Ep 49 Peter Coleman: Hurdles and Hope: Reflections on the Role of Gender
Such a delight to re-connect to my colleague from many moons ago – Peter Coleman – who, just for the record, is not my relative.
Our paths crossed beginning sometime around 1995, at the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, the “ICCCR” at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, where we worked together on many cool initiatives until I left around 2003.
My partner Ellen Raider, with whom I had been delivering intercultural negotiation programs around the world, brought me into the Center after connecting with Mort Deutsch – who is often referred to as a grandfather of conflict resolution, and perhaps the grandfather of conflict resolution in the west.
At the Center, Ellen and I created the first certificate program in conflict resolution at Teacher’s College – which included collaborative negotiation, mediation and then a growing list of related and interesting skill sets like using large group processes to resolve conflict and create systemic culture change.
At the time of my arrival, Peter was a graduate student, Mort Deutsche’s protégé – and I watched him rise to where he is today as head of the center and now a well respected social psychologist and researcher in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace -- probably best known for his work on intractable conflict.
Prompted by the publication of his new book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, I asked Peter to join me on the podcast for a conversation -- and draw from his book, his work, his life (anything that he felt was most relevant) to address the role of gender, gender equality, gender transformation, and its connection to building a more peaceful, democratic and sustainable world.
He agreed and we had a great conversation which we bring to you now.
As those of you who have followed me on this podcast know I -- along with many --believe that getting gender “right”, the role of gender, moving beyond outdated patriarchal structures, is THE foundational challenge to building a much more peaceful, sustainable and pleasurable planet for humanity and other living creatures
By way of example, allow me to repeat the poignant and on target words of Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who is the co-founder and president of a School of Leadership for women in Afghanistan who said recently in the Washington Post:
"Educated girls grow to become educated women, and educated women will not allow their children to become terrorists. The secret to a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan is no secret at all: It is educated girls."
That statement makes me want to cry. What a tragic but accurate comment after the countless lives lost, the total pain for so many Afghans now, and the trillions my country just wasted in our two decades of war in Afghanistan the costs of which were so intelligently tracked by The Costs of War project who we had on this podcast a while back.
Using military or policing force is not generally the best solution to conflict – genuinely meeting people’s needs is.
It’s not that complicated.
But moving beyond the money that drives the choice of using force is complicated, and we need to figure this out like, yesterday.
So, here are some of what I call my “favorite frames” from Peter’s and my conversation:
Reminiscing about our early years at the ICCCR – and a moment when we had a room filled with teachers, guidance counselors, principals from all the approximately 188 New York City schools – the largest school system in the country and perhaps the world, convened to learn critical negotiation and conflict resolution skills. It was awesome;
The seeds that were planted in Peter to do a life’s work in the field of peace and conflict – his reflections on himself as a 7-year-old, the influence of being raised by women, turbulent times in Chicago, the presence of Martin Luther King, the “macro-worry” that began to build in his young awareness of social justice issues and the related conflict about them;
A conference he convened to change the conversation from ‘negative’ peace – like addressing violence prevention and atrocity mitigation to ‘positive peace’ – like creating communities that will foster harmonious relations in which destructive conflict is far less likely to erupt. Similar to why I moved from doing more traditional mediation to more “upstream” organizational mediation, using organization development methodologies, or getting conflicting parties to focus on the positive thing they are trying to create v. the negative thing they are trying to avoid or, like in the health field, focusing on what creates health and allows humans to flourish rather than having a disease orientation. An energy follows where we place our attention kind of idea — which is super important.
Anyway, Peter’s conclusion was that the conference was a huge failure because no one wanted to talk about positive peace with the exception of Doug P. Fry, who we also recently interviewed on this podcast.
And, another frame, how at that same conference he had invited Abby Disney – the creator of the amazing film series Women War and Peace, who kept raising her hand and saying, I don’t want to be the gadfly but – how can we talk about the mitigation of violence without talking about gender and men and their role in this?
