III. Tricks: Stuff We Did Right and How You Can Duplicate It

"Interruptions? Are you kidding? I'm from Brooklyn, I'm Jewish, I grew up with 1000 interruptions per dinner conversation, it's normal, I can hold my own."

"Actually, I'm kind of limited in the number of thoughts I can hold in my mind at one time, so if you interrupt me I might easily lose my train of thought."

"I like interruptions, it makes me feel at home, I'm Italian, what can I say, we get excited and talk simultaneously, it's great. I might interrupt you and have no idea I've interrupted you, I don't think of it as interrupting."

"I have this thing about being silenced. I've seen so many women interrupted by men, especially their husbands, and never get to finish their thought. I really hate it unless it's done with positive intent, for a good reason."

A. . Co-creating ground rules, providing background, creating safety

What works: Allow brief, completely informal/unstructured "chat time" while settling in, before a clear and fairly formal beginning. Facilitator shifts from friendly peer to facilitator with a welcoming remark, giving participants confidence that they are in good hands with a competent facilitator. Co-creating ground rules means that we used a combination of "standard" ground rules (confidentiality, one person speaking at a time, common understanding of starting/stopping times) and actively "customized" ground rules:

1. Note-taking: We asked permission of each participant about whether the facilitator could take notes, and explained "it helps me to track the conversation and honor what is being said."

2. Confidentiality/Anonymity: We also asked each participant to choose their precise level of confidentiality, meaning one of four levels: !you may not share anything I say; !you can share some of my stories only if you change details and make my identity unrecognizable !you can share my stories and quote me, but without my name; or !everything I say is public record and you may use my name. Finally, we re-visited the question of confidentiality at the end of each dialogue (sometimes we forgot this important step, but do as we say) because sometimes participants changed their minds about the level of confidentiality they need, i.e. "You can share all my political observations but please don't mention what I said about my uncle" All the care and attention we gave to confidentiality seemed crucial, and the one time we forgot to ask about note-taking in a group dialogue, trust us, someone brought it up in quite a skeptical tone of voice immediately!

3. Interrupting: We asked participants to state how they feel about being interrupted, inviting them to connect this to their cultural background if relevant. This question, often the first question participants responded to, played a dual role as an icebreaker and creating intimacy through revelation-- while giving the facilitator and participants information about communication styles which was truly invaluable.

4. Creating safety also has a lot to do with the "presence" of the facilitator, emotionally speaking. People feel safe when they feel listened to. When someone has just talked about his father being murdered, or her childhood in a refugee camp, or her mother's desperate fear for her family in wartime, the facilitator's job includes feeling her/his own response as a human being. That emotional presence will then be communicated, perhaps just through eye contact, facial expression or quiet. It can also be communicated verbally, such as, "You've shared a lot, I can see it's affected us all. Let's have a pause before we move on." Creating a quiet space in this way allows other participants to feel, and begin to process, their own emotional response in a real way, instead of chucking it aside; this allows all participants to feel both heard and engaged.

B. Establishing Connection: Eliciting Personal / political histories, stories, and experiential learning

"My parents conveyed to me, 'you can do anything you want to do,' that race is not a barrier, that I could go beyond what the culture says girls can do. My mom believed violence doesn't solve anything: smart kids can do something other than beat up someone for calling me a nigger. It happened to me when I was very little, and I made a decision to confront it. Otherwise I knew I would feel shame, and I decided, 'I'm not going to live like that.' That decision held true for my whole life. The pivotal thing about being gay was political. My mother said, 'Just don't get arrested!' Both my parents accepted my partner." --older, seasoned activist

"I grew up poor; my parents' attitude was, "we don't have anything but that's not a problem." The house my father owns was built by his grandfather. My father had us read W.E.B. DuBois, autobiographies of slaves, and Asian philosophy. I experienced unfair treatment in school, and by the police. I have five brothers, who were abused by police officers; only two were not abused. When I traveled, I saw that whole nations are treated the way U.S. blacks are treated....I've seen a whole lot of inequality, all the time wondering, 'Why is nobody else understanding these things?' " --younger activist

Experiences like these, especially when elicited early in the dialogue, establish connection between the dialogue partners, open up the listeners' heart, and begin exploring themes that are often returned to again and again. They were most likely to be elicited by the "questions of identity", the first deep questions of the dialogue, asked after the brief "questions of activity have given participants a "handle" on who each other is.

