Glimpse #4: Canada vs polarisation
This is a guest post from Rosa Zubizarreta, a friend and fellow traveller with deep expertise in group facilitation who is currently Visiting Fellow in Democracy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. If you’d like to write your own guest post, sharing a story that gives you authentic hope, please get in touch. It would be amazing if this exercise were to start to spread…
In these times of polarisation, I’ve been thinking more and more about a fascinating experiment that took place in Canada in 1991 during a time of deep divisions about the nation’s future — and the very real possibility that Quebec might secede.
In response to this looming national crisis, the weekly news magazine Maclean’s brought together a group of 12 very different people, recruited intentionally to reflect the demographic diversity and different views of the wider population. This small microcosm of Canada was invited to participate in an intensive weekend with a team of facilitators from the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Together, the group of 12 participants and 3 facilitators worked hard to explore their concerns, and to end up with a shared vision for the future of Canada, a vision they could all enthusiastically sign on to. Counter-intuitively, the process actually began by opening up a broader set of concerns, rather than the narrower question of whether or not separation was a good idea. The topics they explored included how to develop mutual understanding among Canadians, what to do about the economy, and what changes should be made to Canada’s Constitution.
In the end, they reached a shared vision, and each and every one of the 12 participants signed the four page document they had created together. This was a crucial output, but just as important were the deep friendships and connections that were forged over that intensive weekend, as participants explored their differences, journeyed together through both emotional highs and lows, and discovered common ground.
As sponsor and convener, the weekly news magazine Maclean’s invested heavily in telling the story of the weekend. The documentation team from the magazine created a special issue, with 40 pages of dedicated coverage about the people, personalities, arguments, reconciliations, and outcomes. This played a major role in helping readers identify with one or more of the participants.
In addition to distributing this special print issue, a documentary film called The People’s Accord was created. Screened at town-hall type events all over Canada, it created an opportunity for small-group conversations across the country, helping share the outcomes of this remarkable gathering even more widely.
It’s difficult to quantify the exact impact of all this on the national conversation: it was not a controlled academic study, and there was no “before-and-after polling” to measure the effects that reading about this real-life drama, or viewing the documentary, had on the larger public. But something certainly shifted, with Canada remaining united. And what is certain is that once again we find clear proof that, given a supportive context, everyday citizens can find great meaning and value in the opportunity to come together to explore public issues — even in a context that is deeply fraught.
Acknowledging the ancestors
Thirteen years after the People’s Verdict, in 2004, the first modern-day Citizens’ Assembly was held in Canada, in British Columbia, followed by another in Ontario in 2006. These are widely acknowledged as the origins of the “deliberative wave” that has spread in the years since, with hundreds of similar processes taking place across the world — including the work in Ireland that Jon celebrates in his previous post in this series. As such, I’m one of many who see the Maclean’s “People’s Verdict” as one of the early ancestors of the growing Citizens’ Assemblies movement worldwide. Even earlier ancestors include the Citizens’ Juries model started in the 1970s in the USA by Ned Crosby, and the Planning Cells model created in Germany by Peter C. Dienel around the same time frame.
What all these exercises have in common is what they tell us about the nature of human beings, by bringing together small groups of highly diverse people. Over and over and over again, we see that in a supportive context, we humans find much meaning, a sense of empowerment, and even joy, in working through the challenges of exploring our differences, in order to be of benefit to the larger whole.
Facilitation: a core skill for the 21st century
What does that phrase “a supportive context” really mean? I think facilitation is a big part of the answer.
In the “People’s Verdict”, the facilitation team was led by Roger Fisher, author of Getting to Yes. Fisher was a renowned mediator, teacher, and writer, and by all accounts, an extraordinary human being. He was ably supported by Robert Ricigliano and Stuart Diamond, and Maclean’s coverage included a profile of the “three referees” that emphasized how teamwork among all three was crucial to the success of the process.
As founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Roger Fisher’s vision included spreading these deeply human skills of facilitation, mediation, negotiation as widely as possible. I share this larger vision, and I feel strongly that group facilitation, mediation, negotiation, and conflict de-escalation need to become basic literacy skills in the 21st century, as necessary as reading, writing, and computer skills. Along those lines, I want to celebrate two programs here in the USA that have been doing inspiring work teaching students how to facilitate conversations across differences: The Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University, dedicated to enhancing local democracy; and the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative at Davidson College. At both of these Centers, I imagine that a significant number of the student facilitators they train go on to become professional facilitators. Yet whether they do so or not, if we want to support widespread community collaboration — and to counteract the competitive and scarcity mindsets generated by what Jon calls the Consumer Story — we will need a large base of lay facilitators as well as professional ones.
Facilitators are “reflective practitioners” who are continually growing, adapting, and experimenting with their tool kits in order to learn from each new experience. And we also love to “talk shop” and share our learnings with one another!
Along those lines, I was delighted to have a conversation recently with Rob Ricigliano, one of the “three referees” in the Maclean’s process, and ask him about what stood out most for him from that experience. We talked about the challenge of facilitating that 1991 meeting under the continuous eyes of the camera and of reporters; how the group was brought together again the following year to reflect on what had happened since, and what more might be done; and much more.
What stays with me most, however, is Rob’s insistence on the importance of the emotional dimension of the process. Participants needed the opportunity to share their stories and express their emotions during their time together — and afterward, many Canadians resonated with the human drama of participants encountering one another, and the emotional ups and downs involved. These stories are what help others connect and relate to the valuable work being done by these microcosms of humanity.
It left me wondering: how can we honour all sides of a narrative, in any of the many conflicts that we are facing today? What are the issues where a microcosm group of thoughtful people, representing a wide range of perspectives, might come together in a supportive context to find a way forward together? How could that be shared in a way that could spread ripples of peace, instead of pain?
A final note from Jon: In addition to these beautiful closing questions, and Rosa’s insights as to the vital role and skillset of facilitation, I think what I love most about this story is the role played by Maclean’s. We tend to think that democratic processes have to be run by government. But I’m increasingly convinced that we’re going to have to create the space for our politics to move into. The idea that our media could play that role is a very interesting one indeed… THANK YOU ROSA!
