I-03-06 Global Vitality Report 2025 / Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz (pp. 157-162)

Global Vitality Report 2025:
Learning to transform conflict and

think together effectively1

Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz2

The intolerable tensions and breakdowns fueled by global implosion3 finally forced us to take more responsibility and forge the tensions of our competing and sometimes warring interests into interdependent and adaptive intelligence before it was too late. It became imperative to think and act together to solve the enormous problems coming at us at unprecedented rates. It was close to the point of no return: Learn or burn.

People were becoming increasingly alarmed at the destructiveness and intensity of hardball politics and partisan argument disguised as “debate.” Annihilating the other side inflamed emotions and polarized people without getting anything done. As major disruptions began to mount, the finger-pointing, name-calling, “blame game” just made matters worse. Ecosystem destruction4 and natural resource shortages were particularly difficult issues to resolve because they tended to result in intractable conflicts5 over values, resource distribution, and power.

In conjunction with the UN's International Year of Civil Society 2010, the grassroots campaign “Put 'Civil' Back in Civil Society” began to offer conflict resolution workshops along with CPR training as essential first aid and preparedness for resilient communities.

People learned to map and mobilize the The Third Side6 to transform conflicts, even though it was often difficult. They learned Center for Nonviolent Communication7 skills, community problem-solving, and “getting to yes” methods they could immediately use at home, in school, at work, and in their communities. These methods had been developed and honed in the last quarter century.

The campaign expanded to make widespread use of peer conflict mediation programs in schools and workplaces. Without being able to de-escalate and mediate conflict as it was happening, people wouldn't be able to transform it and use it constructively.

The Conversation Café8 movement, seeded in the summer of 2001 in the US, went global in 2007, bringing people together in small groups in coffee shops and other public places around the world for real conversations in a safe, supportive environment. As they said, “Tired of small talk? Try some BIG talk.”

In parallel, the World Café9 provided a simple and elegant method for groups large and small to focus on the conversations that matter and then quickly cross-fertilize their insights for collective intelligence. It's practiced worldwide in many settings.

Gradually, like the no smoking campaigns of the last century, truly uncivil behavior largely went out of fashion, at least in big pockets of the population. Of course, the art of the perfect putdown remained alive and well, and just the right amount of attitude kept things nice and spicy.

Meanwhile, globalization's expanding reach, while causing further disruptions, also provided the global standard communications infrastructure through which the movement grew strong enough to help reframe the role of leading transnational organizations within the larger context of our mutual interdependence.

Some large institutions and national governments continued to dominate public discourse, focusing and polarizing a narrow range of issues. Only later, when massive disruptions threatened their very survival did they begin to shift from simple competitive self-interest to complex interdependent self-interest.

In the past 25 years, great strides have been made in business and industry to embrace risk management, crisis preparedness, and decision-making under uncertainty. Those frameworks and methods are now much more widely adopted and used by governments and communities as well.

Organizations have also shifted from command-and-control hierarchical structures to a variety of decentralized10 structures, including loose hierarchies, democracies, and internal and external markets. This shift was made possible by cheap information and communications systems that have flattened our world and transformed the world of work.

The need to collaborate finally taught us the wisdom of practicing conflict resolution, conflict transformation, policy consensus11, constructive confrontation12, dialogue and deliberation13, and the Golden Rule14. Many different approaches and processes have been developed and used since the 1960s, and our knowledge of what works best in which situations is getting much more sophisticated. Wisdom Councils15 and citizens juries16 now routinely advise governments worldwide, from local to national. The transpartisan movement17 in the US bridged the ideological gaps and helped reunite America18.

The new Tough Choices Policy Consensus Systems now involve broad sectors of society in considering the competing interests, values, and tradeoffs in societal issues. These include choosing which of life's forms to create and sustain, making ethical choices about the uses of advanced technologies, providing for human needs while restoring ecosystems that support those needs, orienting technological development, and more. These systems use professional staff and engagement technologies to frame issues, develop knowledge, and suggest and facilitate methods to support robust citizen deliberation. While not legally binding, these citizen recommendations are very influential and help build necessary political will.

Elements of the Tough Choices System for broad societal deliberation:

• Inquiry teams constantly scan the environment; monitor changes and trends; gather data, information, stories, and lore about what's happening; frame emergent issues; converse and deliberate; and generate knowledge about key societal issues.
• Weaving teams organize the knowledge from inquiry teams by looking for patterns and identifying perspectives, agreements, disagreements, and connections to past conditions and future goals.
• Policy teams use the organized knowledge for their deliberations, make tough choices and develop policy recommendations, identify desired outcomes, and develop benchmark indicators of progress.
• Benchmark teams track the implementation of policies using the benchmarks to measure progress towards objectives, note successes and failures, and suggest changes for improvement.
• 
  Bootstrap teams, discovered and named by groupware pioneer Douglas C. Engelbart, watch the knowledge system in action, note how well it's working and where the new engagement technologies help and hinder, specify the next generation of technology tools, and ensure continuous improvement in the system itself.