Peter and I shared our appreciation of Sebastian Junger’s 2016 book, Tribe, where he reported a profound observation of how early American settlers that had been captured by native tribes, when given the opportunity to return to the European colonies did not want to go back, without exception, because they preferred their lives among native communities;
And the frame that most stands out to me, and unfortunately is a discouraging one. Peter tells the tale of working with the amazing Leymah Gbowee, who I have mentioned many times on this podcast, to create a Women Peace and Security program at Columbia, that would provide technical and financial resources to some amazing younger women I think mostly from Africa who have been doing peacebuilding work. Like the badass Riya Yuyada who I interviewed a while back on this podcast. In spite of the huge need for the program and the thousands of applications to it, the program sadly is closing this year. And that’s in spite of the fact that Leymah is Leymah, an amazing woman, a Nobel Laureate, and if you don’t know who I’m talking about, watch Pray the Devil Back to Hell a documentary created by Abby Disney about how Leymah and other women, a way that only women could pull off, brought an end to the Liberian civil war.
The program was not able to raise the $25,000,000 needed to keep the program open in perpetuity, a paltry sum given the amount of money that is flying around on this planet. And this was in spite of the fact that you couldn’t have a more compelling person spearheading the program – the poster child of the Melinda Gates foundation of Oprah.
And that’s not because of any shortcomings on Leymah’s part but much more about where our level of consciousness about what’s going to create a world that we all want to live in for the next number of centuries. It’s a fact that reinforces my belief that we women really need to get our ovaries together when it comes to money and how it’s spent. As I mentioned in my episode about women money and power with Barbara Stanny Huson, women, at least in the US and maybe even globally are coming into huge financial resources, some say will have the majority of the financial resources in the 21st century. This is undoubtedly mostly white women in the US, sitting on so much dough that if we chose to actually use it in powerful ways we could really make a big diff to the world our kids are inheriting. As Barbara said, and I say now, Women’s issues with using and taking charge of the resources we have little to do with our capacity and a lot to do with our ambivalence about power. So many of us still want men to take care of money for us and we have to stop doing this.
Anyway, there are many more great frames from this conversation with Peter including insights about women and negotiation, social constructs about “the masculine”, “the feminine” and war, whether or not getting rid of binary gender pronouns is a peace movement, and --what it’s been like for him -- as a white, tall, good looking dude working in a cauldron of conversation around conflict, peace, social justice and identity.
So thank you Peter, and hope you all enjoy this rich episode.
Find Peter’s bio and transcript here.
Susan
Subscribe to our blogs: Women, Negotiation and Power + The Peacebuilding Podcast
Ep 48 Rabia Roberts: HerStory, Part B --The Neolithic
Dear Podcast Friends,
Happy 2021!
We came so close in the United States of America.
We came right up to the edge, looking into a very deep and bleak abyss.
But we didn’t fall in, we pulled ourselves back, and democracy – at least to the extent we have realized it -- has prevailed. I, along with so many of my fellow citizens, am thrilled.
I have not generally been a person to wave the flag of the U.S. and tout our exceptionalism, though I love my country like I love my family.
I was one of those kids that resisted saying the Pledge of Allegiance as early as 14 because I was already very aware of what my country was doing in Southeast Asia. Fast forward to this podcast, I am all too aware that the U.S. spends more on our military than the next 10 countries combined, and uses our military might to dominate the world in very much the same way the wealthy have used our police to dominate poor black neighborhoods to keep assets pouring into the hands of a small, mostly white, male few of Wall Streeter types – some of them my family members.
But today I feel more patriotic and proud of my country than ever before.
It feels like we have just gone through a hazing, a reckoning and perhaps Donald Trump has done us a favor to wake us up. Like the saying goes – it takes a lot of pounding to create a good bar of steel.
I read a book a long while back called the People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, the same guy who wrote The Road Less Traveled if you remember it. The premise of the book is that lies are the core of human evil.
Seeing ourselves clearly -- as a person, as a country, as a world -- is the beginning of healing and real positive change. As we say in the gestalt world -- awareness works: It’s a paradox that change happens most quickly when we can by see the fullness of 'what is' in the present moment.
A few weeks back, when the run-off elections in the State of Georgia tipped the balance in the U.S. Senate to a Democratic majority I tweeted:
I am so deeply moved by what has just happened in Georgia. Thank you Stacy Abrams. Change Georgia, change the country, change the world.
