Martin Carcasson talks with Guy and Heidi Burgess About Democracy, Deliberation, Impartiality and More

Heidi: Hi, this is Heidi Burgess, and I'm sitting next to my partner in everything, Guy Burgess. And today we're talking with Martin Carcasson, who is the director of the Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) at Colorado State University, and you're also Professor of Communications Studies at CSU.  Martin's been circling around the same areas that we've been circling around for years. And this is actually the first time that we've met face-to-face. And we're delighted to do that. And delighted you'll take the time to talk to us. So I guess my first question is to ask you to give us a little bit of your background and what you're doing with your center and what you're passionate about.

Martin: Yeah, thanks. So thanks for having me. It's a great chance to talk to you and certainly have engaged your work for many years. So yeah, my initial academic training going back 25 years or so in communication studies was in a subdiscipline of argumentation. So really digging in to how do you make distinctions between strong arguments and weak arguments. And that gets into a lot of things like inherent logic and fallacies and quality of evidence and credibility. But then also broadly, the rhetorical studies training area inherently focuses on narratives and the power of emotions and the power of values. So how do we talk to each other about tough issues has always been the focus of my work.

I've also always been particularly interested in the inherent tension between the public and experts in a democracy. And what's the role of each? And have always had this perspective that we need both. There needs to be this healthy tension. There's a danger if either side of that dominates too much. But how do we think about weaving those together? 

My early work in grad school was much more focused on national politics and actually primarily presidential politics. I was trained as a rhetorical critic, analyzing primarily presidential speeches. My dissertation looked at presidents from Johnson to Clinton, on how they talk about poverty and welfare issues? What stories did they tell? What arguments did they make?  Comparing that to the experts, but also the political realities. And I started getting more and more frustrated with our national political system because it seemed designed very much to win elections and gain power, not so designed to actually solve problems that we care about.

So when I got the job at CSU, which is now 20 years ago, I shifted from national to local. And I also shifted from being a critic, talking about how other people talk about things to become much more of a practitioner.   And starting with my classes, and the CPD grew out of my classes, a lot of it was looking at how people weren't having the conversations they felt they needed to have, the tough conversations we need to have to be able to take on our shared problems more productively in a diverse democracy. So then I basically started experimenting on, "Okay, how can I, as a facilitator, help people have better conversations?"

 I did that in classes first, and it worked pretty well.  And then the CPD became this experiment of like, "Okay, can we take these concepts that work in class?" And obviously, in class, you have the added power, If they don't talk the way you want them to talk, they get a bad grade. It's a little bit easier to redirect behavior in positive ways when you have grading power.  So the CPD was an experiment of, "okay, can we play this out in the community?"

I started the CPD 18 years ago. We've run about over 500 meetings. I should always remember this date, but somewhere around seven or eight years ago, we actually became fee-for-service. So we now get hired by the city, the county, the school district, community organizations, the university to design and run meetings. And the heart of this is, one of the classes I teach every semester, I'm training primarily undergraduate students as facilitators with others, the leadership team in the CPD. And they're the ones that are running these meetings,   So 100 people might show up to talk about an issue on a city ordinance or something like that. And I've got the people power to split those 100 people into 15 different tables and normally have two students at every table, one facilitating, one note-taking, trained generally in deliberation and conflict management, and also trained specifically on that topic and trained on a process, a often unique process we designed just to help us have a better conversation on that issue. So I'll stop there. There's a lot that we can play off of.

Heidi:  Great! I was very lucky that we were in a meeting together yesterday, and some of the material that was sent out before that meeting alerted me to some of the things that you've written in the past that I hadn't seen before. So I read through it and got a number of ideas of things that I wanted to ask you about. One of them in there is you talked a lot about a "wicked problem mindset" and that forms part of the basis of the way you train students to deal with these issues and do it yourself. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is, why it's important, how it works?

Martin: Sure. Yeah. So the concept of wicked problems has been around for a little bit over 50 years. Actually, the first article was written the year I was born, so it's easy for me to remember. And the story I heard about it was it was developed initially by civic engineers, city planner types. And they realized as they started working for cities that the problems they were trained to solve in school and the problems they were asked to solve in their community were very different. So they actually initially came up with this distinction between a tame problem and a wicked problem. Tame problem could be very, very complex, but there was a right answer,   It was a technical problem, like how to build a bridge. The image that always pops in my head, is from Apollo 13, which is one of my favorite movies. That scene in Apollo 13 where they had to figure out the filter that was round. How does it fit in the other spaceship where the filter's square. And they got all the engineers together in a room. And there was a right answer. And to solve tame problems, you get smart people together. You get the right answer. And really, the only issue is how do we implement that solution as efficiently as possible.

But they realize working with cities is different. In the problems they're asking us to solve, there's inherently multiple underlying values to those problems, a lot of unintended consequences, and then the people that they're dealing with all rank the importance of those values differently. So there was no technical answer. There was no right way. So I play off of that. I tend to do it a little bit differently than most, because instead of seeing wicked problems as a category or a type of problem, I like to see it more as a lens through which to see problems. It's a tool in your toolkit that you can step back and say, "Okay, if I look at this as a wicked problem, how might that change the conversation? How might that open up some space for us to be able to maneuver?"

A big part of my work that I can get into more if you all like, I did this deep dive into social psychology and brain science about eight, nine years ago to help inform my practice. One of the ways I explain what I do is I'm an impartial process designer, facilitator, who seeks to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and tap into the best of human nature. And Wicked Problems is a key aspect of that, because the basic idea is I'm trying to shift people from making the easy assumption that problems are caused by wicked people — bad people with bad values — and actually transfer the wickedness to the problem. Because when we see that the problem is the issues that we care about, inherently multiple underlining values that don't fit together, and we all rank them differently, the job we have, as communities, is how do we figure out a way to balance these things?  How do we have the tough conversation about that? How do we recalibrate and reshift which ones are more important? Ideally, we figure out how to transcend these tensions and create win-wins, and think differently.  Fisher and Ury, I'm sure y'all are familiar with Getting to Yes, has a  chapter on moving from positions to interests. That is inherently how I think about wicked problems. How do we get away from these positions, identify the underlining values that people care about, put them on the table, and then equip people with a process that helps them work through those.