Sample wording for the questions of identity:

"Who are you, in terms of race, class, gender, sexual preference, ability/disability, or other significant aspects of your identity? Feel free to talk about your family background, going back a few generations if you like.How did you wake up politically? Why aren't you still asleep? Were there particular events global, national, or very personal, right in front of you that woke you up?"

With such a long question, it's good to repeat it and pause, to give participants a chance to think. During and/or after answering this question, participants need a chance to ask each other questions of clarification.

The importance of sharing personal history, and its connection to history, can hardly be overstated. This was often the most mind-opening, deeply fascinating and moving sections of the whole dialogue, for all parties. Younger activists for whom Vietnam, let alone World War II, is far in the past, made direct connections with, for example, a German woman whose mother lost a baby during a bombing raid; who found unexploded ordnance in her backyard as a teen; and whose political foundation was built on the commitment to never let fascism rise again.

Older activists for whom the lies told during Gulf War were only to be expected, seemed startled to realize that the activist across the table from them identified realizing "my government is lying to me" for the first time during the Gulf War-- or, perhaps, that the young activist was 10 or 12 years old when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

As Martin Wiley put it, "When people get a chance to hear why someone has become an activist and made the choices they have made, it personalizes them, and makes them harder to just write off as 'one of them.' It helps you as a facilitator see where they have common threads, and to push them ('Wow, you both worked for Amnesty International when you were first getting involved. You seem to have had very different experiences there. Why do you think that is?')

Also, telling personal history, we may also tell a wider history, one that we know and forget that not everyone may know. An older, Civil Rights-era activist may not be aware how a younger activist may have a limited knowledge of that same time period, formed by a few paragraphs in a history book and a Martin Luther King video. And, conversely, a young activist may forget that older activists may have little understanding of animal rights/vegan issues, and might be more understanding of them if someone took the time to explain it. This happened more than once.

However, the sense of personal connection can be established in so many ways, not just by sharing life histories! For example, an activist coming in late from her job found that in the process of complaining about working in "dead, numbing corporate environments" she and her dialogue partner, seemingly so different in life experience, immediately had a lot in common.

As facilitator Martin Wiley, put it: "Choices come up, not just in the form of the discussion, but in the content. Making sure that you are present in the conversation but detached enough to read where people want to go is vital. More often than not, people's agreements/differences are not going to be anything like what you expect. "I did a one-on-one with an older, nonviolent male activist and a younger, anarchist woman activist. Somewhere in the discussion it came up that one of them liked showtunes. Shocked and pleased, the other admitted liking them as well. They then spent some time discussing what they would be doing if they didn't have to be activists, and got to know each other through that better than through any questions I had prepared. I was able to put aside what I had brought, both as questions and as assumptions, and listen to what they wanted, steering the conversation that way."

C. Empowering the Core: articulating values, principles, beliefs, while staying engaged.

"I don't have any belief in someone telling me what to do just because they have authority. I want things to be fair; I believe in justice, equality that's why I'm an anarchist, I'm trying to empower every single person." --community-based youth activist

"I want to encourage this explosion that happens with people when they realize they are good enough they think, 'I am good enough, in myself and in relation to others' " --older, seasoned activist

"My core value is respect for people. The Quakers call it 'that of God in every person'; I'm an atheist, but that gives you some idea. I don't want to tolerate a society that treats people with less than respect. Vietnam was not "just" a bad foreign policy mistake, it's related to so much more. What I want to do with my life is stop that." --older, seasoned activist

"I believe society creates the emotional flora and fauna and we make decisions based on that. Every person is doing the best they can, given what they know even oppressors are reacting from pain and lack. I'm an anarchist and revolutionary-- but I'm feeling a lack of hope unless we create spiritual change. As anarchists we need to talk about a society that's positive, built by mutual aid, not just motivated by anger. I want people to heal emotionally, the oppressed and the oppressor. " --community-based youth activist

When people talked explicitly about their core motivation for being an activist, their core beliefs and values, it was often with an electric energy that inspired all listeners. As a facilitator, I felt extremely lucky because I got to hear these hope-giving statements all year long. I found, even, that in odd moments when I felt down or demoralized by all the racism, drums of war, and violent inequality of everyday life, the voice of one of these participants would roll through my inner ear, with absolute clarity and conviction,

"I need to end poverty in the world; food, education, health and well-being for everybody, nothing less." (younger activist). Or "I am motivated by the vision of a world where everybody can live to their fullest potential. My commitment is to transmit this belief to future generations." (you guessed it: older activist).

