Transforming Conflict into Creative Responses with Rosa Zubizarreta

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener:

Welcome back to the Living Love podcast. We are in episode 4 of Season 3, and I’m really excited today to be talking with Rosa Zubizarreta. Thank you Rosa, for being here.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Thank you so much for having me, Beth. I’m so happy to be here.

Beth Tener:

Today is we’re going to be talking together about what are the capacities to deal constructively with conflicts. Our theme of season 3 is Belonging: What it Means to Feel at Home Here. Conflict can often split apart, exile, or create real tensions in groups where over time no one feels very relaxed and at home, because of what is going on underneath the surface.

Rosa is a facilitator and has made this very central in her work. She’s the author of a book that’s called From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User’s Guide to Dynamic Facilitation. Rosa talks about how to take the group friction and the challenges that can come up whenever we’re working in teams or in communities and move that into creative innovation. She shares how we come back to repair and to unity.

So today we explore “what are the skills that we need in every community?” There’s those of us, like her and I that are facilitators, but I want the conversation today to also be about how can any one of us be in that role? We all are going to be in times where people get triggered, conflict happens, right? Also in times of great change, as we’re going to see in the months and years ahead with climate change and things just changing and being unpredictable, how do we hold a group together through that kind of change?

So with that, Rosa, one of the stories that you’ve been following for a while is a story of these Citizen Councils in Austria. I’d love to start today diving into that story as a way to unfold into our conversation as one example of a community in a time of deep, unsettling changes. How did that community come together with some different methods and practices to navigate the change, which could be one that would create a lot of tension and conflict?

Rosa sent me a wonderful paper she’s been working on, which had this quote: “public participation is about creating a climate of mutual respect and psychological safety that makes it possible for people to consider creative solutions and move from preconceived positions.” So I love that, the spirit of that, and I think we need a lot more of that in our public realms and our individual lives. I welcome you, Rosa, to maybe start by sharing your interest in the topic.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Yeah, thank you so much, Beth.

So in the year 2000, I was introduced to this particular way of facilitation that is all about creating psychological safety in a group. I didn’t think before that that I was interested in facilitation because what I’d heard is, you know, facilitation is about herding cats or getting people to color inside the lines. None of those things were intriguing to me at all, right? But my friend who invited me to attend this workshop said, “you know, this is different… this is really about creativity.” And I thought, “okay, I’ll check it out.” And I had a very powerful experience at that first workshop. I felt like what we were doing was much more than facilitation. It was about conflict transformation, and it was about diversity work, and it was about creativity very much. Ever since then, you know, I went back again and again because I felt like to really learn this, I’m going to really need to dedicate myself to it.

Beth Tener:

And what was the method was called?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

It is called Dynamic Facilitation. Jim Rough is the name of the person who created it. He was invited to teach in Germany and somebody came to one of his early workshops who was the director of a small state level office for public engagement and for sustainability…his name was Manfred Hellrigl. So Manfred learned this method and he had had a lot of experience with a lot of different public engagement processes before. He took Jim’s work, modified it somewhat, and looked for the first opportunity he could to try out this new process, took it, add to his toolkit, and had some very positive experiences with it… and it kept growing.

So I kept on hearing about all of these facilitators in Austria who were learning Dynamic Facilitation and who were using it in their work with these microcosms of the public. His office had about 6 to 8 people at the state level in Vorarlberg who started exploring this process of how to bring people together using random sortition.

We’ve had some of these here in the US too. It’s kind of like a jury. You know how people get chosen for jury duty? Imagine instead of getting chosen for jury duty, you got a letter saying, you’ve been selected to be part of a jury where we’re going to look at what to do about immigration, for example. So a random mix of citizens get invited to be in a space for a weekend or longer, some of these processes are much longer, but to really look at this issue from a lot of different perspectives because you’re choosing people who different backgrounds, different ages, different geographies so that people can really talk with one another in a facilitated way, which means in a way where everybody’s really listening because it’s a little bit more slowed down, et cetera, about this issue. That’s what they did with the topic of immigration. I’m going to share the story about that. But in order to be able to deal with such a controversial topic, they had had a lot of experience with the process at a smaller, local level and with less controversial issues. They didn’t just start out there, but eventually they did a statewide council on the topic of refugees and asylum seekers.