And what I see when you do this well, I think a wicked-person framework, which is much more natural to us — we're wired for us versus them. We love our heroes and our victims and our villains. When we shift from wicked people to wicked problems, we're shifting from triggering those nasty biases and quirks of human nature to actually tapping into the best of human nature. I do believe in some of my research that a big advantage of humans are we're really creative problem solvers when put in a good situation to do that.

And the sad thing about our politics is how rarely we're put into good situations.  We're often provided simple answers, especially in a two-party system. We always have the easy narrative of the other side is the problem thing.  So that's how we use Wicked Problems. Every time I start an issue, my first job is to say, "Okay, what are all the things people care about?" How do I make sense of the noise, all the perspectives out there and identify that and lay them out? And then that starts this process of how do we transform these conversations into how do we better negotiate these tensions versus framing things as if there is no tension. Our brains want to think one value at a time. My biggest advice to my students, or when I work in workshops, is anytime an issue is framed around one value, alarm bells should go off. Because it's inherently framed as my side has a good value, and then we're defining the other side as being against a value.

Monica Guzman has a great TED Talk, "How Curiosity Will Save Us" that talks about that. We love to define the people we disagree with by what they're against. Because that makes us feel really good about ourselves, So how do we shift that and develop different ways of engaging these tough issues?

Heidi: So what does this process look like? I'm sure when people come in the door, they're already raring to go, to wave their flags and make sure everybody knows they're the "good guys" and the other guys over there are the "bad guys." So how do you get them to start looking at it differently?

Martin: Yeah. The meetings we run have a lot of different bells and whistles that we put together to, hopefully, help us avoid triggering the worst of human nature and tapping the best. So we often talk from the front of the room. I often talk a little bit about wicked problems and those type of things and tap into that. We have a set of ground rules that we go through that basically allows me to do a little mini-lecture on conflict management and deliberation, typically.

And then we go to small groups. Small groups always helps. Because part of the reality is so much of our public engagement is one at a time at a microphone. And we know from human nature, who's going to walk up to that microphone? The people that are so sure that they're right. So we often seem much more polarized than we are because the loudest voices are often speaking the most. So having small groups help. Obviously, having a facilitator there helps too.

And then almost all our meetings, from the deliberation perspective, we almost always have some sort of discussion guide or backgrounder or some sort of document people are reacting to. I was trained on using these 20 years ago. I did a lot of work with National Issues Forum and Kettering Foundation where I got trained to do this work. And so I've been using them since that time. But it wasn't until 10 years ago when I started doing that deep dive into social psychology and brain science that I was like, "Oh, that's why these work,"   Realizing the power of this discussion guide. Because one thing the discussion guide does, is it helps sort out what's going on.

A big part of my job before the meeting is to try to make sense of the noise. We have all these ways for people to express individual opinion. Whether that's one time at the microphone or emails to a city council or comments on a newspaper article or surveys that the city or whoever might do.  Most of our events will have an RSVP that will ask some open-ended questions, so we can check to make sure we are getting participants' ideas.  Plus, we can also see if there is some significant misinformation that we might have to be prepared for going through. And my job is to turn all that noise into a pretty short document. We tend to not assume people are going to read it beforehand, even if we send it out. So it's something that we want to make it possible to read once people get there. People can walk in and during the process, they'll have time to look it over. We often call it a placemat because, sometimes it's a single 11 by 17 piece of paper that's like waiting for them at the table. But the art of these discussion guides or backgrounders is we're trying to summarize this. We're obviously framing it as a wicked problem. We're tapping into a broad range of actors. We're recognizing the inherent trade-offs. One key aspect of wicked problems is there isn't a solution. We're not going to find the perfect way to balance these values and we're done. These are always going to be tough issues that we have to work on. And then when we talk about those discussion guides, we inherently explain that we didn't get it right. This is something for y'all to react to. We want you to tell us what you like here, what you don't like here, what you think's missing.

And part of what I learned with social psychology research was this is basically giving them a group project. This is giving them something to work on.  And importantly, if we were getting together to talk about a controversial issue and one of you said something I don't like, I either have to confront you, or I have to avoid you.  I say this a lot —and I'd be curious your opinion about this, because you all are more of experts on conflict management than I am— I argue that most people avoid conflict. Then quite a few people love conflict  — a little too much. They're going to throw the bombs and attack. And then there's a very small percentage of people, unfortunately, that deal with conflict well.

A lot of my job long-term is to grow that third group. Short-term, to design a meeting to help people join, at least temporarily, that group. But if we don't have a discussion guide and someone's just asking us a topic and one of you says something I don't like, I'm probably just going to let it go because I don't want to confront you. Or I'm going to react badly to you because I love conflict. But this discussion guide transforms that, because we have a broad range of opinions that we gathered from lots of people. So you might say, "Ooh, I really like this second idea." And I can say, "Oh, I don't. I'm not attacking you. We're working together to improve this document." So it transforms the conversation and makes it easier for people to dig into the tensions and work through this, because they're working on this document.

And the other last quick thing I'll say about this is I love small groups because it's easier for people to speak. It lowers the bar. You actually have time for interaction. Instead of if I'm facilitating a group of 20, I'm working like crazy for everyone just to say something. What I want is someone says something interesting. I want to say, "What do you all think? I want to spend some time digging in and back and forth and learning from each other, . So you need a small group to do that.

