E020: Bringing Divided Teams Together (Lessons from Brexit)

This is the world of work podcast with James and James, hi. This is all right, onto the podcast.

Hello. This is James and Jane, and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. What are we doing today? Jane, well, you say another episode, it is absolutely another episode, but it's a little bit different from the norm, we've decided to take a short, very short break in between our episodes that make up series two, and we've decided to look around us in the world and notice there's a few things going on and that maybe there's some lessons that we could learn as organizations And as people in work. So those of you who are living in places like New Zealand, Australia, America, the UK, will know that the political climate is very complex at the moment, and I think that's true for a lot of the world, particularly here in the UK, we are knee deep in Brexit. So for those of you who aren't aware. Quite unusually, we're recording this very close to when we're releasing it. So we are currently,

last night was a major vote that, yet again, didn't go through, and the country is pretty much occupied, certainly at a political point of view, and change point of view by the negotiation of the Brexit exit. And so I think it's occupied a lot of conversations in the workplace. I think it's divided a lot of people. Certainly has my family and around the people I know. And I guess the conversation we keep having, James, you and I, when we talk about it, is, yeah, but what are we learning from it? What are we taking from this whole period? So we thought it would be an interesting idea to kind of stop look around, watch what's happening with our kind of organizational psychology, organizational development, heads on. And so, you know, as a process, what can we take from it? And is there things going on in the world that are trying to address some of the challenges around change in examples like Brexit, and maybe we can help people think about it a bit differently. So today, we thought it'd be really interesting to think about the concept of division and how particularly, there are organizations and people around the world trying to manage different approaches in bringing unity after division. And so James done some great research and identified three real world examples of organizations or people trying to affect that change right right now or recently. And then we're gonna have a little bit of conversation about them, and maybe maybe have a think about how they might be applicable to the workforce, and that might be because of you have an actual division in your company around Brexit, or it might be something that's nothing to do with Brexit. It might just be a bad division. But I think there's lots of really interesting things around the concept of overcoming tribalism, how you heal rifts in organizations. I think one of the classics is in mergers, where you see two organizations to come together, and how do you move an organization forward? So there's lots of things that we can talk about. We just thought it'd be really fun and interesting, and I think we should probably caveat it right now with neither of the political commentators. Absolutely not. We're not looking at this from a Brexit point of view, per se. This is about what we as as organization people can learn from what's going on. Yeah, absolutely it's not. It's not absolutely it's not. It's not a political conversation. It really isn't. I'm really done with those. Quite frankly, nothing to do with politics, but learning, learning some of

learning from what's going on under political climate, as opposed to having any sort of interaction with that political climate. And it does mean we have a totally different structure, as James alluded to. So there won't be any of the sort of more detailed lists that we we're going to take a break from lesson to keep we're going to say we're just going to look at these three real world, uh, situations and have a bit of a chat about them and see what you think Cool. All right, let's do that in just a second. But before we do where can people check us out? As always, the one thing that is true is that we will have a page on the website, yeah, dedicated the episode with a bit more information. And you can get there at WWW dot the WoW podcast.org, you can also sign up for Wow mail, and we'll be doing a mailing as always, alongside the episode. And where else can they find us? So, Twitter. We like Twitter. Oh, I love Twitter at the moment. Yeah, we love it. There's lots of good stuff going on there. So we are at the WoW podcast. You can get us there, and we're on Instagram, Facebook, we've got a page on LinkedIn, all that kind of my absolute favorite, I have to just say, on Twitter, my absolute favorite was Sophie, who is listening to us, and she was listening to us where she's got a new job, and she tweeted us yesterday to say she'd been to her first ever huddled because her new organization does hard. Half time huddles.

Like my favorite. Yeah, so And actually, yesterday, we also had a lovely tweet about the huddles with, was it Sean the sheep doing,

oh, if you like, if you like a GIF or a GIF, GIF, GIF, I go GIF. If you like a GIF, then there is a classic one on our feed, which is basically a bunch of sheep doing a huddle. Oh, great. Which is my favorite? My favorite, probably topping my favorite tweets. Yeah, it made me smile. Anyway, onto, onto the subject hand things civil society does to bring divided groups together. What did you find? Yeah, so, so I looked around to try and find some ideas from around the world as to how different groups heal the rift, or bring divided groups together, or overcome adversity and diversity and things like that. And I've identified three things, and what I wanted to do is I just wanted to go through each of them with you and tell you what I'd seen, read, read out a few things to you, share a little bit of what I've learned, and then try and see Jane, if you've got any thoughts on how we can learn from that what the actual lessons are. So I've got three things. One is a fairly old report now from a UK charitable organization or charitable funder called New philanthropy capital, and they did a report in 2004