Beth Tener:

I first learned about this process of Dynamic Facilitation from Tom Atlee, of the The Co-Intelligence Institute. He’s like a modern day philosopher and curator of what works. I remember he wrote how you any issue in a society or a community is complex. There’s so many layers to and history to it. Who has time to read all the news and understand all those perspectives as a citizen, right? Then they do opinion polling asking “what’s your opinion about this?” But so often it’s “how do I even have an opinion if I haven’t had the time and space to really understand all those perspectives?”

I was drawn to understanding how Dynamic Facilitation works, because the ability for us in a democracy to give the depth and the time to understanding alone, it’s like, “how are you going to do it when you’ve got a newspaper full of 17 important topics?”

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Exactly. So if we were to distribute that work to one group that is coming together, a very diverse group, to study the issue of transportation, and another group that’s created to focus on another issue. We don’t all have to become experts at everything in order to give public input.

Beth Tener:

I love that. Yeah. So wise.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Also, our public input in these kinds of processes is considered because it’s not just “this is what I think because I’ve been in this bubble and we all read the same newspaper. This is what I think should happen.” But instead, “this is what we think because a group of very different people who read very different newspapers and have very different perspectives have come together in a facilitated space for some good time, for a good chunk of time.” And when I say facilitated, I mean the psychological safety is really important. But even just making sure that each person has a chance to speak and each person is treated with respect, right? That’s just like the most level of what facilitation means. So many people say, “oh, I don’t like talking about politics” because what happens is that people get into arguments and back and forth with each other.

Beth Tener:

And the tension rises.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Yeah. Tension rises, no one’s listening.

To me, one of the most fascinating results of these experiments (not just in Austria now because these experiments have taken place all over the world)… whenever we get a bunch of very different people together in a facilitated space where everyone’s going to have a chance to speak and everybody’s going to have a chance to be heard, people afterwards say, “oh my gosh. It was very meaningful to talk about whatever issue it is.” Right? But this is a public issue, and an issue that affects all of us. It was so helpful to be able to talk about that because people really care about public issues when it’s not just butting heads.

Beth Tener:

This is a human capacity we could develop. Right now, you know, with social media and the way the political process is structured, we don’t have to fully get into that today, but it’s like it intentionally always divides into polarizing… you know, this party or that party. So you have all these layers of “who’s going to win elections” clogging our ability to actually think through. But when you can get a space where people can honestly think something through for “what’s the best solution, weighing all these things”, from what I’ve heard from you and others, you can come up with brilliant solutions that weigh everything and you come out with the best choice for everybody.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Sometimes it’s like, if you look at a hand and you look at all five fingers, like you spread out your hand, it’s like, “oh, there’s all these different positions.” But then if you go to the palm, like there’s a common ground of what we all actually believe and agree on already. There’s a lot of public opinion polls in our country that show that there’s actually huge mass support for a number of different ways forward on certain crucial issues, and yet, because of what you were talking about, because of the politics of “divide and conquer” and exaggerating the differences… we end up… I’m not saying, I’m not trying to dismiss the differences or say that they’re not important… but we end up not being able even to move forward on the big amount of common ground that we do have.

Beth Tener:

That’s a question of what it means to feel at home here, right? How do we actually build up our capacity to feel connected to what the common ground is? I don’t even know right now what it is. All I keep getting mirrored back to me is that we’re hugely polarized. There’s not a lot of mirroring back from media and other places of, “actually, we all agree on these things.”

