Newsletter #258 — July 26, 2024
by Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
July 22, 2024
Martin started out explaining his background in communication studies, and how he switched from an academic studying national politics, to what we call a "pracademic" (meaning he does research, teaching, and practice) at the local level. His Center for Public Deliberation started out as a class activity, and has grown to a major fee-for-service operation which provides facilitation for deliberative processes for the City of Fort Collins, Colorado (where he's located), the county, the school district, community organizations, and the university to design and run meetings. Over its 18 years in existence, they have run over 500 meetings.
Martin went on to explain that he trains his student facilitators to use a "wicked problem mindset."
[The concept of "wicked problems'] was developed initially by civic engineers, city planner types. They realized, as they started working for cities, that the problems they were trained to solve in school and the problems they were asked to solve in their community were very different. So they came up with this distinction between a "tame problem" and a "wicked problem." Tame problems could be very, very complex, but there was a right answer, It was a technical problem, like how to build a bridge. ... To solve tame problems, you get smart people together. You get the right answer. And really, the only issue is how do we implement that solution as efficiently as possible.
But they realized working with cities is different. In the problems they're asking us to solve, there's inherently multiple underlining values to those problems, a lot of unintended consequences, and then the people that they're dealing with all rank the importance of those values differently. So there was no technical answer. There was no right way. So I play off of that. I tend to do it a little bit differently than most, because instead of seeing wicked problems as a category or a type of problem, I like to see it more as a lens through which to see problems. It's a tool in your toolkit that you can step back and say, "Okay, if I look at this as a wicked problem, how might that change the conversation? How might that open up some space for us to be able to maneuver?"
After doing a "deep dive" into social psychology and "brain science," he realized that human brains are ill suited for dealing with wicked problems. The "wicked person framework," he said, comes much more naturally to us — "we're wired for us-versus-them. We love our heroes and our victims and our villains". So he trains his facilitators to "shift people from making the easy assumption that problems are caused by wicked people — bad people with bad values — and actually transfer the wickedness to the problem.
When we see that the problem is the issue that we care about, [we can see that it] inherently involves multiple underlining values that don't fit together, and we all rank them differently. So the job we have, as communities, is how to figure out a way to balance these things. How do we have the tough conversation about recalibrating and reshifting which values are more important? Ideally, we figure out how to transcend these tensions and create win-wins, and think differently.
Using the wicked problem mindset, he explained, allows him to be an "impartial process designer, facilitator, who seeks to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and tap into the best of human nature. ... Humans are really creative problem solvers when put in a good situation to do that. The sad thing about our politics is how rarely we're put into good situations. We're often provided simple answers, especially in a two-party system. We always have the easy narrative of the other side is the problem."
Building off his experience with the National Issues Forum and Kettering Foundation, he always develops a discussion guide or a "backgrounder" that he asks session participants to react to. That way they have a joint problem to solve — giving coherent feedback on a document, rather than focusing what is wrong with what someone else is saying. He takes care to develop these backgrounders to include as many different voices and views as possible, while also being very compact. "We often call it a placemat because, sometimes it's a single 11 by 17 piece of paper that's waiting for them at the table." And these placements frame the issue as a wicked problem, a concept which Martin further explains with a little opening lecture at the beginning. He also presents ground rules and does a "mini-lecture on conflict management and deliberation" which helps people understand what they will be doing and why.
This "transforms the conversation and makes it easier for people to dig into the tensions and work through them, because they're working on this document." And they do this in small groups, each facilitated by Martin or a trained student, who brings in all the voices, and encourages the group to reflect carefully on all the ideas that are raised by group members and in the background document. This is the advantage of small groups, Martin observed, "you actually have time for interaction." The down side is you don't have as much diversity as you would have with a large group, but the backgrounder solves that problem, because it brings in the views of parties that might not be at the table, and each small group is asked to react to the views on that backgrounder, as well as each other. That broadens the conversation, and discourages personal attacks. It also encourages people to learn from each other, and tap into their creativity.
The magic happens when we get away from the easy problems that are caused by wicked people, and putting the wickedness on the problem, and we tap into the best of human nature and creativity. We realize, "Oh, wait a second," and we get some new ideas that sometimes can be really powerful that I don't think we often get from a thin approach collecting individual opinions.
Unlike dialogues where the goal is simply to get to know and understand the other side better, Martin's deliberative groups are always trying to address a particular wicked problem. They've worked on affordable housing, environmental issues (e.g., air or water quality), mental health and bullying (particularly with school districts), and substance abuse. among many others. A project that is now a couple of years old is the Deliberative Journalism Project., which is working to equip journalists and newsrooms with deliberative skills.
We talked quite a bit about the stresses and challenges local journalists face. Social media and the Internet has taken away most local newspapers' traditional funding model (of ads and subscriptions), so many have folded, or been bought out by big national conglomerates that print primarily syndicated, one-sided, "click-bait" news. But balanced, informative local news is a fundamental part of a vibrant and healthy democracy. People must know what is going on in their community, and must have input into community decisions. Public journalism, Martin said, is a public good, which needs to be funded as such. Local journalists, be they newspapers, radio, or TV stations can be local convenors, local resources, catalysts of deliberative communication, but they have to be trained to do that, and they need new funding models to make that possible. But if they can do that, they can become a kep component of the local "deliberative system."
Martin explained that after going to a meeting on systems theory and systems thinking, he began to think of his work as bigger than the individual meetings. Those meetings, he realized were part of a much larger "deliberative system."