But the problem is, the small group's inherently not going to be diverse. There's not going to be too many perspectives, because you only have five, six people in the room. So again, the discussion guide brings in a whole lot of other voices and gives a lot of opportunities for people to react to those voices or the facilitator to bring those voices in as necessary. So it's another key aspect we use to overcome one of the biggest disadvantages of small group —the limited amount of perspectives you have at the table right there.

Guy: I have a question for you. How do you handle the relationship between these small public participation groups?  I've been in a lot of these over the years, and they really are a good way to get neighbors talking about issues, as opposed to the public hearing format where you have two minutes to come up with the best zinger, which doesn't work so well. But how do you manage the relationship between these discussions and the consensus that might ultimately emerge from them, especially if you use some sort of advisory group process? And the guys who ultimately make decisions, may or may not follow that consensus.  There's a real sense, sometime,s that this is all just for show, and they're going to do what they're going to do, and none of this matters.

And then there are times that I've been involved in things where people expect the small group to somehow be an alternative to the public, duly-authorized decision-making process. And certainly, public officials are reluctant to sign over their decision-making authority to some of these groups. But it's a delicate dance. And I am curious about your thoughts on this. You probably spent a lot more time trying to deal with that than I ever have.

Martin: Yeah. No, it's a great question and certainly one of the tensions that we're inherently working through. When we do official things for the city of Fort Collins or the county that's needing feedback on a specific decision they're making,  any event or process that the CPD runs is one part of a broader public engagement process. They're always going to have the public comment process.  They're getting emails. The city might run other processes to get feedback too. But we've been doing this for 18 years. So the city council members know the CPD stuff. They know that it's going to be a different information. Whether it's representative enough depends. We work really hard to get representative audiences and try to get beyond the usual suspects, but that's always an ongoing challenge.  So the information they get from our reports and our events are much deeper that most public input. It's inherently going to engage the tensions a lot more and talk through these tensions. So I feel very confident that it is very useful information for them.

But  I wouldn't want them to base decisions just on our process.   I think it's always going to be one of many processes. They'll have surveys and so forth to look at too, which provides a information about the public voice in a different way. The other thing that I like to think about is the difference between what Matt Leighninger and Tina Nabatchi's call "thin and thick engagement." Thin engagement is a lot easier to gather.  It's much more efficient — it is primarily just gathering opinions. So you just have to have a place or a survey or you can have people downtown asking people as they walk by. So a lot of city processes just gather individual reactions to stuff. Thick engagement is when people are actually talking to each other and engaging. And that adds a lot of time. It's much less efficient.  And you need facilitators and you need a backgrounder.

So there's a lot of costs to it and a lot of different ways to do it well. But people tend to learn from each other. I like to think of our process as different from a public input process. It is more like a public refinement process. We want people to come to one of our meetings and think differently by the end of it. Not because we've designed it to get them to think in a different way, but the fact that they're having a conversation with a broad range of people and they're reacting to material that was framed broadly, they realize some of what they were missing. They realized the blinders they might have on,

So again, I think that these deliberative engagement processes are getting a lot of different information, which is more useful in a lot of different ways. It often taps into creativity, which can be critical. So coming up with new ideas. The magic happens when we get away from the easy problems that are caused by wicked people, and putting the wickedness on the problem, and we tap into the best of human nature and creativity. We realize, "Oh, wait a second," and we get some new ideas that sometimes can be really powerful that I don't think we often get from a thin collecting individual opinions perspective.

Guy: Yeah. One of the distinctions that I've made off and on over the years is between what you might call informed and uninformed ways of gauging public opinion. And the thing that drives me batty when a pollster calls up and says, "I want to know what you think about, for instance, single-payer healthcare in Colorado." And you have three choices. And you say, "Well, it depends." They don't have a box for "it depends." But I've never really thought much about it, and it's a cold call. And the feedback that they get strikes me is pretty much worthless. But as you say, that's the cheap stuff.  And it's fast. But something like this, where you get people to engage in a problem and actually have to think about it for a while and look at somebody who thinks something different. And you have an opportunity to collect nuanced answers that suggest new things that you might not have thought to put on your closed-ended survey is a vastly richer form of feedback. If I were an average democratic citizen, I'd sure want my office holders to make decisions based on that, and not something else.

Martin: Yeah. I have one piece, where I talk about engagement itself as a wicked problem. I work a lot with city managers and those type of folks, giving workshops. So this one's for them. And it's this recognition that for high-quality civic engagement, you want high numbers. In some ways, the more the merrier. If lots of people show up, that means, "Hey, people care about this. That's important." But then you want people to be informed. You want the people that show it to be representative of the community in a variety of different ways. For me, you want it to be thick. You want it to be interactive, the time for people to really engage it. But then like everything, you want it to be efficient. You want to use people's time and use the taxpayer's money well. So the reality is those five things don't fit together very well.  There's a lot of inherent tensions between that. So you lay that out, in a sense. To have a representative audience, that takes a lot of time, —   cultivating those relationships and making sure those voices are heard, and dealing with language issues and the costs that come with that.  So it's important to do that. And like you were talking about, you want them to be informed.

If we want them to be informed, we either have to take the time to inform them,  or we have to just engage informed people. If we're just engaging informed people like boards and commissions might do, we're not being representative. We're leaving a lot of people out. So, the wicked problems mindset is, "Hey, instead of hiding from those tensions as our brain likes to do, instead, identify those and put them on the table. Say "we want these five things. But these five things don't fit together. How can we work to find the right balance here?"

And the good news that I ended that article with is, in the long long-term, in an individual community, the more you engage those tensions, the easier they are to engage.  Because as you start developing better relationships with diverse parts of your community, as you figure out ways to get beyond the usual suspects, it's easier and easier to bring people back. If they came to one meeting and they felt that their time was used well and they were listened to and they learned something, they're going to come back. So it's much easier to get them to come the second time. And then you're starting to figure out more and more how to inform people quickly, so you're engaging them. And all of a sudden, those five tensions seem a little bit more manageable.