focusing on young people in divided communities, and how you can kind of bring together young people in divided communities. I think there's some interesting stuff there. The next thing I've got is by an American psychologist called Tom Wolf, who's worked a lot at bringing communities together after divisive projects in local areas and things like that. And he has done some stuff on the power of collaborative solutions, which is again about bringing people together. I think there's some interesting things there. And then the third thing is a contemporary American organization called Better Angels, which focuses on bringing together divided groups of Republicans and Democrats in the US. And then better angels actually comes from a famous speech from Abraham Lincoln in the lead into the American Civil War. So that's where the name comes from. So let's jump into it. Should I start off with the first one and tell you about the first report? Yeah, talk us through the NPC report, because I think it's really interesting. Okay, cool. So if we look at the NPC report, what we can see is that they call out in their work that there are three broad areas that they think about as being important for helping to bring together young people in divided communities. And these three areas of focus, they're sort of intervention types, loosely speaking to use that language from a behavior change. Behavior change perspective, they all sort of complement and work together as a program of initiatives that help try and create opportunities for young people to come together and have a more healed and unified approach to things. And what they call out are three different things. They call out shared space as a key, key piece of this. They call out leadership as another key piece, and then they call out training, right? So they're kind of like three basic things, but those are the areas where they choose to focus on, and I think these are kind of interesting. So if we look at shared space, what they say is that shared spaces, creating opportunities for people to have shared spaces, is really important thing. So they they through shared space, aim to help young people create commonality of things like understanding of culture, so they can understand each other's cultures. Helps them identify,

not just cultures, but also, you know, backgrounds. It helps them understand their ways of doing things.

And through that, the view is that that shared space brings people together and creates a sense of unity. And again, this is very much about learning about the other people that you're with. So some of us shared spaces focus on things like sports, potentially, or things like youth centers, and they can have a structured, structured purpose to the spaces, but fundamentally, it's about creating that sort of physical environment that lets people come together, and using that environment to bring people together so that they can

have an opportunity to build bonds. So that's the shared space piece. The next pillar of their work was around leadership. And there are a couple things in here that were really important, but one that really stood out for me is that they said that leadership in this context should make sure, or should aim to be representative of the communities that are within that divided area, right? So, so it's really important that your leadership brings together a range of people from a range of areas, so that it feels representative and that kind of everybody has a voice in leadership. That feels really important for this paper in terms of healing division. And another thing that's called out from a leadership perspective is that leadership should have a focus or a goal to drive towards increased understanding within the community, so that should actually be a leadership priority within itself. And then the last thing that they call out is around training. And here they identify a few different things.

This context around young people invited communities, and they talk about developing training for understanding of flashpoints. So what are the instances and events that lead to sort of conflict or challenge in the environment? Another piece around understanding the choices and how people go around making choices, training on responsibility, training on conflict, and they actually called out things like training on understanding opinions, and also a little bit on things like reparations. So there's some interesting and fairly specific things in there to do with training.

And very, very three things that I kind of pulled out as high level key points from this report. So fundamentally, they talk about working on shared spaces to bring people together in working on improving leadership so that it's representative, and that it focuses on increased understanding and introducing training so that you can address some of the areas that lead to conflict within divided communities and help people overcome them. So for me, that's for NPC report. What do you think

I'm totally biased, because I love the MPC. Those of you who aren't familiar with it as an organization, they do really amazing work, helping the charity sector in Britain to

do better, to do their work, better, to measure impact, better, to explain outcomes, better, lots of things they do really, really well. So I'm obviously biased. It's quite an old report, and I think probably there's a significant amount in what you've said that is now kind of accepted, but I think there's some stuff very specifically thinking with my organization hat on that's really important. So when you think about shared spaces, community leadership, training and conflict resolution and that concept, those three things that they're trying to call out, I can see in real world examples and organizations where they don't exist, you create challenge. So we consistently talk about remote working, and this concept of people feeling isolated away from it, and I think shared space, and the particularly the things they're talking about, which is giving people the opportunity to understand their culture, their identity, and giving them a place based experience is really important, yeah? And I think that's why, when people people are really short sighted, when they think, Oh, we won't host people in a central office, because it's gonna save money. Yeah, right. No, spend the money bringing those people together in different ways, because you have to do that. That's how you create relations. And if you don't, that's how split things. Also, you're never going to get over it, right? If things are divisive, you're never going to get over it if you don't bring people together. And I think that's why, although it's very uncomfortable when you get mergers, they quite often will force organizations to, rather than have one floor each or whatever, they will push them together.