And “bing” -- I immediately got a like from a young woman in Asia who is an activist for democracy in her own country.
I love how connected we are, and how movements for justice and democracy inspire each other around the world.
After living with the Trump administration for the last four year that used bullying and the fantasy of a lost, white, Christian and patriarchal America, it was so super moving to see, in the words of one of my friends
“A glorious display of inclusivity including all the raw feminine power. . . How bright & radiant”
and knowing that that was brought about, in part, by the activism of so many of us, of which I am proud to be a part. One turning point was on January 21, 2017, when women, with our pussy hats on, marched on Washington in the largest single-day protest in American history that dwarfed Trump’s inauguration numbers of the previous day.
So, I am feeling optimistic, but there is so much to do and the climate clock is ticking
The contribution I have chosen to make toward a deeper democracy is focusing on empowering women by building our negotiation capacity, and showcasing through the podcast some cool content about interventions to build common ground in complex systems.
One CAN bring very polarized groups, even warring factions, together to build common ground.
I have done it.
I have seen it.
But so many of our world governments, including my own, are still so steeped in win-lose, adversarial, “power-struggle” methodologies, egged on by a media that leads with what bleeds. Making better use of the collaborative – and yes, more feminine – processes we know work would help us become less polarized, and more creative and relational. Humans are very capable of dealing with complexity and problem solving if given the right process “containers”.
Power over v power with. . .
Win-lose, win-win. . .
Both of these have big gender implications.
On the podcast front, I’ve been frustrated with how slow I am to get episodes out. There are so many I would like to do, so many cool people to interview – but like so many solo “socialpreneurs” like myself, there is the issue of bandwidth and making a living.
This fall, I put together a six-week, virtual course called Women, Negotiation & Power which was thrilling. I will launch an even better version of that course in March so stay tuned, please enroll, or send people my way. Check out this testimonial video here.
I am also super excited by my growing audience of women whose stories and struggles I am hearing either through my online courses, or individual or group coaching. So thank you. I am here to serve you and make the best content I can for women around negotiation, and for this podcast.
Getting gender right is delicate -- just like democracy. (Tweet this.)
Patriarchy tends to cut humans in half and say that men can be this way, and women can be that. What is happening is people are becoming more fully human, and being allowed to develop themselves fully, not just according to gender roles, or reconnect, for example, to what it means be a woman and not have the divinity in that taken out in any way. This is exciting, and this will create a more peaceful world.
As Carol Gilligan so aptly said feminism is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.
We have a lot of work to do because honestly the model of so many things is still fundamentally the man, supported by the woman.
It’s gonna be weird, but it’s gonna happen in the U.S. soon enough, that a woman becomes our next president with or without an intimate partner standing beside her.
It's gonna feel uncomfortable and probably unnatural to many because it is uncharted territory in the U.S. though so many other countries around the world are leading the way.
So how did we get to this moment in time, to all those colorful flags and empowered women and people on the Capitol steps of the U.S., a young black woman, a descendant of slaves, delivering the inaugural poem and declaring her unabashed desire to be President of the U.S. someday?
I think it has come from untangling narratives that are untrue.
For me, that has defined so much of the work I have done to grow as a human.
Seeing ourselves clearly v. the stories we have made up,
Discovering truth v. lies or fictions like
the election was stolen from Donald Trump
women came from the rib of Adam, that
my brother was more valuable than I was from the moment of birth.
These are all untruths, but powerful narratives that have big consequences.
So in Part B of Herstory, Rabia continues to unpack our human history, herstory, from the perspective of women.
The first you heard in Episode A but she repeats it here:
That “the basic format for a human being is female. The X chromosome has about 1000 genetic messages in it, the Y chromosome has 50”. As Rabia continues, “that’s true of other species as well. The female was here first. Maleness developed over time, and it serves to create great diversity. Our species probably would not have made it this far, if males hadn't begun to add their genetic pool. So we're both necessary. But most of the myths are incorrect. We weren't made out of the rib of Adam. It's amazing how tenacious those stories are, and while they might seem like a joke to some of us, they totally influence substantial parts of our population.
