figure out they need [in terms of conflict resolution help] and connect them to the resource to help that way too.

Heidi: Great idea! So this leads into something that we talked about before and we haven't gotten to here is the importance of fighting some of these polarization battles locally, as opposed to nationally. And the thing that you pointed out before is that people are more likely to be willing to sit down with their neighbors, even though their neighbors may be politically different than they are. But they're all members of the same community. Theyt're faced with the same problems. Let's come together and hash it out —it is more likely to work at a local level than the national level. It may work at the national level, too, but it's harder.

Grande: Right. I think you're onto something there, Heidi, for sure. We have a healthier community or a healthier society if we're not all focused on what's going on in our national government, where we often have much less control. But we have become preoccupied with [the national scene], thanks maybe partly, to social media and streaming and cable and talk shows and all that. But our health, our individual health even, isn't helped by this.  I've been watching the Blue Zones on Netflix, which is about people who live to 100s because they're often connected to people and feel supported by people in their neighborhood, right?  They're having good conversations with them here. So yes, you can have more change in your local neighborhood. I think that's really key because that's where we feel more closely connected to. Now, you know Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, decries the loss of that over decades, for example. And the research shows that we often don't know who's living across the street or on the left and right of us now, more than ever. So to the extent that we can increase that, sometimes it's because our kids go to a neighborhood school. There are communities that are planned really well, so that where you live is where you shop, is where you see people, and you're having coffee, you're walking. Absolutely. I think that's critical.

I think very highly of Next Door. I think they bring people and other listers or ways that connect people, not thousands and thousands of miles away, but two blocks away. I worked a little bit next doo,r to be open. Joseph Bocelli, who works at Nextdoor, has organized a national campaign about helping your neighbors shovel snow, right? And everybody needs it. There are a lot of folks who can't do it easily. And he's finding ways of helping neighbors help each other. Isn't that a wonderful thing? It doesn't matter whether they're Democrat or Republican or whatever. You're just trying to help your neighbor shovel the snow before it impairs your access to the street and all. And very successfully doing so. So I think that's key. Whatever we can do to get us in a positive relationship.  Because we need to celebrate. There's something I would call community effervescence.  We feel happier when we're doing something positive. Whether it's like — I do line dancing in my community or people or tennis. Tennis has the longest extension of a healthy life as compared to any sport.  But those sort of things connect you with others on a regular basis. Exercise is then fun and you're meeting people versus, "Oh, I got to go do an hour of running." And you're more likely to do it. You're just more likely to do it. So I think that you know community is the answer out of this because we are then getting to know someone in a deeper way. And we're getting to know them here.

Something you know we've talked about in the past, across these divides, you know is true in South Africa with how Mandela and Desmond Tutu, there's an example of seemingly an intractable dispute, and yet they peacefully were able to shift from an all-white government to a mixed one.  And you talked about how Mandela really said, "You needed to give a vision for all the people South Africa." It wasn't that you were trying to kick one side out. If the answer was, "We're kicking out all the white people here," there would have been a lot more resistance.  Now there was still a lot of resistance. I'm not minimizing that. But you're giving a vision that everybody can buy into.

And I think you know one of the things that dispute resolution does well is what's our common ground?  What's our vision? Or what's our shared vision for the future that we can all buy into? I think that's a hugely important piece of what we as mediators, negotiators, facilitators can help a group identify. And it is also the answer out of this polarization issue. How is this going to be? It's much harder to find common ground if we don't trust each other. And trust is the currency that we desperately need in order to get to a more harmonious society. Because if we don't have trust, it's going to take a long, long time.

Heidi: So it strikes me that first, you've got to get the people in the room. Then you've got to get them listening. Once you get them listening, they can start to develop understanding and trust. Then you can start finding common ground.  I've been involved in some online conversations lately because I've been talking a lot like you are here. And I have encountered with this notion that the assertion that we can create a society that everybody will want to live in is poppycock. It's academic idealism. These people say that there's always going to be winners and losers, and you want to always fight to be on top. What do you say to that?

