Newsletter #349 — April 29, 2025
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
Why Chains and Why Webs
This is an exercise to illustrate that intractable conflicts and "wicked problems" are much more complex than they are sometimes thought to be. This technique helps dispel the common "us-versus-them" notion that the problem is simply "those bad guys" who are doing "bad things." The story is always more complex than that, and the only hope we have for solving these problems, or even making them a little less bad, is to start with a much better understanding of what's going on.
Participants are asked to identify a social, political, economic, or environmental problem they want to focus on. Then, on a piece of paper, they write down at least five things that are contributing to the problem. So, for instance, if the problem is homelessness, they might list housing is too expensive, too little housing is available, landlords don't want to rent to certain "types" of people, drug addiction and mental health make people unable to maintain a household, low income housing is seen to come with too many rules, etc. Then ask them to flesh out what causes each of those issues. So, why is housing too expensive? Why is so little housing available? And so on. Then step back again and ask why those problems exist.
Their answers are just guesses, of course, unless the participants are given some background reading which covers some of these issues. But even if they don't have that, the point is to see that the problem is much more complex than simply "greedy landlords are charging too much for rent" or "lazy people don't want to work for a living."
You can also suggest participants start drawing arrows between their causal strings when a factor in one string effects a factor in another string. This, then, changes the "why chain" into a "why web" or a simple "conflict map."
More details can be found here.
Finding Common Ground / Constructive Approaches for Addressing Differences: a Discussion Guide
One key to moving beyond the destructive politics that are tearing apart so many communities is developing an ability to work together to both recognize the things that divided communities have in common, and to find ways of more constructively addressing the differences that remain. This discussion guide is designed to help groups do that in the context of a wide range of complex and controversial issues. The purpose of this kind of discussion is twofold. Most obviously, the goal is to help participants think through a particular issue. More importantly, this exercise gives participants a framework for much more constructively talking about the many issues which divide us and developing better ways of addressing those issues.
There are different ways of conducting this exercise depending on whether the group doing it is fairly ideologically diverse or similar (it can work in either instance, but it is easier to do with ideologically diverse groups.)
Like before, the group (or the group's facilitator/leader should choose a controversial topic to discuss. (If one is working with an ideologically homogeneous group, it is sometimes possible to find issues on which members likely disagree.) Then put people in small groups to discuss the following questions:
1. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is broad agreement among members of contending groups?
2. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is clear and strong disagreement among members of contending groups?
3. To what extent is each disagreement attributable to different images of objective facts? And, to what is extent is each disagreement attributable to differing values or moral beliefs?
4. For differences attributable to differing images of objective facts, can you imagine some sort of fact-finding process that would resolve each disagreement in ways in which all could have confidence?
5. For differences attributable to differing values or moral beliefs, how can we most fairly and constructively handle those disagreements?
6. Are there things that the various groups are now doing that contributes to the destructiveness of a conflict, while also undermining a group's ability to protect its own interests? If so, what are they?
These questions are fleshed out and examples are given as "prompts" if needed in the full exercise description on BI.
Values-Based Conversations
This exercise helps people examine their values and the degree to which they align with others' values--both those in their "own group," and those in "other groups." This exercise was originally developed by Alan Yarborough, the Reverend Shannon Kelly and Wendy Johnson as part of the Episcopal Church's Curriculum on Civil Discourse. (The exercise here is the one described on pages 17-20 of the full curriculum. Although originally done in a religious setting, this exercise, along with the other ones in this curriculum, are much more widely applicable than that. With Allan's permission, I have adapted the language here and in the detailed instructions on BI to a secular setting.
The exercise uses a list of 175 values. Participants are asked to go through the list three times, first marking all the values that they hold. Next, they mark (with a different mark) all the values their important identity group(s) hold. They then are asked to go through the list again and put a different mark by all the values they think their country holds dear. Participants are then asked to make notes about the values that showed up in 2 or 3 categories, differences between the categories, and consider what they typically do when their own values differ from people around them.
Then people are put into diverse groups to discuss their answers to those questions and to explore the degree of similarly and difference in their assessments. Typically, Alan reported (and we agree) people find more similarities between groups than they expected and more differences within their own identity groups than they expected. Everyone then reconvenes and discusses what this says about our relationships, our values, and how we can (and could) potentially work together more effectively -- in their organizations, communities, and nations.
Many more details and help for facilitators in found in the detailed BI exercise.
Reconciliation Index
This exercise was patterned after Elise Boulding's Future Visioning Exercise. It is called the "reconciliation index" because I originally developed it for a course on reconciliation. But the basic idea is much broader than that — you could substitute the words "de-polarization," or "cohesiveness" index instead, or even a future visioning exercise.
The basic idea is to figure out what a society (or a community, or an organization, or a family) would look like if it managed to resolve, or at least significantly de-escalate, all the conflicts that are currently tearing it apart. If you are trying to resolve conflict and improve relationships in any of those groupings, what would the improved entity look like? How would it function? (We observe that it is hard to get to where you want to go, if you don't know where that place is, or what it looks like.) So this is an exercise to define one's goals before one charts a course to get there.
The exercise can be done individually, or in small groups, but as is often the case, it is more interesting and more fun to do it in small groups. Ask the participants to choose an organizational unit that is experiencing a lot of conflict. (Since I taught in the United States, my students usually chose the United States. But a church group could choose its own congregation or the church as a whole; people could choose the town or city in which they live, just as long as they are very familiar with the nature of the conflicts and they people who live/work/or worship there. )
Ask participants to imagine their chosen society/community/organization thirty years in the future and imagine it is "reconciled." What are the social, psychological, political, and economic attributes that would indicate to you (and others) that reconciliation had, indeed, been accomplished? (Point out that "reconciliation" does not mean that all of one's sides interests and needs are met, without regard to the other sides' interests and needs. In my typically progressive classrooms, the students often came up with a list of all the progressives' wildest hopes -- income and wealth equality, free health care and education provided by the government, zero carbon emissions, etc. I then asked them if conservatives would feel comfortable in that place, and they admitted no, probably not. So I sent them back to the drawing board, to do the exercise over again.)
- Once they develop a more "balanced" image of the future, ask them to look back from the future to the present and imagine what changes it would take to get from where your chosen society is now to the reconciled future you envision? Consider the short term, intermediate term, and long term changes that would be needed.
- Then consider the obstacles to taking those steps and ways around those obstacles.
- End by asking them to come up with a few realistic steps that might be started now to try to start moving along this "reconciliation path?"
Detailed instructions can be found here.
We will share two more exercises in Newsletter 350, including one originally developed by John Paul Ledearch, which Heidi considers to be the best peacebuilding/conflict resolution exercise of all time.
Lead Photo Credit: Incredibly, this photo is a fake! It was made on request for this newsletter, by ChatGPT! (At least I hope they don’t! :-) )
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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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