Heidi: So who comes to your meetings? Is it all volunteer? Do you reach out and try to bring particular people in? How does choosing the participants work?

Martin: Yeah. It works in a variety of ways. Overall, most of our events are open to the public. We rarely do something that's invited or just selected. But every once in a while, we do that. For example,  we are experimenting with some citizens' assemblies or citizens' juries here in Fort Collins which is much more of an invited event. With those, a group commits to a long-term process. But most of our events are open to the public. And then we'll do a variety of things to encourage a broad audience. Sometimes we'll do a stakeholder analysis and  figure out whose voices need to be there. That becomes important before the process, just to make sure what voices are in the discussion guide and so forth. So we're doing a lot of that work anyway. And often, when we do the RSVP, we might ask some demographic questions so that we can watch, if there's groups that are not coming, how do we think about that? Here in the city and the county and school district, we have a lot of translation issues. So for our bigger meetings, we'll always have Spanish translators present. That option helps us connect to that audience.

Before COVID, most of our stuff was always face-to-face in person. With COVID, we switched all online. Now we're out of that, but online has some interesting benefits.  It lowers the bar to participate. People don't need to get babysitters, and they don't need to have transportation. So sometimes we're thinking about, "Hey, do we do multiple options? Do we let them go online?" So that's a constant process of thinking about taking on that challenge of getting the right people in the room.

But we also understand that  it's an unreachable ideal. We're never going to have the perfect room. Even if demographically percentage-wise, we have the perfect room, who's to say that those are the right people representing those different groups? So it's a constant process of trying to get better and better at that. We've helped innovate a few interesting things with that. We helped the city with a city plan, probably five or six years ago. And they put in some money for organizations, particularly organizations that are harder to reach, and allowed them to apply for to get a grant to run their own meeting.

We created a community guides program, which is the same thing. Individuals from harder to reach audiences can apply and get a stipend. We would train them too. We'd give them some of the same training we gave our students. And then we'd basically give them a meeting in a box so they could just run a meeting in their house with five or six of their neighbors and then capture the information and send it to us. So those are some of the things that we're innovating to try to get beyond the traditional participation limits and think through where your meeting is, what time your meeting is, that sort of thing.  All those are the variables that you're constantly playing with.

Heidi: Fort Collins demographically is probably fairly similar to Boulder. We're both college towns. And we're very progressive, liberal, not many conservatives. But one of the complaints that we've heard a lot about processes like this is it's very hard to get conservatives to come, because they don't trust it. Have you run into that at all?  Have you considered that as a problem that you've had to address?

Martin:  Yeah. I always joke with my students that if we don't do any work to try to get an interesting audience, we'll get white, older, progressive women. That's who will show up in meetings. Which means if we want to get anything beyond those four categories, we have to do some work. I will say, yeah, I think generally progressives are going to be more likely to show up. They're more interested in solving public problems, working on those issues. But I do think the way we talk about deliberation at its best can be boiled down to this broad question, "Hey, what should we do about X?" X being a wicked problem. X being an issue. Ideally, it's a problem. Most agree it's a problem. They might disagree about why it's a problem. They'll certainly disagree on what we should do about it. But you're starting with the common ground, at least, of like, "Hey, we need to do something about this. What we're doing now, the status quo is not working very well.

Heidi: I'm realizing that I should have asked you a long time ago to give folks an example of the kinds of problems you're talking about. For instance immigration...or... I mean, what are we talking about?

Martin: .Again, we've run 500 meetings in 18 years on almost every conceivable topic. Mostly local. We tend not to do national issues. So we've been doing a lot of stuff lately on affordable housing.  We've done a lot of stuff on environmental issues over the years — air quality or dealing with water or dealing with water conservation. We do a lot of things with school districts on things like mental health or substance abuse or bullying.  I've got a project we started a couple of years ago called the Deliberative Journalism Project that's working with newsrooms to equip them with these skills. I have also run stuff about what's the role of local news and newspapers and how do we deal with a challenge they have with their financial model completely imploding over the years.  So yeah, it's a broad variety, but mostly local actors.

And getting back to that question of "what should we do about X?" we always want that "we" to be a broad we. The "we" is "u,s as a community," And so inherently, the materials that we develop and the potential actions people are exploring, some of those are government actions. But a lot of them aren't. We certainly believe in a local community that you need strong nonprofits.  You need a strong civil society. There's often a role for private businesses to help address the problem. I'll give an example of this in a second.

Some of the best results of our processes have been creating new community organizations that want to focus on that issue. And I think all that does tap into a traditional conservatism, right, when you're saying, "Hey, we're not starting with the assumption of, "Okay, how do we make sure government has the money to solve this problem for us?" We like to think government is one tool a community has, a particularly important tool. But a lot of these issues, we want to think of there's lots of different actors that dig into that. 

The one example I'll give with this is that we helped start an organization called the Partnership for Age-friendly Communities, which is now a full-fledged 501(c)(3 ) with an executive director and a board focused on issues for older adults.  It started about 10, 12 years ago. We had information from the state demographer that for our county, the percentage of people over 65 was going to increase like 140% in the next 10 years. So more than double. So we started with this question of what community do we want for older residents and started talking about that. And the number one issue that rose to the top was transportation. People tend to outlive their ability to drive by about 10 years on average. The West is a very car-centric place.  So what do we do with that? Concerns came up about loneliness and isolation and so forth. But transportation raised to the top. And it was just fascinating. We actually created a discussion guide based on this. When you think about transportation needs, well, there's some individuals thinking, "Okay, older residents are going to have to make some decisions like, "Hey, I might not be able to live in the mountains when I'm in my 70s or 80s, I might need to move in and be closer so I can walk to the grocery store and be more connected or be on a bus route now."