For me, probably the most important things to take out of this are around representative leadership. Yeah, because I think

it applies to certain applies to inclusion, it applies to so many issues. Yeah, you know, it is not about having a representative workforce. It is about having a representative workforce of your community that also is led by a representative group. Yeah, and this is one of the problems. So it's really interesting. There was a discussion on Twitter about, why do we have non diverse boards and charities, for example, and and, you know, everyone was like, Well, why don't we and I? But part of the reason is because we, because we, because we don't do it. I mean, you really want to do it, you do it. You just appoint someone, yeah? And you hear a lot of, you know, the bottom line is, what you're saying, for example, when you don't, when you don't appoint someone from a merchant organization onto a board, yeah, is we're not really merging. We're owning, yes, right? And it's the same if you have two youth groups that merge together, or it's the same if you have and you know the Brexit connotation would be, if you fill your cabinet with leavers or remainers one way or the other, what you are saying is, we are not coming together. We are ruling. And that's not particularly what happened, supposedly, but certainly that, that sense of where is our voice in this is really important if you're going to bring people together and get over it. And for me, the training bits super important.

It is not easy to get over division and having some actual training and and developing your skills in being comfortable with difference, yeah, is super important, and understanding where that might flare up. So I I'm really uncomfortable when people try and say that unity or re establishment of relationships after a division is about changing people's minds or everyone consensus. It's just not that's not what it is to me. What it is to me. What it is is making people comfortable with being different and having different opinions, and that being okay and managing that within the workforce. And I think if I was going to pick out one challenge that is going to come out of Brexit for organizations, whatever happens, you will have people in your organization on both sides and whatever.

Ever happens from Brexit, someone's not going to be happy. And actually, it is a sensitive, complex issue. And the idea that whether we whether we leave next week, two weeks time or not, happens is the end of it. It's just the beginning, because either way that we're going to be living with someone not getting what they want. And you know, to me, that's no different to organizations that have employees who have launched action against their employers, and it's done who picks up the pieces afterwards, right? Because they don't really, it's horrible and it's uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk to anyone. So for me, that's it's really interesting model, and I think there's a lot that can be learned. And my call out to this, what would be if you do see this in your workplace, if you are seeing

divisions from outside of the workplace affecting you up, don't, don't put your head in your sand, because it's not going to work.

In my view, you need to start thinking now about how, how you as an organization can can heal some of the rifts that are going on, and if you're planning a major change that's going to affect people unequally, like an office move, which is always my favorite subject, but any of those, then I would definitely be thinking about it. So that's my take. Cool. All right. So, so that was the NPC view on this, about young people in divided communities. And they called out three things. They talked about the importance of shared space, to give an opportunity for people to come together from divided groups. They talked about the importance of leadership, particularly representative leadership. And leadership focused on increasing understanding. And they talked about the importance of training. And it feels like all three of those things would be possible options for business or other organizations that had divisions within them. So hopefully there's something interesting there. The next one I want to touch on is by an American psychologist, someone called Tom Wolf, who spent a lot of time looking at bringing together divided communities. As I said, this is things like towns where maybe a hospital has been taken away, and how do you deal with that conflict, or towns where maybe there are maybe drug epidemics, or whatever it happens to be divisive instances in towns that lead to sort of community, community polarization or separation, separate, separation. That's not even word, isn't it, separation. I quite like separation. Yeah. So less separation. Everybody. All right, anyway, so in looking at how to bring together disparate groups in civil society in the areas that he's looked at, he's actually come up with six steps as a process. And I just I thought they were kind of interesting, and it's kind of nice to have a model. And I thought we could run through those, and then you could let me know what you think. So his first one is, he says, whatever you're doing in this type of situation when you're trying to bring people together, he says, what you should do is make sure that you're including, including, wow, look at that, that you are including the people most affected by the problem, right? So all too often, from sort of his experience, he says that you might be talking about a specific area, say homeless people that lead to division in the community, but maybe you don't include the homeless people in your conversations. And the point is that you'll never really make progress unless you include the people who are most affected by a problem. So part one is including the people most affected. Then part two, he says that fostering true collaboration goes beyond simply sharing information. So what he's getting at here is that it really needs to be a collaborative approach. People need to have voices that matter. People need to be able to contribute towards decision making. People need to be able to help shape things. It's not just about sharing information with people, but it's really