That even though we don’t want gender to be determinative of what our options are in life there are differences in our bodies and evolution that impact our experience. For instance:
girls at birth have 10 to 30% more cells in the corpus callosum than males have, “the spot that links the left and right side of the brain and makes it easier generally for women to talk or write feelings”
“that women have more rods and men have more cones. So we literally do see the world differently”.
How the way the female pelvis evolved has shaped women’s need and desire for collaboration. . .
That aggression is wired in males of many species. Rabia gives some great examples of how the females of other species keep this in check, and calls on women to step into our extraordinary power to better manage male violence whether it be intimate, domestic or global ;
By way of example of how resilient we have been, Rabia describes the “incredibly successful period of about 70000 years that we girls with our daughters and our mothers our grandmothers and of course our male brothers walked the earth, surviving two ice ages. As she emphasizes “What we're capable of, and what our grandmothers went through to get us here”
Thinking about this gives me some hope.
I like both urban and rural life but, in 1996, the same year that our planet became more urban than rural, I chose with my then husband peter, to move out of NYC and raise our kids 50 miles north in a more rural place. We did this in spite of the relative whiteness, which neither of us were a big fan of but it felt important to have them understand the natural world which was under such deep assault. They do which is both great, and a constant heartache.
If you are watching, you know that the earth is changing fast before our eyes.. on my little piece of the planet, the pond I live on has not frozen for the last two winters. There is virtually no snow, there is a new kind of moss growing on rocks everywhere, in the forest there are blow downs everywhere because of the severity of the storms.
I can often feel pretty depressed about this because while I feel we can keep improving on racial, gender and economic justice, but we may not be able to turn back the clock on what we have done to the planet.
It seems ironic that as the fierce mother that I have been that I put so much effort into creating a good life for my children only to see the earth on which they depend dying beneath their feet.
That is heavy.
But this episode provides great perspective -- the 70,000 years Rabia talks about compared the 10,000 years that we tend to learn about as our history. It makes me more hopeful for all of our grandchildren
She describes in some great detail about periods of the goddess
Goddess cultures were highly sexual. Spirituality and sexuality for a couple thousand years seemed to go together everywhere from Turkey to Egypt. You see it in paintings and in architecture so it wasn't only the goddess that the patriarchy wanted to get rid of, it was sexuality.
She talks in this episode about the emergence of patriarchy, gaining force through imagined orders, hierarchies, narratives.
“The time that women start becoming the property of men ….the most important thing about owning women is that she had to be chaste because a man's honor was dependent on a woman's behavior. If she had sex, he was dishonored. There was now no honor for women. Things had changed, honor became something that men had -- that was their only thing. Bravery was measured by going to war and wearing armor and killing a lot of other men, not bravery in the pregnancy of delivering a beautiful baby, which had been for thousands of years from Spain to Indonesia”
She goes on to talk about “the first three commandments of the Bible say what no other god has ever said, I am god. I am the lord thy god you shall have no other gods but me. This is not how humans developed spiritually. This is a real break in human consciousness.
Rabia continues
“you cannot take my name in vain, okay you can't talk about God unless you're really worshiping him. He is a far-away God that, he dips into human affairs but is distant, he's all male, and everything that comes after the ten commandments, a quarter of the stories are about how women should be treated and behave.
And she says, The Hammurabi Code, it’s the same, one-third to one half is about how to deal with women who have sex, who don't clean your house, who talk back
So, I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. There is so much insight and will make you rethink many of the assumptions we make about how we got to this moment we live today.
Warmly,
Susan
Subscribe to our blogs: Women, Negotiation and Power + The Peacebuilding Podcast
Ep 47 Rabia Roberts: HerStory, Part A
Dear Podcast Friends,
I took a hiatus this summer from high-speed internet and went to the “boonies” which was great for making progress on my book, Women, Negotiation & Power (stay tuned), but made podcasting virtually impossible. Indeed, I discovered quickly how much high-speed internet is running our lives – those of us with access to it – in both good and bad ways. It was good to take a break, to slow down, disconnect. I found myself very happy, but also glad to come back and be a part of our digital revolution once again.