These statements sometimes rolled out naturally with no prompting; sometimes were elicited with direct questions; and sometimes emerged indirectly while reflecting on a particular experience.

Here's an example of the direct question about core values, *after the "questions of identity" phase of dialogue: *Note: because they followed, and were grounded in, the very specific experiences of life history and political awakening, we found that people were very "real" and sincere in their expression of core values it never felt like someone was on a soapbox or off in la-la land. Having already touched nerves and hearts as well as minds, perhaps this is why the expression of core values usually seemed so electric, important, inspiring.

1. Core values/vision: "Both of you have already mentioned values important to you, while talking about who you are; for example (respect, justice, anger at oppression). Talk a little more about this: what are your core values? What motivates you?" Variation: "It's often easier for us to talk about what we don't want than what we want. What do you want, what does the society you'd like to live and and are trying to build, look like?" Variation: "What is your vision; what is it in this vision that gives you hope, inspiration or energy to keep going as an activist?" *At the same time, once the core values have emerged, it's important to move back to the practical, experiential plane, to give these values room to live and breathe in connection with the actual struggle for social change, and thus also keeping the participants engaged in vital connection with each other:

2. Application: What works? Based on your values/vision, what kinds of strategies, tactics and processes should we be adopting? Please tell about a time that you felt part of a campaign, organization, or movement strategy that really worked if you've ever experienced this! what happened? Feel free to also give examples of disasters: what didn't work? *Note the repetition of the word "what" in all these questions of praxis, of application. Using "what" encourages participants to speak specifically, elicits stories and examples rather than theories and generalizations. Variation: "You've both mentioned different processes used inside radical movements the authoritarian structure of the Communist Party, or the hidden structure of a "clique" that makes decisions inside democratic / anarchist movements. Let's talk more about this. What kind of process works? Give examples of decision-making processes and organizational structure that you've experienced what happened? Variation: similar approach to questions specifically about: Nonviolence, armed struggle, property destruction, confronting oppressions within the movement; relating to the media, the mainstream, and powerholders.

D. Making room for complexity, confusion, passion: stirring things up

"In 5th grade, I had been friends with a poor white kid. His family didn't flush the toilet because they couldn't afford the water; they all shared one toothbrush. Later, we had a visibly racist teacher. This kid's house burned down; his dad maybe hit him. We had a fight, and I became "nigger" to him. Then I was eating dirt every few days." --younger activist

"An ally must be able to say, 'I don't know,' and be self-accepting, and be able to admit when they're wrong and make amends. It's offensive when people who are not African American think they know all about African American culture. .It's not my job to help white people work on their racism, they need to work first before trying to be an ally. I can feel sucked dry and angry about that. Yet I'm willing to hang in there with Black folks who are not where I am." --older, seasoned activist

"We don't have the hearts and minds of everyday people any more. When I came up, my perspective was similar to those around me; now, reactionary nonsense is more common." --older, seasoned activist

"I don't like the anarchists' tendency to marginalize themselves. To deliberately marginalize yourself to effect change is a false construct. You are forming relationships in and with community." --younger activist

"The barrier I feel sometimes with younger people is not from me, it's younger people who think they don't have anything to teach. I need the back and forth." --older, seasoned activist

"In my family, older people talk nonstop and don't even care if there's input, I can't get a question in. There's a lot of thinking, 'I know it all.' " --younger activist

Most of the above comments are examples of the flow, in a dialogue, from relatively more "safe" forms of expression to that which is less safe. Less safe because it is complicated and may not be well understood; less safe because it acknowledges anger; less safe because it's an unedited opinion which could hurt somebody's feelings; less safe because it directly addresses the very differences which are sitting right here in the room with us: differences of generation, of political perspective, of race, class, gender, and every conceivable aspect of identity and life experience.