Grande: Hey,  I went to law school with the idea of becoming a civil rights lawyer, and one of my heroes is Thurgood Marshall. One of my heroes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These are people who fought in the courtroom. Fighting is not the problem, right?   It's fighting in the least violent way possible, I think, that is going to make the difference. So I believe in advocacy. I think that's changed the world for the better here. And that's what makes America a special place to me, in that we are able to fight for America to live up to the promise that was made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Even as we're going through it, you can easily point to the flaws or the imperfections throughout our history here. I would absolutely say that. And as we fight and as we fight more fairly, you need to be able to communicate one-on-one. You need to communicate within your own house. We know our houses are divided at times and within your neighborhood and within your city.

So again, this goes back to, I think, can we give each other respect? Can we make each other feel safe even as we're disagreeing? In his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," King talks specifically about the importance of negotiation. He talks about how he'd been trying. He stressed that they'd been trying. But the white ministers were criticizing what they were doing. He says, "But you know at some point, you got to fight.  You can't just keep you just can't keep doing it." I think they're the yin and yang of each other to a certain extent. You need both.  And for us to move towards a harmonious society, we have to fight for what we believe in, hopefully do it in a way that's nonviolent. I mean, the whole civil rights movement, right? If we think about Martin Luther King, or Andrew Young, who I've spoken to He was very much he was a strong believer in negotiation. He was often King's negotiating representative in many of these protests here. And we think about Gandhi, of course, his whole nonviolence. And we just talked about South Africa, where through nonviolence, they were able to achieve their means.

I think Clarence Jones, who was Martin Luther King's attorney who wrote the Forward to America's Peacemakers, one of his highest compliments was that CRS, he felt, was an encapsulation of the movement, that they were trying to do nonviolence. And I think I would go back to what you said earlier around Roger Wilkins saying, "you know we're bringing civil rights into the government." But philosophically, it's the idea that we should resolve our conflicts in a peaceful dialogue-based manner.

I think that part, we can all agree to.

Heidi: I agree. And the other distinction that I think I would make is that you can fight, but you can still likely find common ground on something. So there's some things that you're going to fight over.

Grande: Absolutely.

Heidi: And there's some things that you can negotiate over.

Grande: Absolutely.

Heidi: And Gandhi had this stepwise process where he negotiated as much as he could. And when he came to a wall, then he would stop and he'd have a period of reflection and regrouping. And then they'd have a demonstration where they would engage in nonviolent protest again. And then after a while, they'd stop and try to negotiate. So it was a back and forth between negotiation and protest. And it was a stepwise movement towards progress as opposed to nonstop protest where you just make the other side angrier and angrier and create a stronger and stronger pushback against you. And then you just end up digging the hole deeper and deeper and you're not going to make progress. So I think it's important to distinguish between agreeing on everything and recognizing that there may be some things that we can agree on when there's other things that we won't.

Grande: I agree entirely. This is true in every negotiation, really, whether it's with your family or with a family member. There are certain things you're going to agree to and certain things you would disagree to. Can we get away from reactive devaluation here? This happens in industry. Here I am at Stanford in Silicon Valley. Apple and Adobe could be suing each other, but they're also collaborating on other projects at the same time.  It's a very common thing that you can go from collaborator and adversary, and you're doing it at the same time with different departments.

One point I'd add to it is you know there's the distinction Mary Parker Follet made that Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton picked up on was the distinction between positions versus interests here. What you're saying, that is true when we can trust each other. That makes it easier, or when we can communicate rationally with each other, maybe a little lower threshold, you know, than the trust and relationship, all those things. The more adversarial you are with each other, the greater the demonization, the more likely I'm stuck to positions. 

It could be any issue.  Could be gun control. And you say, "No!" right? And that's what's happened. They think everything is slippery slope. We can't talk about all the intricacies that go on into that. So if you're that adversarial, it's hard to do exactly what you're saying, which is find where we can agree and find where we disagree. And also, we can't even talk about our interests, our varying interests. And some of those interests, we may just weigh differently. You know safety, or family tradition. There are all these things people care about. We're not opposed to any of them, per se. Our differences are often in the prioritization of them. But we can't get there if we see the other side as the enemy. That's what we are, you know, that's what we as dispute resolution practitioners emphasize.