And then there's roles for nonprofits.   We have some great nonprofits here that provide rides and help people get around. Then there's a role for private business. This was before COVID initially. But you were seeing more and more of grocery stores starting to deliver. And if you have a big shopping center or a mall, it might make sense for them to have a shuttle to go around different parts of town on different days and bring people to the stores. So we're not always thinking people are responsible to get from A to B. Sometimes B is going to come get you. And then, obviously, there's a role for government to think about public transportation and other programs. We actually had a whole conversation across all four of those sectors.

So that's part of what we try to tap into more traditional conservatism. And there is a role for religious institutions in these issues as well. We've done lots of stuff on poverty and homelessness and have some great resources there from the religious community that are helping us address those issues.

Guy: Now, when I think back on the sort of civic issues that I've been heavily involved in over the years, I've realized that they were all a couple of decades ago, back when there were real local newspapers. And that there was a paper everybody got and read every day, and they'd send reporters to every meeting, and there'd be detailed write-ups on it. And all that's disappeared. Maybe Fort Collins has a better newspaper than Boulder does, but in Boulder, you're doing well to get a two-day old weather forecast out of it. So, I wondered if you had any workarounds for that, that you have these meetings, but how you connect them to the larger community and let people understand what's happening and what issues are being discussed? Or just that there's going to be a meeting. How do you make up for the deficit that's associated with this decline of local news?

Martin: Yeah.  Two big things I want to talk about there. So I'll start with journalism, and then I'll talk a little bit about the shift to deliberative systems. I agree with you. I think we didn't realize how much civic work newspapers did, back in the day. And that was when newspapers were a great business. There's a new documentary called Trusted Sources coming out, that we got to help develop, which tells this history. Journalism, initially, newspapers, were primarily partisan. They were just telling people what they wanted to hear in different groups. But then as they became bigger, the thing that drove newspapers were advertisements, so it made sense to have a broad audience. You wanted everyone reading your newspaper. So all of a sudden, the heyday of journalism was, " No, we want to be informative to everybody." And the profits from both subscriptions, primarily from advertisements, made it a good business. So they had all these city reporters. They could pay for all this necessary capacity that helped our civic society, even though there probably wasn't that much demand for it. There was demand for the sports and those type of things. And I think basically, the Internet killed that. The Internet took away all the ads. They went to Google and Facebook. It took away the newspaper as being the primary place for people to get advertisements for local things. And that changed the whole incentive process. Now the incentives are back to narrowcasting. If I have to rely on subscriptions, not on advertisement, unfortunately, it's a much easier model for me to pick my audience and tell them what they want to hear.

And that's what we're getting from political radio and we're getting it from national news. And we're getting, it, unfortunately, sometimes from local news as well. But I'm hoping this will change. There's a lot of energy now around recognizing the crisis of local news, recognizing the importance of quality local news. I would argue, and I imagine we'll get into this, of needing impartial, objective, local news as a resource.

They've been having that conversation quite a bit within journalism for a while. So Press Forward is this national organization. They've got over $500 million.  Knight Foundation and a few other organizations, are all about rethinking local news and the link between local news and democracy. I've been working with the Colorado Media Project, the CoLab -- the Colorado News Collaborative --  which involves the Colorado Press Association, the Rocky Mountain Public Media with the CPD (Above the Noise).  The five of us have this statewide project that will be doing some training. I'll be doing some trips here in July and August across the state to rethink the local newsroom, sometimes a radio station, sometimes a a newspaper well, not paper anymore, but a news site, a newsroom, to think of them as a local convener, as a local resource, as a local deliberative catalyst in a sense.

And how do we get that to work? It's not going to be easy, because there's less and less staff. People still don't want to pay for local news. So you're seeing now part of it is a shift in how we see local news. I believe we have to shift from seeing local news as a private good, right, as a market good, to a public good. We have to start looking at local newspapers like a museum or a library. This is something that we have to do. I don't know if that's public funds or some people donate a lot or how we're going to do it, but we need to rethink local news because communities need to have quality journalism.  And we're just realizing more and more that the market is not going to provide that. So we have to rethink that and have some tough conversations.

Heidi: Yeah, I think that's really important because what we're seeing in Boulder is there are several little startups that are trying to supply local news online. They're not trying to be a paper newspaper. But each of them, they're competing with each other, and each of them has like three or four stories a week. And there's way more news than that. And it strikes me as another —it maybe isn't a wicked problem, but it's a vicious cycle— that I'm not interested in paying for that news source because it's not good enough. It's not broad enough. But they need people to give them money so that they can get more broad. So it's a question of how do you get that started? I think if somebody would jumpstart that with some money, there might well be an audience to it.

Martin: Yep. You know, Colorado is a hotbed for innovation in journalism. We used to have two great newspapers in Denver, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. We lost the Rocky Mountain News and the the Denver Post has some interesting issues itself. And I think there are a lot of journalists who think that once you live in Colorado, you want to stay in Colorado. They like this state. So you have a lot of journalists who have realized that they have to get innovative. They have to figure out other ways to make a living.  So now we have the Colorado Sun that's doing some great work. We've got Colorado Community Media, which is a great story.

I don't know if you all know about that, but that was a collection of smaller weekly newspapers, in a lot of suburbs of Denver, that were struggling. But then they got a national grant, and they switched from for-profit to nonprofit, and now they've been doing a lot better. So we have the Colorado Media Project and CoLab, those organizations that I talked about that are thinking of some innovative ways of how to do this. So hopefully, in some ways, Colorado will lead the way in rethinking this. But that shift more and more, I think, to nonprofit local news is going to be something that we have to have. And basically, they're diversifying their income. So some of it is going to be from grants. Some of it's going to be subscriptions. Some of it will be more like a museum, that some people will say, "Hey, I'm going to pay $10,000 a year because I care about this. I'm going to be a gold level member." And some of it might be some government support. But we're still nervous about government controlling media. There's always going to be that tension. We still need local media to be the guardian, of checking accountability.  But there were a couple of bills that, unfortunately, didn't pass, that would have created incentives to do advertising in your local newspaper to get a tax break for it. So there'll potentially be some ways government can help with that. But overall, these newspapers are going to have to think of new ways of doing business. But the more people realize,  "I need local news, and local news is a public good, I think the better."