So coming back to this, can you put me in the situation of like, “all right, I’ve joined a Citizen Council, maybe we’ll do this one as an example in Austria. A lot of the groundwork’s been laid, there’s been a lot of practice, little small groups talking about different issues, and I’ve now been invited to join this one on what to do with the refugees.” What would it be like when I come in the room? How does it actually work?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

The first thing that would happen is that there would be a circle where everybody gets a chance to go around and talk about how they felt when they got their letter of invitation and what inspired them to come. So we kind of get to hear from each person, get to hear each person’s voice…

Beth Tener:

How many people? Is it about 15 or 20 or how many people are in one of these typical councils?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

It can really vary, but usually it’s no more than 12 or 15 per small group. The one on immigration had two different groups that then came together. Each group is having an in-depth conversation with 10 to 15 people. They have done citizens assemblies, like they did in Ireland, and they’ve done in France, and they’ve done in the UK, where they have like a hundred to 150 people over a period of one weekend a month for six months. When they have the conversations, they’re also working in groups of 10 to 15, and then coming into plenary sessions, so there’s a natural scale of having a small group conversation that you can’t have a small group conversation with a hundred people. That that doesn’t work.

Beth Tener:

No. And there’s a different quality of conversation based on how many voices are in the conversation. So I would be in with 12 to 15 people, we do an opening circle, and then what would happen?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

So in this particular case, and I have to say I was not there, this is all based on interviews and reports.

Beth Tener:

Just to clarify for the audience, Rosa just finished her PhD where she studied this whole story we’re talking about.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

I interviewed 11 facilitators who had a lot of experience with several of these different councils and I had asked each of them in my interviews, “what do you most enjoy about the work of facilitating these councils? And what do you find most challenging?” I guess what fascinates me, again, back to what you were saying, all that we hear is that people are polarized. We have this belief that human beings don’t have the ability to really work through “how do we move forward on this issue.” But that’s because we’re always like kind of voting for candidates, which is a whole different thing. It’s more like, “who do you believe in?” It’s not, “what are we going to do together on this particular issue?”

Beth Tener:

I often think of it as, you know, the issue has a life of its own, our community and what we decide to do with these choices… it really shapes our community, and it’s not a multiple choice test. We’re not consumers picking a product. We’re people holding a very nuanced, complex series of trade-offs and choices. To me, the evolution of the space has to hold that complexity in a way that people don’t get overwhelmed and check out.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned something really important: we’re not consumers, and that brought to mind one of my favorite books these days, which is Jon Alexander’s work, which is called Citizens. I kind of need to quickly add that it kind of took me a little bit to get used to the title of this book because I’m an immigrant, my parents came here when I was eight years old, worked in California for a long time with people who were immigrants, and so citizens can be a little bit of a loaded word.

Beth Tener:

I hear that.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

But Jon Alexander didn’t mean who has legal papers that give you the right to be here without being chased by, you know, an oppressive state. What he means by citizens is people who take responsibility for the wellbeing of their community, and that’s a much older term. So he’s talking about the shift from consumer mentality to citizen mentality, meaning “what are we going to do to help improve our community? And so how do we tap into that energy? How do we create a space that brings out everybody’s care?” Because deep down, we all care about the wellbeing of our community.

Beth Tener:

At one point, I was doing a group process that Tom Atlee and some others were involved in, and the framing we got to was that there’s a lot of care. It’s just too fragmented right now. Our care is fragmented.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

So our care is fragmented, and also our care is covered over by a lot of triggering emotions: a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of confusion. So that was the first thing that came out in this council.

So first, there’s a little bit of information provided: this is the number of asylum seekers and refugees that came in this year, this is the number that came in the year before. This is presented by the sponsors, by the official folks who called the council. Basically: here’s the context, figure out what to do about it.

One of the first things that happened is that there was a lot of upset in the room because this information had not been being widely publicized, partially because people in positions of authority and responsibility weren’t wanting to get people upset. The whole reason they held the council in the first place was that the quotas for the number of asylum seekers and refugees for the country of Austria were set by the EU and the state of Alburg was set by Austria. So it’s like, “well, is this usually the case?” There’s a level above that is making the decisions about how many new people they were going to need to integrate. But the numbers had been going up and so the state was like, “what are we going to do?” These Citizen Councils that they’d been using successfully to deal with other issues, they said “let’s bring that process in to help us deal with this monster issue that we know that there’s a lot of resistance and fear. So what do we do about it?”