We can see there is a path forward, really. And there are all these barriers that keep us from getting there. The psychological aspects of demonization, the structural issues, the bureaucracy that makes it hard for an institution to change, the inefficiencies of negotiation. We're going to bluff. We're going to stall. There are all these inefficiencies. And I almost want to throw in social media or technology as another category. I almost want to. But these are all things that make it hard for us to come to reasonable agreements or even to talk at all. But that's the journey, right? We can do it if we can help with this.

And you know I'll go back to your original question, which is, you know are things so bad? The fact that what was revealed was this base within the Republican Party, we call it MAGA. I will be honest. Maybe I'm in my bubble in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's like, "Wow, I didn't think it was that big or that boisterous or that loud." And it was always there. It's not like it didn't exist before Trump got elected president. And I've had my experiences with racism growing up as a Chinese-American. When I would travel to certain places, and people would say not nice things or ignorant things to me. And you know I constantly think of, "Oh, I wish this had never happened." But if I use the Jungian analogy, it's the shadow brought to light. It is something that has existed in our society from slavery to Civil War to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to these things. And maybe we just have to deal with it and deal with it openly. And that's maybe a good thing. Now, it may not be easy, but maybe this is what we need to do to get to that multiracial democracy. And that's one thought. I mean, I think it's unavoidable. At this point, I think we're going to have to deal with it.

Heidi: I think it's very clear we're going to have to deal with it because, as I've said in the past, the other side, which ever side you're on, the other side is not going to go away. So we're going to have to learn to live with them. I think the big difference now, the reason it was easier for us to not see the other side is that we used to all watch the same three TV channels. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. And it didn't matter who you were, you watched Walter Cronkite, and you believed him. And now we've got millions of TV channels and social media outlets. And I'm really frightened by the numbers that I see of the people who get all of their news from Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. So it just makes whatever you're seeing, you're seeing so much more of it. And you're so convinced that your side is right and the other side is wrong. And as you say, if it divides, it leads. And it's really making dealing with it way, way, way more difficult, but totally essential.

Grande: Yeah. And I appreciate what you're saying is that we see more of it now, because back in the day, you know, there was also the whole Reagan doctrine that made it easier to have different viewpoints on radio too. All of a sudden, things kept opening, right? We only had CBS, NBC, and ABC, and then all of a sudden, there's radio, there's cable. And clearly, the Internet has given megaphones to anyone. It doesn't mean you're being listened to, but everything's there.

I would say a couple of things. One, it clearly was always there before. It's just that we didn't see it. We didn't hear it. We were in a bubble of a different sort in those sort of days. And also, I would say, though, you know that's a rare part of a world history.  If you went back earlier to revolutionary times, people had printed their own newspapers. Jefferson and Adams were going at it and saying really nasty things about each other for much of their lives. So it was actually a blip at some level that we actually had this moment where everybody watched the same three channels. It was actually kind of an unusual time in our history, which makes sense when you start to go further back here.

01:30:55.000 And the one point I also want to make is whenever, and I'm not trying to be purely symmetrical about it, but I think, I hope, there's nothing here. And I think we need to be careful not to demonize the other side. I think bringing it to light is not right. I think those in the right feel like, "Oh, I'm always being accused of racism, right, if I'm a Republican, right? Or I'm just being told what's wrong here." And you can start to understand why "owning the libs" becomes important at some level here. So I think it's incredibly important not to just say, "Oh, well, they are bad. I think we all have to constantly work understanding how the other side feels. 

Because you know the numbers, we're not quite sure.  10 to 12 million people who voted for Obama voted for Trump. So there is clearly a group of out there who voted for Trump, who also voted for Obama, right? And so there are people who want to change, right? So I do think we all have to spend time understanding those who I might disagree with and to see their positions and understand, "No, there's a lot more going on. I'm missing something. I need to continue to learn." And I think that's incredibly important, no matter which of the many sides you are on. And there's not just two sides to this. There are many sides.