It often felt like this venturing outside the comfort zone was where the greatest learning took place. Sitting and talking with an older lesbian woman, a young man who grew up Muslim acknowledged, "Growing up, I thought negatively about homosexuality. Muslims sometimes speak very badly about homosexuality. Recently when I went to a mosque, and two out of three times I went, bad things were said about homosexuality, I decided not to go back. For me that's part of becoming an ally." Yet, for him to reveal this about his own growing up, his faith community, and his decisionmaking process required a great deal of vulnerability and the courage to reveal it. It may be significant that in this case, such sharing happened only in the second dialogue, after sharing of general life stories and views about tactics and strategy had been covered in the first.

A few things we learned about encouraging people to go to messy, contradictory, complicated or controversial places:
1. It takes time -people usually need to feel safe and connected first
2. The direction will suggest itself. Sometimes all the facilitator needs to do is ask a question a different way: after "what do you look for in an ally," ask, "what does it feel like to BE an ally?"
3. Stick with using "what" to elicit specific experiences
4. If you know of an unspoken disagreement, ask the silent party directly, "what do you think of that," or "does that represent your view?"
5. Sometimes people begin a story, then hesitate as if thinking it will be somehow "inappropriate" especially if it includes their conflicts and criticisms of others. Simple encouragement, "go ahead," or "this is useful" or "keep going, we need to learn from this," often works.
6. Ask directly about the conflict, to give permission, i.e. "What is it, in your experience, that keeps older and younger activists from learning from each other?"
7. Challenge negative or ahistorical generalizations to provoke clear thinking: "You say demonstrations are useless; can you think of one that's ever been useful, anywhere? What's the difference?" Yes, it's possible to retain neutrality while asking provocative questions.
8. Switch physical seats! Sometimes when the energy that wants to flow through a conversation is "stuck," changing location can "unstick" it. This can be done randomly, or intentionally, as we did once when we put all the "younger" activists on one side of the room and "older" activists on the other. This worked well!
9. Switch viewpoints, or rather, ask the participants to. Martin Wiley says, "One thing I've found successful is to ask, "What do you think the other person/group's assumptions about you would be?" This forces people to acknowledge that their "side" or opinion may be viewed differently than they would like it to be, and to remember that their opinion or view of the other might be equally flawed. It's also a chance for people to poke a little fun at themselves, rather than having the other person poke fun at them.
10. Another question is, "How do you think the other person / group would be received by your friends / peers / group?" This forces people to see their community through another's eyes. Some people may hesitate to be fully truthful, afraid of hurting another's feelings or unwilling to make their own community look bad. But you can continue this exploration by getting the dialogue partner involved, asking them whether that has been their expectation or experience in relation to the other's community.

One way or another, this line of questioning often creates a breakthrough beyond politeness into honest exploration of differences and honest crumbling of harmful, distancing stereotypes.

E. Digging for Differences

Like miners going underground for ore, facilitators ultimately have to take risks and make difficult judgment calls in order to dig for differences. The differences are there, but participants in a dialogue may prefer to stay polite, or simply to experience the pleasure of connection without the discomfort, awkwardness, or self-confrontation of expressing differences directly. We were, in fact, awestruck at the persistence of politeness and the difficulty in getting to difference. We brainstormed all year long about techniques we might use as facilitators to encourage participants to express their differences with clarity and passion.

Our collective self-critique, at year's end, was that we did not make enough progress in this area. My own hunch, having thought about it for a few more months, is that we as facilitators were self-contradictory. We felt protective of each group because each group is maligned: young anarchists are smeared as being wet behind the ears, unreal in their objectives, and disconnected from the very communities they live in and claim to care about. Older activists are dismissed as sellouts, as hypocrites more concerned with their mortgage than with social change, and as irrelevant because unable to keep up with technological, tactical, cultural, organizational, and other developments. Students are seen as self-involved, as unaware of their own privilege, coming from the "head" rather than gut, heart, and life experience; and as unlikely to be involved in long-term radical social change work.

Consciously and more importantly, unconsciously, we facilitators wanted to protect the precious individuals in front of us in each dialogue from the weight of these negative stereotypes-so we failed to insist that these assumptions be explored directly, bravely, openly.