to use a phrase that that some of you might know, it's about giving people a share of voice and giving people an opportunity to co create things. So stage two is fostering true collaboration that goes beyond simply sharing information. Then point three that he talks about is, he says focusing on a community's assets, not its deficits, right? So this is partly about looking for the things that people have, looking for the things that people have in common, looking for some positive building blocks from which you can build a relationship. So what are the good things that that a divider community has remaining, that it can use as a bit of a point to come together around, maybe something, to celebrate something in common and strengths fundamentally that help bring people together. The next thing he says, point four, is that to bring divided communities together, it's important to create a democratic process in which everyone has a say. So with this, you know, the imposition of decisions on others isn't always helpful for bringing them together, but the closer you get towards a democratic process where everyone has a say, but more likely it is that you'll be able to bring people together, and people will will go with the sort of majority will the last. Sorry. The fifth thing he says is that make sure that you should try and take action that involves social change. So to bring communities together, you need to introduce initiatives and undertake activities that try and change.

Some of the underlying problems that have led to some of that division where possible. And the last thing he says is that it's good to try and engage people at a spiritual level. Now this one is one that maybe I'm not so certain about. The language doesn't really resonate with me so much with a spiritual level, but I can very much understand the desire to connect with people at an emotional level, or at a values based level, or a philosophical or a philosophical level. Yeah, I think that's right. So those are the six points that he talks about. I'll run through them again. So firstly, include the people most affected by a problem. Secondly, make sure that you foster true collaboration going beyond simply sharing information. Number three, focus on the assets that you have, not the deficits in the community. Number four, create a democratic process in which everyone has a say. Number five, take action that involves social change, and then, number six, engage with people at a spiritual level, or philosophical or values based level in our world. So what do you think about that? One, I like Tom, you like Tom, I like Tom, I like Tom, because he's doing something really important. Yeah, his work is really important, really good. He's because, I think in his day job, he does lots of coalition building across communities and stuff, right? Yeah, I think it's good. Like you. I probably the spiritual language doesn't sit terribly well with me, but I do think that there is a a non material world approach that is useful, sure.

And if you were to swap spiritual for the the community coming together rituals that spirituality sometimes brings, then, yes, I'd be much more comfortable with it. And actually, I would say I've seen good community work that does those things, and I've seen community work that doesn't do some of those things, and it's been okay, yeah, but I what I haven't seen is good community work that doesn't do at least two or three of those. Yes. Okay, so it makes sense to me, How much is it about bringing division together, and how much is that just about community change, don't know, or team building, almost? Yeah, not sure.

I do. However, I am fundamentally highly attached and with no evidence whatsoever, completely behind him, on focusing on a community's assets. It was funny as I was just about to point to that as you were chatting, because that was one you were gonna

guess so for me, my experiences of working with young volunteers in London and developing their skills,

where they learned to recognize each other's strengths and where they learned to recognize their strengths the team and awareness of weaknesses in the sense that they knew what they weren't strong at, but where they learned to celebrate their strengths was where they became into their own. Into their own, and they learned to come together as a group. And so for me, it's totally unsurprising that that's also the true of looking at what you've got. And I also think, if you reversed that statement, what's the quickest way to divide a community? Yeah, talk

about all the stuff you haven't got. Talk about all the things that you don't have access in the world unfair. And isn't the world unfair? Because what happens is they then, it then becomes them against the world, but it also becomes them against each other, not enough to go around absolutely and so for me, if you flip all of his his ideas, aside from the spiritual one, on their head, you can kind of quite quickly see how division could either thrive or continue, at very least, if you don't do these things in the way that they're intended. So, yeah, I like Tom, yeah, I was just gonna say one of the things that really stands out to me. I mean, focusing on assets is really high on my list as well. I think that's great. The other one that, the other thing to learn from that is, and from my personal experience, don't ever take a job because you think it's the we it's a job that requires you to be good at all the things you're not good at to see if you can just, just a private tip there, yeah, don't try and fix your deficits. Have the work. I wasn't terribly happy, that's

