Currently we are more and more aware of social issues facing our society – such as addictions as in alcohol, gambling, and illegal drug use; as well as unemployment and job loss, housing, etc.  Many social issues trigger emotional responses and a feeling of helplessness leading to difficulties and strong polarization in conversing individually (family), locally, and nationally around these social issues.  Here is an example of a process for dialogue leading to overcoming or minimizing polarization (and a feeling of helplessness and isolation) around just one such social issue.  It happens to be a real live process in dealing with gambling–but it has roots and tentacles that could be used for almost any social issue.  

A number of years ago, a government body decided to do a public consultation on gambling.  A team was put together to facilitate it. My role was that I had trained the facilitators in the methods, and helped design the process, but I was not there personally.  It was one of those rare events where a wide spectrum of people was invited to contribute their perspectives. Participants included people who were absolutely against any gambling, and others who were absolutely for it, as well as people whose views were somewhere in the middle.

To accommodate a lot of participants, there were several large breakout groups, each of which used the same consensus workshop processes in a series of consensus workshops.  These results were brought together at the end.  

For one of the consensus workshops, the focus question was something like “What are all the impacts of gambling?”  Participants were asked to brainstorm all impacts, both positive and negative, and put a plus or minus on their cards when they wrote them. Brainstorming in this way to this neutral focus questions allowed radically opposed ideas to be articulated.  Questions of clarification when necessary were answered by the small group who wrote the cards. The clustering then was by “similar impact”, not whether it was positive or negative. Most cluster columns then included both positive and negative cards about the impact and the cluster was named neutrally as a larger impact, acknowledging that it had both positive and negative aspects. 

The results on the cards including the larger impacts on the cluster names were captured verbatim in simultaneous documentation by a person on the facilitation team at the back of the room, (this was before digital cameras were common, and way before cellphone cameras).  The documentation was printed and distributed to the participants at the end of the event.

The conversation in the plenary session came up with several recommendations for action.  

Two amazing outcomes:

Experiential outcome:

At the very end of the session, two people, one known to be strongly against gambling, and the other known to be strongly for it, were overheard saying something like this in front of a third person, “We are shaking hands, and we will continue to talk and listen to each other.  Before this session, we never would have spoken to each other.”

Rational outcome:

A couple of days later, a sponsor of the session called the lead of the facilitation team and asked them to keep all the results private until the results could be massaged for the report.  The reply was that it was too late – that all the participants had already gone home with the verbatim results that had been documented as the work was going on. The sponsor was in this way held accountable to hear and reflect the outcomes of the group.  Within a year all but a few of the recommendations had been approved by the sponsor and a process of implementation begun.

Keys to the success of this session: 

1) 1) The Working Assumptions shared at the beginning of the process made it clear that every response would be respected and heard. (See Working Assumptions post from 2015.)

2) Making sure (through the brainstorming and clustering process) that the whole spectrum of responses was heard and held in the results, allowing people to experience that they were heard, and that everyone heard other perspectives. (For a concise description of the basic process, see https://ica-uk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Consensus-Workshop-Overview.pdf )

3) Making sure that the words that people said were documented and shared with participants at the end of the session so that the actual results became the foundation of the decisions by the sponsor afterward and that nothing was ignored.

4) Design of the process allowed safety in speaking, promoted listening and hearing to what was actually said. The process/listening allowed people to not focus on rants or positions but on the thinking and observations on what was really happening to people.

5) A focus question was open enough to allow all perspectives to be held and to be clustered to see larger patterns.

6) Clustering of the ideas was done by similar topic, allowing both positive and negative responses in the same cluster, therefore acknowledging the different perspectives while emphasizing the similar areas of concern.

7) There were tangible and documented results that demonstrated that people were heard, and that their ideas were part of the solution.