What happened is in the little council is that initially a lot of that resistance and fear come up, and the point isn’t to do away with it, to cover it, to suppress it, but to give a space where people can be heard around it, right? So in the Dynamic Facilitation process, people say whatever it is they need to say, and the facilitator reflects back, “did I get it right? Let me record it.” People really got to vent at first. You know, “why hasn’t the government been telling us this”, and, you know, “what are we going to do with all these people?”

The way the process is designed, everybody gets to be heard and at some point the energy starts to shift. In this particular case, some people started saying, “okay, well we understand that our state isn’t the one that sets the policy on this. It’s the national state that assigns this, and we have all these feelings about it because we felt a little left out of the loop, a lot left out of the loop. We’re just starting to hear about this now, but what are we going to do about it?”

So there’s a story that some people who were there like to tell: a gentleman from Austria said, “you know, we are sitting here talking about how we only have X amount of lifeboats, and how are we going to fit more people into these lifeboats that we have? But we’re Austrians we can expand.” To put it into a different framework: it’s like if we were talking about a pie, and if we start sharing this pie with more and more people, everybody’s going to get a smaller slice of the pie. And then somebody says, “well, yeah, we actually know how to bake pies. So what do we need to do to bake more pies? What do we need to do?”

Beth Tener:

So that was one of those moments, it shifted, right? That shifted some of the energy, the constraint or the group.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Yeah. To thinking, “well, how, what would it look like to build more lifeboats? Maybe we do have work that people can do that would be helpful. You know, like I could use an extra pair of hands on my farm to help me milk my cows. Or maybe I know some people who are retired who would be happy to spend a couple of hours per week doing conversational practice with some of these people so that they could learn how to speak our language better or more easily.”

People started to look at what can we contribute to help the adaptation process of these folks who are going to be here anyway. Because ultimately we at our level aren’t the ones who make the decisions about that.

But first they had to work through all of their anger and upset about the fact that people were coming in. But then once you have a chance to digest that this is the reality of what’s happening, then how can we deal in a more effective way with it? And so they came up with an idea that there should be public meetings throughout the state where people would have a chance to hear about this new information, but also about what this group had come up with. And there could be volunteer fairs to identify who has something that they could contribute. They also wanted more information. So the Office of Public Engagement who had sponsored this agreed to publish four different monthly magazines with information about where people were coming from and featuring people, all about who they were, so that people would feel like this wasn’t so big secret that was being kept from them.

Beth Tener:

Or what was happening to them. Right?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Back to you being a person who’s been chosen. So you’re in this meeting, some people have expressed upset for a while, and then after the venting, some other people start coming up with, “what can we do moving forward?” And then you all draft a list of recommendations coming out of this meeting that get shared at an open public meeting with the community. Because remember: this small group that you’ve been a part of has been people who’ve been chosen by lottery to reflect the diversity of the larger whole.

But now you’re all going to go present at an open public meeting where the governmental sponsors of this meeting are there to hear the work that you’ve done and this whole thing is going to be held World Cafe style, which means that people are sitting at small tables of four people and talking amongst themselves. You might be one of the people who’s got to stand up and say, “this is what happened in our council. At first there was a lot of upset because we felt really left out. And then after we worked through that, then there were some ideas that came up about what we could do to participate in facing this situation in a more positive way.” So the people in the room all get a chance to talk in small groups about it.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. I want to just reflect of some of the things I’m hearing in this story. One of the things to feel at home as change is happening around us, some which we can control and some which we don’t, but that ability to have the space to just vent what we’re upset about or concerned about. It’s that idea that if you’re listened to and have a space for that to be honored and received, that emotion has somewhere to go. It can be moved through. And on the other side of it can be a more thoughtful, less highly charged conversation about, “now what do we do?” A lot of times when we avoid conflict or we have a political or other systems that want to just push it into two polarized sides, you know, you just take that emotion in different directions as opposed to what’s going to put it in a creative direction. Where on the other side, we’re still going to have a possibility of coming to some coherent unity on some answer. We don’t know what it is yet. But there’s a need to work with that emotion and receive it and process it feels really important in this, in what you’re talking about.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Absolutely. Part of the architecture of this process is this large public meeting. The Citizens Council had just reported out their work and everybody’s talking about it in small groups during that council, in the larger group they figure out what also gets formalized, although people may have started to create it before. It’s this thing called the responders group.