Going back to your earlier question, Guy, so yeah, I run these meetings. And I know basically the first five years of the CPD, that was what we did. We ran individual meetings. And at that time, a couple of things happened. One is within the broader deliberative democracy academic world, there was a shift in thinking to this notion of deliberative systems. And part of that was shifting from focusing on the event to focusing more broadly on how does your community function? And when you think of something as a deliberative system, you're thinking about, "Okay, what are all the different institutions and impacts that lead to either high-quality communication and decision-making or erode that?"

I went to a great conference that was a mix of engagement people like me, with systems thinkers. We considered how we could learn from each other. I started reading a lot of the systems literature, Senge's Fifth Discipline and Daniella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, and so forth. That shifted my work to think about systems, not just individual meetings. Now my meetings are one particular part of this system. I think an important part, but still just a part. 

That's when I started working a lot more with my library, with the newspaper, with the community. I realized more and more, "Hey, the more organizations in my community that see themselves as an impartial resource, that see themselves as a deliberative resource, as a bridging institution, the better." So we started doing a lot more of that kind of thinking. Maybe 100 people show it to my meeting. But there's 130,000 people in Fort Collins. So how do we think about impacting the broader population?  How do we talk about issues? So you have that in the literature of thinking differently. So more and more, my work now is really focused on looking at how communities build the capacity that they need to have the conversations we need for democracy to work. And there's lots of answers to that. What is city government doing? What are all these different civic societies doing? What are local universities doing or community colleges and those type of things?

Heidi: You've mentioned a word several times that made me realize I wanted to come back to one of the things that we started to engage with two years ago, and to some extent, much earlier.  That's the notion of impartiality. And you have this notion of, if I'm remembering right, "principled impartiality." When we started to advocate for impartiality in our blog, we got jumped on all over because we weren't standing up for justice. And so I'd like you to talk a little bit about what your thought is, what principled impartiality is. Is it different from the typical neutrality? And how do you interact with folks who have a very strong advocacy view that they think is more just. But you could argue justice cuts both ways in many of these conflicts. How do you deal with that?

Guy: I might add to that is that one of the things that we've been struggling with is we've tried to figure out how to make a more politically diverse society and democracy actually work. What is what the underlying commonality is that binds a diverse community together? And in the context of the meetings you've been talking about, it's what are the ground rules? Well, it's sort of ground rules. It's how do you frame a meeting so we're going to explore all of your differences, but we've got this in common. It's the foundation, and it's a set of commitments that we make to one another that makes the whole thing work. And if you don't have that, and if one side wants to just steamroller and obliterate the other side, then you have horrors like we're seeing in Gaza, for instance, perhaps. But fortunately, we're nowhere near that bad. I hope.

Martin: Yeah. We'll see what happens with the election and after the election. Exactly. I think our conversation started at least online on emails with the principled impartiality idea and your all's reaction to it. I was looking back over that earlier today. When I introduced the CPD, I probably said something like, "It serves as an impartial resource for Northern Colorado."

And what does it mean to be impartial these days?"  Like I just mentioned, I work with a lot of institutions. So I do a lot of work with public libraries. I work with city managers. I work with journalists. I work with conflict resolution folks. I'm a facilitator / deliberation person. And all those have some sort of commitment to either being — there's lots of words for it — impartial or neutral or objective or nonpartisan or transpartisan or omnipartisan —that is a new one that I'm hearing more and more.

And as we polarize more and more and more, there's more pushback against that, arguing, "No, how can you be neutral to this?" I think I have in the article, and I think you all mentioned this as well, Desmond Tutu's saying that "neutrality in the face of oppressor serves the oppressor." It's been sent to me over the years. I imagine it's been sent to you over the years too by people saying, "You can't be neutral with this," So yeah, I dig in on this idea in that article for National Civic Review. The title is "The Case for Principled Impartiality in a Hyper-partisan World." I still believe we need impartial resources. Part of this comes from the research on social psychology and brain science, that shows that we're unfortunately much more wired for outrage and polarization than collaboration and deliberation. It's hard for us to deal with conflict. So having organizations, having individuals whose job is to help people resolve conflict and deal with conflict better, I think, is inherently going to be important.

I ended that essay with this concern. If we just say, "No, there's two sides, and we're sure one side's right and one side's wrong, we should just join the right side." I think it takes away the power that we have to be the convener, to be the trusted person bringing people together. So that's the case for impartiality.  But when I talk about principled impartiality, once again, I see it as a wicked problem. And I often admit, yes, I have a hammer and everything looks a like a nail sometimes. But it's this recognition that impartiality is still needed.

I have a triangle there with impartiality on the top. I'm committed to impartiality for the reasons I just mentioned. People need to trust us. I believe for humans to deal with conflict, they need help. So someone that's focused on doing that well is important. But then I also have commitments to democracy, at least small D democracy. I'm partisan towards democracy, and that brings in a whole bunch of values. And I think a lot of those values are both on the left and the right.  I don't think either side owns democracy. 

And then I also have a commitment to good information, In the initial draft of the paper, I played off Desmond Tutu and said, sort of the same thing that if one side has really good information, and the other side just has talking points that we know are wrong, If I'm neutral, neutrality in the face of bullshit serves the bullshitter. But they decided not to let me use those terms. So I had to change it to  a little bit. But it's that same idea, So I'm committed to impartiality, I'm committed to democracy, and I'm committed to good information. While recognizing the line between good information and bad information is not an easy one, It's really hard to make that distinction. But it's something that we do have tools to try to negotiate. So the work that I do is a constant negotiation between those three. 