The more organizations in my community that see themselves as an impartial resource, that see themselves as a deliberative resource, as a bridging institution, the better." We started doing a lot more of that kind of thinking. Maybe 100 people show up to my meeting. But there's 130,000 people in Fort Collins. So how do we think about impacting the broader population? How do we talk about issues? So more and more, my work now is really focused on looking at how communities build the capacity that they need to have the conversations we need for democracy to work.
And there's lots of answers to that. What is city government doing? What are all these different civic societies doing? What are local universities doing or community colleges and those type of things?
Together, he explained, they make the local deliberative system.
This conversation brought us back to the issue about which we first started interacting with Martin, back at the beginning of this newsletter. That is his notion of "principled impartiality." Back in 2022, we had an online debate (in Newsletters 53, 54, 55, and 56) with Bernie Mayer and Jackie Font-Guzman about their notion that neutrality is a trap. We said it was essential for de-polarization, and ultimately for justice as well (while Mayer and Font-Guzman saw neutrality as contributing to injustice, rather than justice. Martin contributed his notion of principled impartiality to that discussion in Newsletter 56. Describing it in our conversation, he asked:
What does it mean to be impartial these days?" I work with a lot of institutions. So I do a lot of work with public libraries. I work with city managers. I work with journalists. I work with conflict resolution folks. I'm a facilitator / deliberation person. And all those have some sort of commitment to either being impartial or neutral or objective or nonpartisan or transpartisan or omnipartisan —that is a new one that I'm hearing more and more.
And as we polarize more and more and more, there's more push back against that, arguing, "No, how can you be neutral to this?" I think I have in the article, and I think you all mentioned this as well, Desmond Tutu's saying that "neutrality in the face of oppressor serves the oppressor." It's been sent to me over the years. I imagine it's been sent to you over the years too, by people saying, "You can't be neutral with this!"
I dug in on this idea in an article for National Civic Review. The title is "The Case for Principled Impartiality in a Hyper-partisan World." I still believe we need impartial resources. Part of this comes from the research on social psychology and brain science, that shows that we're unfortunately much more wired for outrage and polarization than collaboration and deliberation. It's hard for us to deal with conflict. So having organizations, having individuals whose job is to help people resolve conflict and deal with conflict better, I think, is inherently going to be important. I ended that essay with this concern. If we just say, "No, there's two sides, and we're sure one side's right and one side's wrong, we should just join the right side," it takes away the power that we have to be the convener, to be the trusted person bringing people together. So that's the case for impartiality.
But when I talk about principled impartiality, once again, I see it as a wicked problem. And I often admit, yes, I have a hammer and everything looks a like a nail sometimes. But it's this recognition that impartiality is still needed. I have a triangle image with impartiality on the top. I'm committed to impartiality for the reasons I just mentioned. People need to trust us. I believe for humans to deal with conflict, they need help. So someone that's focused on doing that well is important. But then I also have a commitment to democracy, at least small D democracy. I'm partisan towards democracy, and that brings in a whole bunch of values. And I think a lot of those values are both on the left and the right. I don't think either side owns democracy. And then I also have a commitment to good information. In the initial draft of the paper, I played off Desmond Tutu and said, sort of the same thing he did, that if one side has really good information, and the other side just has talking points that we know are wrong, If I'm neutral, neutrality in the face of bullshit serves the bullshitter. But they decided not to let me use those terms. So I had to change it to a little bit. But it's that same idea. So I'm committed to impartiality, I'm committed to democracy, and I'm committed to good information. While recognizing the line between good information and bad information is not an easy one. It's really hard to make that distinction. But it's something that we do have tools to try to negotiate. So the work that I do is a constant negotiation between those three. ...
One argument I make, particularly now with the concerns about the authoritarian right and people saying that we can't be neutral. We have to call that out. I think attacking them [the right] fits within the polarization and doesn't do much. But if we really help people have much better conversations, I think we'll realize more and more where the better arguments are. If the world is really beset by oppressors, oppressing people, powerful people and bad faith actors -- I think they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter. That makes it easier for them. So pragmatically, I think the better the conversation, the better the argument, the better off we are.
We also talked about polarization, a topic on which both we and Martin have focused a lot. He observed that he has two beliefs about polarization that seem opposed to each other, but aren't. First, he agrees with our assertion that "polarization is our number one issue."
If we can't deal with polarization, we can't deal with any of the other challenges that we have, So we have to figure that out. Not only because polarization is a vicious cycle that leads to more polarization and distrust and so forth. But then also, information doesn't work. When we're polarized, facts can't work. Some of the scariest research I did was on the backfire effect. When we're polarized, if I'm trying to convince you you're wrong, sometimes the better my argument, the more you would backfire against it, because your brain is so wired to find some sort of flaw [in my argument] and convince yourself you're right. So the first belief is that polarization is our number one issue. We have to focus on that.
But, like James Coan (and many others), he also pointed out that "polarization is greatly exaggerated. It's not real. It's mostly manufactured." And when people participate in processes like his, they see it melt away.
They often don't agree. But they recognize that the things that that person cares about, they care about too. It is maybe a little lower on their list, but they do care about it. So that shift happens. A lot of my work is shifting from this exaggerated conflict to the actual conflict. We're never going to come together. We won't all agree. Consensus is actually a scary word for me. With wicked problems, you're never going to have consensus. But with that shift from exaggerated conflict to actual conflict, we often realize the conflict is much more manageable.
This is just some excerpts from our rich conversation, so we hope you'll watch or read the whole thing. You'll learn much more about Martin's deliberative process -- how he does it and why it works. You'll learn about how he works to "scale up" his small scale conversations to have more impact. And you'll learn about other initiatives he is working on -- all fascinating stuff. Check it out!
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