So the responders group is created by members from all of the different agencies who have been working on this topic already. So in this case, for example, there was a representative from say the equivalent of Catholic Charities (or similar), who’s already helping people who are immigrants. There’s an equivalent of another social service department that does this particular little bit of work with immigrants. So all these people, they’ve been part of the planning process for all this. But now we are formalizing by inviting one or two people from the smaller council or from the larger cafe, some members of the public to say, “who wants to be part of this group that’s going to meet on a monthly basis to track the recommendations of the Council as they move through the intricacies of the bureaucracy.”

Beth Tener:

So the Citizen Council has the bureaucracy and is accountable to following up on what the citizens say?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Yes. How do we make the bureaucracy accountable. Love it. To following up on the recommendations. Now, you don’t know what’s going to come out of a Citizens Council. So you can’t say the government now needs to implement it because that would be like signing a blank check ahead of time. But what you do need to do ahead of time is to have the government agency that’s sponsoring this commit to following through. Implement what they can, and if there’s something that they can’t implement, they need to be able to give a good reason why they can’t implement it. You don’t want to ever be in a situation where you come up with a bunch of recommendations and then they just get lost because then people feel like…

Beth Tener:

This happens all the time. We did all this work.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

What happened to all the work that we did? It makes it worse. It doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse.

Beth Tener:

I agree. People do this blue ribbon commission after commission after study group, and then the recommendations, and the new mayor comes in or the CEO changes, and it just… This is a big part of it. If we want to create ways to work with tension and navigate complexity, we have to get better about the follow-through if we’re going to get people to do good process and work together.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

You could see this as an organization consultant yourself. You could see this as a macro level, a higher level application of the reflecting back that we do to people in the individual level, right? Because in part we are creating psychological safety in the room.  We say, “wow, let me make sure I’m understanding. Did you just say, da da da da, da. Is there more? Can you clarify? Can you expand?” And then I’m charting it down on the paper. So I’m letting people know that I’ve heard what they’ve said. Likewise on a big level, here’s this blue ribbon commission who’s just made all these recommendations to the government. You need to come back and say, “this is what we’ve heard, and this is the part that we’ve been able to implement. This is what we’re doing with it, and this is the part that maybe we’ll need to wait till next year.” But you need to close the circle.

Beth Tener:

You so do, and we as citizens should be increasingly demanding that that gets done, right?

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Absolutely.

Beth Tener:

So I wanted to come back to this idea of “how do you create ways that we can deal with the conflict in a group.”

Rosa Zubizarreta:

We had talked a little bit before, so I am still going to be talking about a group now, but a different level of group. This is now not a government sponsored thing… this is in your home or in your workplace or in your neighborhood. And I’d mentioned to you earlier, Beth, how inspired I was by the work of Dominic Barter, who is the founder of something called Restorative Circles. In his work, Dominic talks a lot about the importance of becoming aware of the conflict system and the importance of creating a new and different conflict system. We could look at the conflict system, ask “what do we do when there’s a conflict?” It’s just the answer to that question. And so currently what we do when there’s a conflict is that we try and pretend it’s not there.

We try and sweep it under the rug or whatever, until we get to the point that we’re fed up. Then we think, well, “you know, maybe I’ll go to small claims court, maybe I’ll sue this person.” That’s the conflict system that we have set up in our society. There’s an intermediate step there, which is, “well, I’m going to tell all the neighbors on my block how upset I am about this neighbor who’s doing this objectionable thing, and they’re all going to agree with me.” And then, you know, maybe we’ll all start to shun this person and then maybe they’ll change their behavior, which usually doesn’t work it usually. But anyway, so what is it that we do when there’s a conflict?