The paper was initially longer. I'm hoping to get back to a second version of it that I'll play with. What I had to take out, was my use of polarity management as a key tool, as a way of thinking. I don't know if we want to get into that now, but the basic point of it is to look at the tension between two things and recognize that you can always have too much of something. So values have an upside, positives, but then they can always dominate too much. So that was what I was trying to do with those three things. As I try to keep the balance between those three commitments in the work that I do. The danger is if any of one of those dominates too much and eclipses the other. 

So I think a lot of the criticism that you all received about being neutral, that journalists receive, that city managers receive, is when people overemphasize neutrality. That when we're so focused on neutrality that we're not seeing important distinctions. But then we could also easily overemphasize the other two. So you're constantly keeping them in tension and thinking about what is our role, to kind of play with this.

The last thing I'll end with, and I do this a little bit, but I should have made it clear when I read the paper. So I think there's four big P's to impartiality that are important. There's principal which is what I just talked about. The second is that it is pragmatic. Part of the reason I decided to commit my life to being an impartial resource is I cared about a lot of issues. It's not like I don't have values and I don't have political views. I just believe what the world needed more is impartials. The world needs activists. But the world also needs bridgers and peacemakers and facilitators. And I thought, "if I focus on helping people have better conversations, I think in the long run, the things that I care about will be served more." In one way, from an argumentation perspective, there's this idealistic view that if it's a fair fight, I think the better ideas are going to win. So my job is to make sure, as much as possible, that it's a fair fight and have faith in the process, So that's the pragmatic role.

One argument I make, particularly now with the concerns about the authoritarian right and people saying that we can't be neutral. We have to call that out. I think attacking them [the right] fits within the polarization and doesn't do much. But if we really help people have much better conversations, I think we'll realize more and more where the better arguments are. If the world is really beset by oppressors, oppressing people, powerful people and bad faith actors  — I think they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter. That makes it easier for them. So pragmatically, I think the better the conversation, the better the argument, the better off we are. 

The third P is professional. It's not that I'm impartial. It's not that I have no biases whatsoever. It's my professional role to be impartial. That's what I'm trying to do. And that's certainly what journalists talk about as well, and I think probably people in your profession.

And then the fourth P is process. I'm impartial to the topic. I'm not leading them to any certain solution, but I'm pretty biased towards the process. I have a certain way of doing process, and that's where my focus is.  That's, again, the professionalism of running a process.

So it's not this simple strawman impartiality of like, "Everything's good on both sides." There's a danger of impartiality falling to both sides — of a false equivalency. But I think we recognize that tension, and we're trying to avoid that and get the upside from impartiality.

Guy: Now, one last question that I have relates to the local politics that you've been describing. This is where democracy works. But we've run into a whole series of dynamics that have led to the nationalization of politics. We've nationalized the media. Big companies come in and buy up local newspapers and flood them with syndicated columnists and syndicated content. They figured out that they can have enough money with a national-level organization to develop really great hot-button content that grabs people's attention. And everybody's talking about the big rematch between Biden and Trump. But the fact is that local politics, by and large, actually works pretty well. And even at the national level, there are cases where government actually is working under the radar.

Martin: But bipartisan deals often don't make the news because they are not that interesting.

Guy: And that also changes everybody's perception to the point where people are giving up on democracy at a time when, in a great many ways, it still works really quite well. I wonder whether you had any thoughts on how to decouple and maybe de-emphasize this overly partisan national stuff.

Martin: Yeah. No, a lot of the work I do is local. As I told my story at the very beginning, I switched from national to local long ago. A big part of that was my own mental health. I was doing very well as an academic. I was publishing a lot of papers. But all my papers were about how bad it is.  I was more interested in how do we have tough conversations about important issues. And most of my papers were how bad our conversations were. And I was looking at it like, "So I'm going to be an academic for 40 years, basically writing papers of how bad things are?" That doesn't seem very fun. So that's what caused my shift from national to local and the shift from being a critic to being a practitioner that I mentioned earlier. But yeah, I completely agree with you. Because of the Internet, because of all these things, because of the loss of local newspapers, that there's been a nationalization of all these issues.  And part of it is, because of human nature, we like the drama. We like a simple story. We like our heroes and our victims and our villains. And a two-party system, unfortunately, is well-suited to give our brains what we want. So we're going to draw that attention to it. So yeah, a lot of my work is how do we get away from that?

I know you all have done a lot of work on polarization as well. I have these two interesting beliefs about polarization that don't seem that they fit, but I think they are actually in some ways consistent. One, I know you've argued this as well. I think polarization is our number one issue. Because if we can't deal with polarization, we can't deal with any of the other challenges that we have, So we have to figure that out. Not only because polarization tends to be  a vicious cycle that leads to more polarization and distrust and so forth. But then also, information doesn't work. When we're polarized, facts can't work. Some of the scariest research I did was on the backfire effect. When we're polarized, if I'm trying to convince you you're wrong, sometimes the better my argument, the more you would backfire against it because your brain is so wired to find some sort of flaw and convince yourself you're right. So the first belief is that polarization is our number one issue. We have to focus on that.

But number two, that polarization is greatly exaggerated. It's not real. It's mostly manufactured. As I mentioned earlier, I see my job is to design processes to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and tap into the best. The reality is there are a lot of people that make a lot more money than we do that are doing the opposite. That seem to understand the social psychology. I like Amanda Ripley's term "conflict entrepreneurs." And whether they're bad faith actors, that's something else that I know you all have written on, and I've been struggling with how do we think about bad faith actors, who are feeding us those narratives. And a lot of them are at the national level. A lot of them are media or internet personalities that are just feeding us that. The good news, I think, long-term, is the more we understand the brain science and social psychology, the more power we have to address it better. And certainly, my experience in Fort Collins is since the polarization is more perception than reality, that means it's not too hard to shift people.