so, yeah, we should all focus on our assets. We've all got something to put right. That's a positive, positive message. The thing I was going to point out, or the thing that I was going to mention that I like is around his call out, but you should include the people most affected by a problem. Yes, I think when you look at things from an organizational perspective, particularly in the merger or post merger, or things like that, potentially what you do is you get all the people from the, you know, the acquiring company that claims to be merging, sitting in a room saying, what are we going to do about all those other people? Right? How come all those other people who aren't in this room aren't happy. I don't understand. Yeah. And that in itself, is an encapsulation of a problem. So so I will, I will go back yet again to my favorite musical, Hamilton, okay, yes, yes. I remember, which I think I've told you, and there's a song in it. You've got it. I want to be in the room when it happens. Yeah? And if you don't have a voice in that room, you feel completely isolated, and you don't feel represented. And that goes back to first model as well, right? Yeah, it's all about representative. Leadership, yeah, so you have to involve those people. Yeah. Cool. All right, so there's a bit of commonality between those first I definitely think there's quite a lot of commonality actually, in their approach, the way they're thinking about it. So hopefully some some lessons in those for um organizations or groups out there looking to bring people together the last uh.

Sort of civil society idea that we're going to touch on is from this group better angels. And as I said, they're a US citizens organization working towards depolarizing America. So they're,

you know, they're, they're an independent, non political organization looking to to bring people together. And they do a range of interesting things, but they had a couple of ideas that I thought were kind of interesting that I just wanted to touch on and see what you think about. So if we start out, they do something which they call a red blue workshop. So again, this is about different political parties in America, so red Republicans, blue Democrats, is the language that they use. And this is a set of workshops that they've created to bring these groups together a little bit in divided communities. And this is based a little bit on family therapy, and as opposed to being a sort of general model, as proposed by the npc and

Tom Wolf's work. This is a specific activity that they've done, so I thought it was interesting to include it so red, blue workshops that they do, they run seven hour workshops, right? That's a big commitment. And these are mixed groups. So they bring together a roughly balanced, mixed group of Democrats and Republicans. And what they do is they use structured conversations, and they really focus on exploring the lived experiences of individuals. So this is about their real life, as opposed to things that they've heard through third parties or seen on the media and things like that. And the purpose of a workshops is to listen to the others and to have an opportunity to express your own views, but but without trying to change anybody's mind during this process. So it's a listening exercise, it's a speaking exercise, but it's not a mind changing exercise. And the outcome of these activities, of these workshops, the intended outcome, at least, is an understanding of the other group's view, of how they've reached those views through their lived experiences, and why that's sort of valid, and an understanding of those other people as human beings, again, through, to some extent, their lived experiences. So that's the overall purpose of a workshops, and high level how they work. There are a couple of activities that they do in them, but that I just wanted to touch on. First one they call a stereotypes activity, and I think it's interesting. So what you do here is you get the two divided groups. So you get, in this instance, all the Reds on one side and all the blues on the other. And what you do is you get the groups to spend some time on their own brainstorming what they think the negative stereotypes that are told about them are right. So for example, if we had, one of the examples they talk about is, if you have a Democrat in there, group of Democrats, they'll sit there and brainstorm and say, Well, what is it that we think of a Republican? Say about us? That's a negative phrase. And they'll say things like, well, we just want to sponge off a state. You know, we're we're snowflakes, that kind of thing. And they'll say, Okay, well, that's the negative stereotype. So we've captured that. Then the next thing that they want to do is that they want to in their groups explain why that's not the case, right? So they want to think through and discuss in their groups as sort of a rebuttal and their view as to what the real state is. And then the last thing that they'll say is that, okay, well, what's the little germ of truth that hides behind this that we potentially can acknowledge. So the way that would work from a democratic perspective in this instance, would be the negative stereotype is that we're semi socialist and want to just sponge off a state and have a government give us everything and have a really big government. The truth is that actually, there are a huge amount of highly entrepreneurial go getting Democrats who are actively driven and want to look after themselves and contribute to society. But the little germ of truth that might be out there is that we know that in reality, there could be some people who want to game the system a little bit and take advantage of it, and that's just maybe what's happening a little bit in a few instances. So by having the in group express all those things and go through that stereotyping activity, they get a chance to explore things. They get a chance to bring negativity out into the open. They get a chance to rebut it, but they also have an opportunity to accept a teeny little bit of it. And by by expressing that in a way that it's viewed by the other groups. It's a bit of a bridge building activity. So that's very stereotypes activity that they do, and one other activity they do they call a fish bowl activity. A lot of you have probably heard of something like this. Fish bowling is a specific type of meeting where you've got an inner circle of chairs, which is the bowl, and then an outer circle of chairs, which is the observers. And the way it works in this instance is that what would happen is you'd get all of one group. So you'd get all the Republicans in the middle, and they'd be in the fish bowl, and then all the Democrats would sit around on the outside, and the Republicans would just have a conversation in the middle of a bowl, talking about their lived experiences, their political views, their.