Now Dominic Barter worked in Brazil and he worked a lot in schools. And I know that your last episode was on schools, but I just want to tell you the story that he shared with us, which I think is so beautiful. He said, every school needs a conflict room, but that’s not a punishment room. It’s not where we send people to punish them when there’s been a conflict. It’s a place that has couches and soft music and beautiful posters on the wall where people can go in and chill, and there’s people who are there to listen to them and to help them figure out how this conflict can be solved. His biggest teaching is that conflict is a part of life. So we need to accept that human beings are going to get in conflict, and we need to figure out what are we going to do when we are in conflict to help us find our way back In a good way. Whereas if we try and say, “oh, we’ll never have conflict”, and then when it comes, we’re unprepared for it, or we switch into punitive mode, that’s not going to work so well.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. I love what you’re saying about that. We need in each community… it’s like thinking ahead about “how do we do this?” One of my earlier guests was Libby Hoffman, who did a lot of healing work with some colleagues in Sierra Leone after the civil war there, and they were really building up like teams of people trained as conflict transformation teams. And you know, in each village there would be a little house that would have a room that had a little flag outside. Like, “this is a space, you come when there’s a conflict and these are the skilled people in our community that help you hold it.”

Rosa Zubizarreta:

That’s a conflict system. Here’s the system we have created to deal productively with conflict.

Beth Tener:

Because there will be conflict and, and how are we going to hold it in a way creates repair and unity.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Lawyers and courts and jails, and that’s our current conflict system.

Beth Tener:

Or just exile and move to some different community, right? Yeah.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Right, right, right.

Beth Tener:

And break apart.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

So even though I had heard this from Dominic, it’s like the penny hadn’t dropped for me until I was doing this consulting work with a colleague of mine with a group of teachers.

These were lovely, beautiful teachers at a Waldorf school who did beautiful work with the children in their classroom. But when it came to collectively working out the conflicts in the school with one another, that was not working very well.

One of the things that we realized was that they needed a conflict system. What I mean by that is if the teacher from down the hall comes to your room after the kids have all gone home and says, “oh my gosh, I’m so stressed out because teacher X just did this thing. You know, we were out in the parking lot. And I said something to her and she was really snappy and short with me” and thought, “okay, so what are we going to do?” Because the thing is, what most people have a tendency to do when this kind of stuff happens is to take sides. So this particular case, what a conflict system meant is that we needed to get all of the teachers together and have some shared agreements that if a teacher comes to you and says, “I’m having such a hard time with this person,” you may choose to give that person a chance to vent. We all need a chance to vent five minutes, 10 minutes. If you want, if you’re able to, you can also say, “oh, I’m really sorry. I had my own hard day and I need to go home right now.” But if you choose to do the kind thing and you’re able to give this person a chance to vent… there needs to be a previous agreement amongst everybody that at the end of those five or 10 minutes, what you’re going to say is, “okay, so now that you’ve had a chance to vent a little bit and think more clearly about it, what are you going to do to repair your relationship with that person?”

Beth Tener:

Yeah. And if that’s the question, everyone’s knows they’re going to be ready to be asked.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Right. It’s a very different framing so that, you know, like, if this person listens to me, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to agree with me. Listening is not the same thing as agreeing. They’re not going to now be on my side and we’re going to be against this other person, but instead they’re going to be supporting me. Also, how can this other person and I repair our relationship? And that might be just the two of us having a conversation or that might be me saying, “you know, I really need a third person there because I’m so frustrated.” There’s all kinds of different levels and ways that that can happen. But the point is, that we are all contributing to supporting a culture where the goal of any conflict is figuring out a creative resolution to it.

Beth Tener:

Rosa, one other question I wanted to ask was about, again, back in the spirit of Living Love, is this way of thinking about conflict and holding it. What are other ways people could do this at home or in their workplace or their faith community? I think you were telling me you have a more specific method, not so much for public dialogue, but for other smaller applications.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

I think we really need to think of the 21st century as an opportunity for people to develop a broad set of literacies around conflict. So just like people learn to read and write and do math, and you know, once upon a time there were very few people who could read, and very few people who could write. Well, we need a lot of people who have basic skills in conflict, de-escalation, conflict mediation, facilitation, and in negotiation.