And that's the favorite part of my work, having conversations with my students afterwards, of them relaying these aha moments, these people at a table that walk in having a caricature of someone who thinks differently than them. And then that person's sitting there and they're talking to them. And all of a sudden, with the help of the process and the ground rules and the facilitator and the discussion, all the bells and whistles, they get to the point of like, "Oh, wait. You seem reasonable." They often don't agree. But they recognize that the things that that person cares about, they care about too. It is maybe a little lower on their list, but they do care about it. So that shift happens. A lot of my work is shifting from this exaggerated conflict to the actual conflict. We're never going to come together. We won't all agree. Consensus is actually a scary word for me. With wicked problems, you're never going to have consensus. But with that shift from exaggerated conflict to actual conflict, we often realize the conflict is much more manageable,

And in local politics and local decision-making, what's so different is that our leaders locally, they can't just play politics. You can't get reelected over and over again just by playing the Democrat-Republican game, which works nationally, unfortunately, in most districts. You actually have to help your community address problems and make a difference. To be able to do that, you probably inherently have to be able to work across perspectives and engage people to think differently. So we often have a different style of leader locally. I think we much more naturally have a facilitated leader who works across difference versus a one-sided leader. So that's what we're trying to shift people to realize. In my talks, I've been saying this for 10 years, or maybe even longer, that one of the biggest questions for our democracy moving forward is, is the dysfunction and polarization at the national level going to bleed down, or is some of the really cool, innovative, exciting things that are being done in individual communities going to start scaling up?

The reality, unfortunately, in in the last 10 years, it is much more of the former than the latter. But we're still doing the work. And you're seeing Americans who are innovative. When there's a crisis, people start stepping up. So you're seeing more and more of these bridging movements and builders movements. This is where we see each other sometimes on these big Zoom calls with people all over the country who are thinking, and more and more people are motivated by saying, "Hey, we have to talk to each other differently.  We can't just keep on screaming at each other. It doesn't seem to be working very well." So I think you're starting to see more and more momentum to thinking differently about how we engage each other. But I think it's going to be the local communities that save us. The more and more individual communities that do this better, the more people see an alternative, and then they start demanding it, hopefully, at higher levels.

Heidi: I think you're right. And one of the things that we've both been saying for quite a while now is that one of the missing ingredients in our national situation is hope. So many people have lost hope, because if you just look at the national level, the scene is horrible. And I have so many friends and acquaintances who have disengaged because they say, "Oh, the situation's hopeless. I can't affect anything that's happening. It's so terrible. We're going down the tubes." And more and more people are seeing what's happening at the local level and seeing things like what you're doing and other communities are doing and things are working.  And I think it's a way to foster hope.

One of the things that I've been interested in, we've been talking around it and never mentioned it on the video, is that we've both been going to meetings of what's called the IMIP — the Inter Movement Impact Project, which we've been participating in maybe for 16 months or so. When they first started meeting, I'd say there were 20 people involved. Now, quite often, there's 50, 60 people involved. And many of those people are heading up organizations of organizations. Listen First is an organization of 500 organizations, and some of those organizations have hundreds of people in them. So the numbers are really starting to mount up. There's getting to be more and more interest, more and more activity, more and more hope, I think.  So I think you're right. There's a top-down, and that's pretty toxic. There's a bottom-up that I think is — what's the opposite of toxic?

Martin: Virtuous!

Heidi:  Yeah, virtuous.

Martin: And I think it is a virtuous cycle. Polarization is a negative cycle, a negative feedback loop. What we found here in Fort Collins and other colleagues that run centers like mine, it becomes a virtuous loop. The more you do this, the easier it is to do. The more you rewire. I mean, a big part of the story of the CPD is a hopeful one. When I started it, I really thought it was going to be my students and I in a class. We're going to take these concepts from a class, what works in the classroom, see what works in the community. I thought we would pick a topic, develop some background materials, see if some people would show up at the library or the Hilton to have a conversation. But I was trying to go for this grant. This grant required me to have an advisory board. So I cold-called people at the city and the school district and the League of Women Voters and the Library just to get their names on a document. But just from those phone calls, they're like, "Well, we need to run this meeting in a few weeks. You want to help me?" So all of a sudden, we were getting these gigs. And then every time we ran a meeting– I know from the social psychology, we're getting people to think differently. Their brains weren't wired for this, but at the end of it, they knew they did something important. And they would walk up to me — I'd always stand by the door to thank people for their time as they're leaving.  And they would walk up to me exhausted and say, "We need to do this on this issue," And again, it's like when you give people an authentic alternative, they see the value of it,and they come back and they want more. So now we've run 500 meetings. I think three of those meetings were meetings that are like, "Ooh, I like this topic." Every single one of those meetings was primarily the community coming to us saying, "Hey, we need to talk about this issue. Can you help us talk about that?" So that's the positive feedback loop. That's the hope that we have.

As we understand human nature better, we can design processes better. These processes work. How do we get more and more? And how do we get funding for this? I always post on social media right after elections when we get the number, how many billions of dollars were spent on the election? I'm like, "Hey, give me 10% of that. See what I can do with these problems we care about. And again, we're starting to see more and more funding. We're starting to see more universities doing this. I've got colleagues in universities across the country that have started centers similar to the CPD that are having some success. The more we can support those and grow that, certainly, the better.

Heidi: Well, this has been a wonderful and enlightening conversation. Is there anything that I didn't ask about that you want to make sure our viewers know about?

Martin: I don't think so. I think we covered what I wanted to. I jotted down a few notes to touch on, and I've hit on all those. So yeah, no, I appreciate talking to you. I  have learned a lot from you all. Your website certainly is a resource for everyone doing this work. So it was nice to spend some time with you all.

Heidi: Well, great. We very much appreciate it.

Guy: We want to thank you very much. We really appreciate your willingness to do this.  It's always nice to hear stories of how it actually can work. I used to work for a guy named Kenneth Bolding who cited Bolding's first law:  If it exists, it must be possible. This conversation has showed that good political conversations are possible.

Martin: Nice.