Doubts, their uncertainties, their hopes for aspirations, their reasons behind their beliefs. And the Democrats on the outside would just observe, right there's no contribution. It's just an opportunity to to witness firsthand the sort of inner conversations and workings of of a group that is out of your own sort of domain of belief. So those are the activities. And then they had one other thing up that the better angels talk about, which I quite like, which I'm not going to do in a lot of detail, but they talk about the emotional and intellectual transformation of depolarization, and they talk about the sort of emotional journeys that people go through. And I just want to call these out, because I think it's interesting. You know, the most polarized the emotion is hatred. Then it goes from hatred to disdain, from from disdain towards pity. Then from pity, it moves to basic respect. And then, once you eliminate the polarization, you reach a stage where you have respect and admiration. And for me, that kind of tracks a journey of bringing together a divided group of people and ultimately building that sort of respect and admiration, but supports a bit of cohesion. So, so that's kind of my takeaway from the stuff that better angels have done. Have you heard of better angels before? Have you not since? So you, you were listening to a podcast, weren't you? Yeah, someone else. We listened to other podcasts too, and Reasons to be Cheerful, and they kind of shouted out to these guys, right? And I hadn't heard of it before.

What do I think? I think the stereotypes the fishbowl activity are excellent activities, really well thought out on how to make people understand someone else's perspective. However,

I'm not sure that depolarizing a country, I guess you got to start somewhere, and you start with people who have prepared to spend seven hours in a workshop. But the reality that I feel looking around my country at the moment, that's in the in the grips of quite a big division, is that in order to truly depolarize this country, there are. There are huge swathes of people, including people in my own social circle, that would never choose to go to anything like that cool. And therefore that's just not that's it's an effective activity where there's a desire for unity or or to bridge across the division. And therefore, if you think about it in the context of a family which is based on family therapy, it makes total sense. So if I could get my family into that room, it probably be quite good. Yeah, I think it makes sense if you're talking about a very small village, or if you're talking about a ironically political party that's trying to find some, you know, common ground. But there has but, but like the political party, there has to be an appetite for the common ground. I also so I but I love the activities, and I think they're good, and I think organizations, absolutely, they are cracking activities, particularly the stereotypes. One, yeah, again around diversity and inclusion work again around mergers, because it's effectively, it's about deconstructing your identity. It's about explaining to people what your identity is to offset to you versus how other people have perceived or attached things to your identity as an individual or group. So I love that. I love the stereotypes. One particularly fish bowling is good, but it's a bit of a more standard thing. It's a more standard thing, and it works well, if it's managed well. And you know what? We'll do another episode on meeting types or something like that at some point, and talk about fish bowls as a type meeting. Yes, we will the however, the transformation piece, the emotional, intellectual transformation of depolarization, so hatred, disdain to pity, to basic respect, to respect and admiration. Don't know.

Do you know what I actually in order to get comfortable with that, I would have to go away and research what else is out there. Yeah, because for me, it sounds like maybe I'm just in a bad place for this stuff. It just feels like they've made it into a process, because that's the journey they want to see. So unlike the change curve, for example, which I feel has some inherent truth in it, even when I when I read it, the evidence is there. And I read the academic evidence, and it makes sense, but also I connect with it. I look at this and I feel, I feel a little bit like it might be wishful thinking, but it may be really well backed up. Yeah, I don't know. So I'm going to have a look. What I do think is true is that I suspect huge two, two issues, one people may go through that journey for the people in that room. So you may look at, you know, you may look at the 10 people in the room and go,

Oh, because, in my experience, that's what happens. So change depolarization around major issues in society. In my experience, that's the first step, is getting you to think that some of them are okay, and then over huge periods of time, huge periods of time that shifts to I'm going to assume they're okay, unless I see otherwise. And I was thinking particularly about

the objections to gay marriage when I was thinking about this and how I think there's a really interesting lesson to.