One of the very powerful skills for any of this work is being able to reflect back what somebody else is saying because when people feel heard, they tend to shift out of fight or flight, and they tend to shift into their more social engagement mode. So how can we help another person feel heard? And it’s not by saying, “I’m hearing you; I’m hearing you, I heard what you say.” And it’s like…

Beth Tener:

Let me repeat that back.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Well, we do need to repeat it back because if we just say, “I’m hearing you”, I don’t know what you’ve heard. If I’m upset and you say, “I’m hearing you, I’m hearing you.” I have no idea what it is that you’ve heard. But if you say, “okay, let me check to make sure that I’m understanding. Are you saying that this and this and this”. If you’re reflecting it back to me, then I know whether you’ve heard me or not. And I might say, “well, actually that’s not it. It’s not that I’m upset at him, it’s that I’m feeling deeply hurt and offended.”

Beth Tener:

Like, what’s the nuance of the feeling? Yeah.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Right. And so this is a skill that in the seventies and eighties became very popular and got very misused. So Carl Rogers, the founder of humanistic psychology, some of his followers said, “oh, this is something Carl Rogers does a lot, so we’re going to take this little technique and we’re going to package it up.” And you know, we see it being ridiculed. Like, it’s like what a therapist says, “well, you know, sounds to me like you’re feeling this and this and that.” The point is that the spirit of how we do this makes all the difference in the world, right? So what’s our intention when we’re reflecting something back to someone? What’s the purpose? What’s the reason that we’re doing this? And it can’t be to show somebody how well we’ve listened. “Well, I know what you said. You said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Because then it’s all about us. So if it’s going to work, we need to ask permission, we need to say, “I really want to understand what you’ve just said. Would it be okay if I tell you what I think I’ve heard.”

Beth Tener:

Yeah. That’s very respectful.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

And so then we have consent that this other thing… we’re open to being correctable.

Beth Tener:

Did I get that right? Yeah.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Did I get that right Or is there more? We’re being very humble, and I like the word correctable, you know, it’s like this isn’t approximation.

And so I have this resource I want to share with people, which is my friend Ed Moons with Empathy circle.com. So he has a format called Empathy Circles. You’re in a group of five or six people, and one person is speaking, one person is listening and then reflecting back, and then it kind of goes around in a daisy chain. What’s so wonderful about it is that this is in one way a very simple, basic practice, but we don’t have the muscles to do it. Especially when we’re stressed, our instinct is to argue instead of to reflect back. So it’s all about developing the muscles, right? And you can say, “oh, this is really simple. Of course I can do this”, but there’s actually a whole realm of experience and practice in it.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. That sounds great. We’ll put that resource, we’ll put your book, we’ll put a link to this Austria Citizens Council, all that in our show notes.

So I think we’re getting towards the end of our time, Rosa. This has been such a rich conversation and how we relate to conflict feels crucially important for healing families, healing workplaces, creating places where people are comfortable to work through it together and come out together and more unified on the other side. I’m just grateful for you and all your colleagues who’ve done such innovation and writing about what they’ve found to work in this space. It feels really important.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Maybe to summarize this whole thing… I really appreciate your bringing it back to conflict. The deep thing that I walked away with from my first dynamic facilitation trainings in the year 2000 was “Wow. When there’s conflict, it means that people really care about something.” They’re coming at it from different perspectives. They’re clashing, but if they didn’t care about something there wouldn’t be conflict. How can we go down to the level of understanding what is it that they’re caring about and what is it that they feel is being threatened here? And how can we create a space where we can listen deeply to the caring that each person is bringing, because from there is where we’re going to be able to find the shared way forward.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. And having their care honored and named as opposed to cut down and shut off. That feels like the heart of it. Well, thank you Rosa.

Rosa Zubizarreta:

Thank you so much, Beth.