Regenerative Resourcing: The Power of Inviting in Disagreement
Many participants in our Power of Place programme continue to develop their regenerative practice after the initial course has ended. During the Autumn/Winter 2022/23 continuing practice sessions we have focused on the process of stakeholder convening from a living systems perspective. This week we focused on the value that inviting in disagreement can add to the energy field in a stakeholder group and why it’s important to make room for it well.
Disagreement or dissent is a bit like a brown envelope for an unpaid bill. You can hide it under a cushion, put it in a cupboard, pretend as hard as you like that it isn’t there, but the bill doesn’t go away. Often, interest grows until the debt collectors come knocking at your door at which point in time, things can be ugly.
If you don’t make room for disagreement to be welcomed into the room in a good way, it has a habit of growing in the dark until it erupts into full blown rebellion, resentment and cynicism.
If I think of how living systems work, one of the core principles that creates the conditions conducive to life, is valuing and maintaining diversity. A health coral reef is only as healthy as the relationships and interactions between its many different species, and the ecosystem in which it sits. If we consider The Great Plains running through central USA, where billions of bison used to roam, fires caused by lightning and often set intentionally by native peoples, renewed the grasslands on a regular basis. The interaction of two disturbances — bison grazing patterns and fire — increases the biodiversity by creating a heterogeneous patchwork of plant communities in the grasslands.
Disagreement or dissent is a way to ensure diversity is maintained as a core principle within a stakeholder group. It is a disturbance that has the potential to generate new life.
How do we invite disagreement ‘well’ into a stakeholder community?
We show a community that we have respect for the diversity of views and beliefs within it when we create the space for disagreement and dissent. One way to approach inviting disagreement into a community well is to work with a framework called the Law of Three.
The Law of Three is a foundational framework in regenerative practice. It is based on an idea that all truly transformative action or thought arises through the interaction of three energies that are always present and available to us: activating, restraining and reconciling energies. The activating energy represents the natural impulse of life to evolve and create something new. The restraining energy arises in the response of the recipient of an action or thought and represents material or other constraints that need to be understood and integrated if we are to create something new.
When we are able to consciously hold conflicting or paradoxical ideas together in our minds, while at the same time allowing mental space for an idea to enter that is better than the conflicting ideas, the Law of Three honours the physicist Bohr’s maxim — for every great idea, the opposite idea is also true.
If that is the case, it is impossible for us to care deeply about the purpose of a place or the purpose of a community without having doubts and reservations about what we are going to do together. Unfortunately in a world that is dominated by culture that believes in command and control, most forms of dissent and disagreement are considered disloyalty or labelled as rebellion, negativity, or a form of ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’.
Exploring Disagreement & Dissent in our own experience
In our practice session we worked with a number of different questions to explore our own responses to disagreement and dissent as a first step. We brought to mind one experience where the experience of voicing disagreement was handled well within a group and one where it did not. We explored what was different about the process, conditions and outcomes in the first conversation compared to the second. A number of key issues came up for the group.
When the experience of voicing disagreement was not well received a number of things were present:
- Individuals felt they lacked the communication skills to express their disagreement well
- There was a sense of being ignored or not heard or of concerns being minimised
- There was an experience or expectation about being publicly shamed, rejected or locked out of further conversations/meetings/the project
- There was little or no time allocated for listening to the views of others
- Three was a negative ‘cost’ or consequence to expressing disagreement
When the experience of voicing disagreement was well received, a number of things emerged:
- A greater sense of connection
- An extended feeling of trust
- An ability to maintain curiosity about the potential of the group and its work
- A sense that an opportunity to let go of the doubts or disagreements, or at least an ability to navigate the uncertainty better, arose
We also explored two of community building maestro Peter Block’s key questions for dissent from his successful process The Six Questions for creating a structure of belonging by bring ing to mind a project each participant was working on that was important and to which they felt fully committed, and reflected on:
· What are the doubts and reservations you have about the work?
Interestingly as we began to explore the first question we all noticed that there was quite a bit of furtive looking around in the offices and lowering of voices so that individual responses might not be heard in the room from which they were participating! Yet we were all able to express doubts and reservations — even when fully committed. It’s not an Einstein moment, but sometimes it’s important to stop and recognise that doubts and reservations are forms of dissent or disagreement that we all have from time to time so it should be far more normal than it is to be able to express them.