Be learned from the Irish referendum, yeah, because I'm really anti referendums generally, because I don't think that's the political system and they don't support them. However, I have to say maybe it's because I like the the outcome, but I have to say that the way that the Irish conducted themselves throughout that particular referendum much more so than the other one, which was about abortion, I thought was extraordinary. I thought

groups as well, was that, yeah, and just the way, the way that they, they tried to understand what was holding people back, such that the narrative could be clear about what was coming out of it, yeah. So I just thought. I just, I look at, I look at the way it was written about afterwards, and it was never it was it was a victory. For a moment, it didn't feel like it was a massive during win. It was more about, okay, we've made a decision move on. And that, to me, was about the dialog and the way it happened. Yeah, so I guess in terms of lessons from that for organization. So have you got any thoughts

I do for me, the lesson I would take without having understood the academics behind the depolarization stuff would be around manage your expectations, because actually,

basic respect might be all you ever get to Well, and that's okay. That's better than hatred. Yeah, the lessons, yes, do I? Do? I

look around and think, I think one of the things I would say is there's got to be, there's got to be behavior that's unacceptable, yeah, in organizations, and I know that's not very popular view. I think I know that for some organizations, they they, you know, if they find out someone's a member of a hate group, for example, that will be a conversation about this is not the culture. And I think practically managing that, I think you have to actively manage your culture anyway and let people know what's what's unattractive. I think within managing mergers very specifically, I think it is, I

think you have to understand it's a journey. And I think I'm tired, and it comes back to the change journey. Yeah, right, the change curve. I'm tired of people trying to rush people through stuff, yeah, manage people's expectations and accept that it takes time. Yeah.

But, you know, five years down the road, people have forgotten, well, then they haven't in two so don't assume they have Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, overall, I think there's some some pretty good stuff in there. I think for me, one of the things that stands out across all of our models is about the humanity and about connecting with other people and about seeing your counterparties as humans, as opposed to grouped individuals or group ideology. So if you can break through some of that and actually look at people as people, and understand life stories and in the words of a better angel, the better lived experiences and things like that, then I think that's helpful for bridging some of the divides. And I'd say that in organizations, that's something that's that's not too difficult to do, is humanizing the other people in divided Yeah. And I actually you, if you're going to draw one thing from it, you'd realize how much easier it is an organization. Yeah? Because actually, you know, the ability to see people as human first, you don't even have to deal with most of the stuff outside of the office. Yeah. So even if you've got a division around things like Brexit, or in America, we've got things around the wall and stuff like that, you know, it's a lot easier because you're in work environment. The one the other thing I would just say, though, is we've called this episode. We were talking about this as Unity, Unity versus division. It's okay not to be unified on everything. Yeah, it's about being comfortable not being unified sometimes. And I'm just holding I'm picking up myself on that like I'm conscious that I, for example, my personality, I have quite high levels of agreeableness, and that makes me want to bring people to agree. I like it when everyone agrees on stuff, and so it's really important for me to remember that actually is okay for everyone to disagree as long as everyone's comfortable with that. Yeah, so it's a lesson for me. Too. Cool. Well, it sounds like, you know, we started our conversation thinking about the fact that that Brexit is a bit of a depolarizing or a dividing phenomenon that's happening happening in the UK, and trying to see what organizations are doing to bring divided groups together. So we looked at NPC, the new philanthropy capital, and some of the proposed models on how to bring divided communities together, young people in divided communities together had some lessons from that. We then looked at Tom Wolf's power of collaborative solutions, looking at the six step process around bringing together divided groups, divided communities. And then we looked a little bit at some of the better angels, stuff around how they're bringing together divided groups from a political perspective in the US, and had a few lessons from there. Have you got any, any final thoughts on the overall piece that we're doing? Or just, I think that although we're doing this from a point of view, that the world feels quite divided at this point, and particularly relevant here in the UK with Brexit happening, this is for all ages, right?