And I think that's an important thing that we in conflict resolution bring, is that it's never "us versus them," really. There are multiple factions within each side. At the very least, there are all these other things going on. We believe the process of complexifying will help lead to a better answer at some level, that going deeper and truly understanding something will help.

Heidi: So let me end by asking you, are you optimistic about whether or not these are problems we're going to be able to solve or are things looking really bleak and we're in real trouble?

Grande: So I would say two things. I'm on the optimistic side in the sense that that's just the way I am to a certain extent. But I want to qualify that by saying, "There's a lot of bad signs out there around our democracy, around being a multiracial democracy, around this coming election.  And so those are incredibly concerning here. I'm optimistic in the sense that I think that energy of optimism is one that we as individuals, communities, and a country needs, right? Because I think in my experience in conflict resolution, I've already talked about how it's important to feel emotionally safe in a room, to feel respected. But in any conflict, what I think is an important third ingredient there is being, if not optimistic, hopeful. Right? We know this. Negativity as we age is not good. It doesn't help you. It doesn't help you live a longer life or a healthier life or being happy day-to-day.

So I don't know if there's a choice, I feel like I have a choice. I feel like you almost have to be optimistic, yet you can't be blind to the deep challenges we face as a society. But I also would say I'm hopeful because I want something to go right. I want us to become a better multiracial democracy, recognizing that even as I'm hopeful, I recognize that, "Oh, something bad could happen if the hope turns out not to be true." But yeah, overall, I think there's a lot you know that says America has dealt with worse or similarly difficult situation and comes through.

And you can go around the world and you can look at American history and say, "you know we have dealt with wars and we have dealt with injustice, racial injustice, social injustice. And you know we talked a bit about South Africa, and I could touch more about in Ireland or Columbia, what they were able to accomplish and say it's because people were able to create a sense of dignity for all within their community and be able to see the vision, a shared vision.

And I think that's where I would end it by saying, "That's what we need to constantly focus on. That will get us to where we need to go to as a society."

Heidi: Wonderful. We just published a lovely article, I thought, by a woman named Anne Leslie, who actually works for IBM in London, I believe. And she made a distinction between optimism and hope yeah and said, "Optimism is the belief that everything's going to work out the way you want it." And hope is the notion that things could possibly work out the way you want it.  And both optimism and pessimism, she said, "Take you out of the picture. It's just what's going to happen independent of you doing anything.  Hope gets you in the picture and implies that you have a role to play in bringing about whatever it is that you want. And she said, "I choose to think that I have a role, no matter how small it is, that it matters what I think, and it matters what I do." I think that notion of hope and agency is really important.

Grande: And if everybody had a little bit of hope and thought if we could just get to know our neighbors a little bit better and start talking about our local problems and dealing with things differently on our street, we can make our own lives better locally, and that's what really matters. And then eventually, everything else will sort itself out.

Grande: I've heard the distinction, and I agree with the agency idea.   I think you said it very artfully, which is hope is a little bit more about agency. I still think optimism is important, and I won't let go of the fact that you know but I very much agree with it. I think even the way I alluded to it was hope is something where you understand that things might not go wrong. And I like your amendment to that, which is it gives you agency, and you can argue that hope is more realistic than optimism. You can make that argument for sure. But the last thing I would add to that is saying, it's really good to be hopeful. I certainly know people who are hopeful, who are connected to their community,  whatever ways they do it, they turn down noise. We don't need everyone focused on congressional dysfunction. We really don't need everybody thinking about it.  It was my job or my job still to work on these things, to think about and work on these issues of political dysfunction or larger country dysfunction. But most people just want to live their lives. And I think many people are doing just that.