On the plus side, trust is a shining thread, and in general our project erred on the side of building trust and weaving a web of connection among many individuals, organizations and communities.

We also engaged in quite a bit of healing and repair work on webs that had been damaged by painful blunders in the past. Perhaps, in Phase 1, or the pilot year of such a project, this was the best that could be done.

Still, it could be that we made the mistake, however unconsciously, of being overprotective, and that this overprotectiveness was due to our own erroneous assumption about the fragility of "our" triangular (younger, older, student) communities of activists. Thus we considered it to be very risky to burden our dialogues with facilitator-initiated questions like, "Some activists feel that the imposition of nonviolence guidelines at actions is repressive, arrogant, and counterproductive to the success of the movement. What do you both think of that?" or, "We haven't mentioned the term, "sellout," but you have been talking about the compromises you've made such as paying taxes to a government whose policies you abhor. What's the difference between "compromise" and "selling out"? or, "Some activists think that a security culture has arisen which is so paranoid that it's harming our ability to carry out strategies for social change. What do you think of that concern?"

In hindsight, it's understandable that we focussed on safety, pleasurable exploration, education, connection, and insight more than on conflict: this project had never been done before, and it felt like the stakes were high: if we significantly alienated people and made them feel attacked, if we compromised the neutrality of the facilitator, we would lose trust and sabotage the project.

What follows is a combination of things we did right in digging for conflict, and things we "shoulda coulda woulda" and which you can:
1. Spend explicit time in the project's earliest phase identifying the stereotypes, assumptions, and projections each community makes about the other(s). This won't be fully accurate of course, but it will give the facilitators a much clearer picture of the mine they need to get down into than if each facilitator is actually harboring their own stereotypes of others' stereotypes!
2. Do take risks and stimulate the discussion with questions in the form of "Some activists think--" whenever you feel a conflict is being avoided or skirted around. The only time not to do this is when you are really concealing, not very convincingly, your own political viewpoint under the disguise of "some activists think" and hammering somebody with it.
3. Facilitators, question your own sense of protectiveness, and challenge yourself to envision each participant as strong, competent, and able to withstand sharp political criticism even when it touches their personal life. One of the most "fragile"-seeming activists, an older woman with frequent depression, became quite feisty when the "sellout" issue was brought up in a non-dialogue setting. "Let them try living my life first, and then see if they think they can pass judgment!"
4. Try doing less in order to do more. That is, rather than covering a number of topics in any given dialogue, take a topic and try to go down into the conflict areas that touch it.
5. Be sneaky, funny, and creative. When two participants seem to agree on almost everything or they just share experiences without coming to terms with each other's perspectives ask outright, "Well, if you two disagreed about something, what would it be?"
6. Ask not only about interruption, but about conflict styles. "Are you a conflict avoider, a conflict resolver, or a conflict addict?" This can give the facilitator good information about how to dig for difference with this particular pair or group.
7. Pay attention to your own pulse, breathing, etc. as facilitator. Your own biorhythms will tell you when a "hot button" has been pushed, even if people are still dancing politely around it. The facilitator can then play a powerful role by naming the hot button, acknowledging the heat, and inviting people to "sit in the fire" rather than to avoid it, or pretend it's been prematurely resolved.
8. Get out of the way! Participants may hold back because of what they think you think, or what they think you feel. One example of this is when I, as facilitator, responded to a questioning look from a participant in a dialogue by saying, "That's OK, you can say anything you want and need to about white people here, I am fine with it." Without an explicit, encouraging, permission-giving statement, this participants might have held back things they needed to say about their exhaustion, complex feelings, and frustrations with white people.
9. Pay attention to your own levels of hope and despair, as facilitator. When we despair of resolving conflict, we too tend to avoid it. When we feel hopeful and resilient, we are much better able to skillfully lead discussion into and out of difficult places. If our own attitude is that conflict is zestful, fruitful, and fascinating, then the dialogues we facilitate will be much more likely to bear that out.
10. Don't worry too much, for that matter, about "resolving" conflict. As many participants said at many different times, for example, age differences are "really real!" People think differently at 20 than at 40! Creating a space for each participant to fully express her/himself is enough; the changes in perspective generally happen internally, invisibly within each participant -- and in the ripple effects through their communities -- after the whole dialogue is over.