In fact inviting people to express doubts and reservations is one of the easiest and best ways to allow disagreement into the room well. That does not mean that we have to respond to each person’s doubts. What is important is that we make room to have them expressed.
If we get into answering and responding to people’s doubts, we often fall into defending ourselves. We don’t have to take them on, just show that we are interested in what it is that really matters to them so that we then have the possibility of moving to questions of deeper commitment and ownership.
· What have you said ‘yes’ to in the work that you no longer mean, or didn’t mean in the first place?
Anyone who has ever worked with Peter’s 6 Questions knows that in each exploration the questions become progressively more challenging and many require an established culture of trust and safety. As we have been together as a group since April 2022, we have had plenty of time to move to more challenging questions.
As we reflected on this one together, what arose was the sense that if we are not able or allowed to say no to something, then the fact that we have said yes has very little meaning. Because behind that ‘yes’ will be something inauthentic. In our own experience that might be us responding to peer pressure if we had lost our of internal locus of control, or the fear of consequences, or simply a wider disabling culture.
We also considered how deeply we are conditioned to feel afraid of negativity in the room, in order to keep everything moving forward in a positive manner. Yet giving people room to say ‘no’ does not create their negativity, it just allows them room to express something that was already there but hidden or unexpressed.
When Disagreement is Inauthentic.
We also explored the different kinds of disagreement, how we should differentiate between authentic forms of disagreement and inauthentic forms of disagreement. Many of us had experienced forms of concerns raised being minimised, dismissed or ‘proven’ with data. This is an inauthentic form of disagreement which you may recognise as a tactic of denial.
Denial as a process of distraction or obfuscation is common. We have probably all heard of holocaust deniers or climate deniers. It is not always the case that people who deny the validity of dissent are in actual denial, but they often have powerful motivations to keep dissent out of the room. Then denial becomes a useful tool.
If we consider climate change, some of the common forms of keeping dissent out of the room include the demand for more data, the belief that technology can overcome the problem, or trivialising or doubting data when it does exist. Climate change denial is a way to avoid responsibility, cost, inconvenience to those who benefit from continuing processes that are contributing to its acceleration such as the fossil fuel industry.
We had all also experience the voice of cynicism coming into gatherings. Cynicism is a form of passive control that is prevalent in many communities that have lost hope and faith in the future. When we give up on the future we are captured by the past. I spent some time in the UK last year visiting former mining villages, some of which had very challenging socio-economic conditions. Cynicism is a great destroyer of future potential. We found frequently that it presented itself in the guise of data-driven arguments and experience-led stories that reinforce absolutes: X never changes or Y is always and will always be like this.
Finally we had all of course had some experience of rebellion in stakeholder engagement. From individual rebellious souls to participating in movements of rebellion such as Occupy or Extinction Rebellion. The compelling thing about rebellion as a form of inauthentic dissent is that it’s just so much fun, especially when it appears in the form of protest. I recall the heady days of the first Occupy acts in the city of London, and the early days of beating drums up and down Whitehall when Extinction Rebellion was first born.
Sometimes however rebellion is just an act of complaint or keeps us perpetually in locked in activation vs resistance mode, and blocks out the evolutionary potential of a situation. When advocates from either side become so attached to their demands (especially impossible demands), the ‘position’ becomes more important than the future. There is a delightful lack of responsibility in being the one who makes demands, rather than the one who has to fulfil them. The opportunity of taking the moral high ground is a very seductive one but does it ultimately avoid responsibility for taking action to actually do something? To enact personal agency? It’s a question I can’t completely answer because I think Bohm was right: for every great idea, the opposite is also true.
What needs to change in us if we are to work well with disagreement?
Finally we explored what needs to grow in us if we want to be able to work well with disagreement. Here’s what came up for us:-
• not taking dissent personally
• resisting the impulse to respond and take responsibility for others doubts
• resisting the impulse to problem-solve
• being able to hold the space for uncertainty when you don’t problem-solve
• being able to sit with uncertainty
• not pressuring people to participate in a conversation about disagreement when they don’t want to
Further reading:
Community: The Structure of Belonging
The Law of Three by J G Bennett