And I think one thing is we talked about we've talked about in the past, the benefit in our highly noisy, attention-deficit society is we don't want people acting mindlessly. We don't want people acting in a way that is not aware of what's going on within themselves, first of all, right? I think a lot of this work means before you act, really understand what's going on with you. Because if you find yourself in the throes of demonization or us-versus-them and you act out of that, you are acting, in my estimation, mindlessly, and you may be doing harm to others and maybe even yourself. To the extent that we can take a step back from all the noise and the conflict and we can remove ourselves, right, mentally, emotionally, that's helpful. And meditation can do that. Yoga can do that. Tai Chi can do that. Whatever it is that one does. Running can do that.

Heidi: You know tennis can do that.
 

Grande: Yea, tennis can do that. Yeah. Well, with tennis, you got to really focus on the ball. You can't be thinking about too many other things, right? So that is going to be good for us at the individual level, and yes, on the societal level. That's why I think pickleball could save America, right?

But no, I just think from a cultural norm standpoint, I think we want to build a society where people are pausing, especially in the light of our phones just constantly grabbing at our attention here as well.

And this may be a little bit out of order for this interview. We've talked in the past about cultural norms and the importance of media. One thing we haven't talked about that we did talk in the past is how Search for Common Ground does a really terrific job internationally about creating media to bring people together, to send messages that we can cooperate across tribal differences (for instance, in Rwanda) that we can humanize the person that we have been in conflict with, that we have literally been at war with here. And I think that's going to be important in a world where we don't have just three networks. But you know what am I thinking of? This is US. It was an ABC television show, Ted Lasso. There are shows that really do show the common vision. Sports does a good job at some level sometimes of doing that as well.

And sports is a good example of healthy teaming because psychologically, we were built from evolution to be us versus them, right? It's a natural human response. But the question is, can we do it in a healthy way? I think Search for Common Ground has done a really good media strategy of helping countries with radio shows, talk shows, plays, and all that. And that's something that we remember. Ally McBeal, an old law show, had a mediator on it. And people watched it and said  "Oh, that's kind of cool," right? So I think having those sort of norms, having a psychologist in that marriage story, the one with Scarlett Johansson had a mediator in it. You know, even in a divorce, a divorce is an interesting example of people who are adversarial who are married to each other, right? And yet, they hate each other. They can hate each other. People can hate each other so much. But we can learn and we can figure out ways to move forward, even in the most difficult of personal or community circumstances. So that's one more piece I'd throw into it as something to think about from the dispute resolution perspective, but as we think about it, what do we as a society need to do? And it's a good example of scale-up, which we talked about earlier.

Heidi:  And I've been really impressed with what Kristen Hansen's been doing at the Civic Health Project along those lines and using media. And she's looking at more ways of doing it. And they had a contest. I don't remember what it was called, the democracy promotion contest that did a lot of media spots. It was interesting.

Grande:  And Stanford had a really good competition about how to deal with polarization using social media. So there was a challenge where academics proposed an experiment for how to deal with polarization that exists and came up with some really fascinating approaches to how to decrease adversarialism and hate as well. So there's good stuff going out there, and we just need to keep it going and scale it, right?

Heidi: Totally agree. Well, I just want to thank you tremendously. Again, this has been wonderful. I could talk to you all day.

Grande: This has been great for me, Heidi.  I'm thinking a lot about this stuff... There was a person who's led the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, Jan Martinez, who's led it for 20 years and has done a really amazing job at building this program up. And I feel very lucky and privileged to be her successor. And for me, you know, why I've enjoyed talking to you is I'm trying to really think through how can I best leverage this program from a leadership position to make an impact on these issues, to make a difference on the polarization that exists in our country, at our community level? And what can this center do to be constructive and help us move forward? So you know I'm looking forward to my time here as taking a lay of the land and then really saying, "Let's see what we can do. Let's see what the center can do to help law students, help lawyers because they play an important role, rule of law, and they play an important role as leaders in the community. And also, let's think about how technology, right? Silicon Valley is about technology. What can it contribute to combating polarization here? And what can we do as a center on the issues of the day— to be engaged with the communities out there to see what we could do? So thank you. Actually, I appreciate at least being able to say that in our interview as well.