Be your own moderator and have better disagreements.
Many people have actually lost friends or gained taboo subjects among family members these last few years because disagreeing with each other became a sort of war. Most of us don’t want to sit at the Thanksgiving table or conference room in either extreme of blazing hot argument or cold silence; and without a decent way to disagree together, many people just stopped trying. Or they continued to engage and acquired high blood pressure or enemies or both. Clearly, this is not healthy.
My personal approach to the polarization in this country has been to have conversations with friends on the extremes to discover ways to build bridges between ideas. For example, I have one “right-wing nutjob” friend (he admits to this label) who is eager to explain to me, in his rapid-fire, high-octane voice, his ideas of how unfair everything is. I have another heavily right-leaning evangelical Christian friend who is eager to hear my take on things and discuss our differences and similarities, both. Yes, we have both. Other conversations with that “wing” have been similarly elucidating and positive. On the left is an array of reasonable to extreme friends with whom I also have excellent debates. These conversations have provided me a ballast during these increasingly contentious times. Not because we all agree – but because we are all able to disagree kindly. We all have learned a lot from each other.
Maybe it helps that I’m a professional moderator, but why can’t other people also have these reasonable discussions in which opposing sides can really get somewhere? I don’t want to get hate mail here, but I believe that something went very wrong in just a couple of nights: the debates between Clinton and Trump were not properly moderated.
The purpose of having a moderator in a discussion is to help the parties adhere to the ground rules and facilitate the flow of discourse. This is harder than most people imagine, but if moderators do a good job, they are all but invisible in the room. I don’t think I need to rehash the disaster that those Trump-Clinton debates were, but it suffices to say that the moderator neither helped the parties adhere to the ground rules nor facilitated the flow of discussion. Sure, my Never Trumper friends will blame him for constantly interrupting and yelling and insulting; but it was the moderator’s job to excuse him from the debates if he couldn’t follow the rules. If a grown person acts like a kindergartener, he should be treated like a kindergartener. The moderator failed at this, and the results were devastating. The whole country got a lesson in how it was now “acceptable” to communicate with someone with whom we disagree. But what we learned in kindergarten – wait your turn, offer your input, and listen patiently to the others – is still deeply important.
I myself am not a staunch rule follower and can’t follow a recipe to save my life – but I have to recognize when rules are crucial and when I need to work harder to follow them. When I moderate my Leadership Councils and start getting “advicey,” I catch myself and restate things in better terms because it affects the listeners and the entire tone of the discussion. If my LC members only heard the rest of the group wagging their fingers and telling them what they should do or how they should believe, nobody would be free to discover their own right answers. We would become fearful of each others’ judgment and not want to share our truths with each other. The groups would fail if not for our communication guidelines and protocols and the respect we all have for them.
As it stands, however, my LC groups have wonderful disagreements, lively discourse, and incredible depth of conversation because they can trust their moderator to keep them safe inside the rules of discussion. We do take turns. We don’t interrupt each other. Sometimes we get “advicey” and, when I ask for the advice to be reframed, LC members respect my request and we all remind ourselves to practice these communication guidelines inside and out of our meetings because they help the listeners figure out their own next thoughts. Threatening, judging, yelling, interrupting, and insulting do not help. Ever. Forcing my opinions on you won’t encourage you to agree with me. But showing you another way to think about things in a safe, low-stakes atmosphere just might. Or it might not. And that’s okay. Either way, we grow by listening to another perspective.
Our country needs disagreement in order to thrive. We need new ideas, better ways to solve our problems, and a healthy discourse between all opinions. We do not need mean-spirited, warlike arguments; these are not the same thing as reasonable, respectful dissent.
So the next time you enter a conversation with people who might not all agree, try some moderating tips:
- Volunteer to moderate the discussion, and ask for buy-in from the group to allow you to call time-out if something runs amok.
- Ask the group to respect your intervention if someone interrupts before the speaker is finished. (This can be tough with some extroverts! Try to have fun with it; everyone will learn something.)
- Let the person with the agenda be in charge of content; support those efforts by checking in to make sure each topic is complete before moving to the next.
- Establish ahead of time that if people continually interrupt, the meeting can’t go anywhere and will need to be rescheduled – or the offending interrupter will be excused from the meeting!
These may seem hardline, especially if you’re telling your boss that you’ll ask her to leave if she doesn’t behave appropriately, but if there is any room for kindness, growth, and humor, get those into the discussion. This stuff takes practice, and most of us aren’t very good at it. But the ideas that can bloom when given the room are well worth the effort.