Being off the grid allowed me some good reflection time. Perhaps because as I age there is less time ahead of me than behind, I find myself looking backwards at the big things that have shaped me and my culture. For instance, it was determined at the moment of my birth that, because I was a girl, my access to power would come through dependency on men. Shaking off that type of conditioning takes some doing – for all of us. And, however inspired the words of our Founding Fathers (U.S.) “all men are created equal”, it’s clear from historians that the founders were really just referring to propertied, white men like themselves, a crack in my country’s foundation that is revealing itself and reverberating through movements like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. The irony for those founders, products of their time, was that many of them were slave owners who also could not entertain the suggestions from both their wives and the Native Americans who inspired them to include women in the process of forming “a more perfect union”.
So, in keeping with looking backwards and the big things that still reverberate, I'm super excited to bring you my current podcast episode, HerStory. HerStory Part A (and Parts B and C coming soon) will go back to the very beginning of humanity and tell the story of human evolution through the eyes of a woman. Perhaps that past seems ancient or irrelevant to you but, as my guest Rabia Roberts puts it “once you start studying things like neuroscience and how long it takes the brain to develop, you being to understand that pathways get laid down long ago that still have a great influence on us.”
These recordings are actually classes that Rabia gave to a group of women in Boulder, Colorado in 2017. They're just super excellent and not to be missed which is why I am including them here. I will release them one each month for the next three months, HerStory, Parts A, B and C. I think you'll find so much useful information, and Rabia is an amazingly intelligent, sophisticated, and light spirit.
Rabia was on our show in 2017. As you will see, her description of herself as an activist, who loves to be a scholar is pretty darn accurate. For the past 50 years, she's been deeply engaged in what she describes as the three great movements of our time: social justice, peace, and environmental action. Rabia has lived and worked in places as diverse as Iraq, Syria, Burma, Thailand, Jordan, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Brazil and Afghanistan. Her unique experience yields a rich harvest of insights relevant to the challenges facing us.
HerStory was intended to be a series of seven classes or so, but unfortunately after number three, Rabia has had constant medical challenges which has slowed her down. I’m hoping this podcast release might inspire her to continue, even if just in this type of audio format v. a real class.
Rabia got into this project because of “the need for global feminine leadership, and the fact that patriarchy won't die”. This was to be her legacy for women and girls. In her words:
“HerStory is a great empowering story of who we women are, how it has been misunderstood and how women have the unique qualities and skills to bring our country together and our democracy forward. In fact, I believe only a woman will be able to heal and lead us into the future. Only women have the needed capacities and skills to bring men and women, people together. And history gives the evolutionary reasons why this is so.”
This first episode, Part A, covers the human story from 13.6 billion years ago, basically the beginning, to about 40,000 years ago. In it, Rabia gifts us with so many incredible insights.
The following is just a few of my “favorite frames”.
The first is what she calls the enormous femininity of making something out of nothing, what cosmologist and scientist Brian Swimme calls “the great effulgence” commonly known as the Big Bang. One of the first principles of our beginnings was differentiation, “that everything differentiated, nothing was the same. It wasn't a pile of gas that evolved, it was differentiated beings, differentiated things.” Rabia points out that differentiation is one of the main principles in us and “when we try to establish monocultures or mono races, we are working against the fundamental principles of Earth, and ourselves. Monocultures ruined our food and trying to have one race is ruining our civilization.”
The second is that mammals began for a long time with cloning -- XX -- females of species from insects to the apes reproducing themselves. For those of us who grew up with Adam and Eve, of course, this shows a tale turned upside down: Adam and Eve was completely backwards. The male evolved from the female, not vice versa. It’s crazy how so many of our traditions attribute our beginnings to a God the Father, a male with no reproductive capacity at all.
Another frame is especially relevant to the search for peace and the need for women to not abdicate our power. The evolution of the Xy chromosome, the male, brought much needed biological diversity, but also more violence from the testosterone needed to get DNA into the female. Rabia goes on to say that while women can be violent and competitive, the male half of our species creates most of the violence in both intimate and larger systems. She shares insights from other large mammals that she has studied – whales and elephants -- who also deal with the same challenges of male violence, and how the female of those species handle it -- Women take note:)
I like her tales of the bonobos, our equally-distant cousins to the chimpanzees. The bonobos are led by females, and if a male gets aggressive, they go have sex. They are, according to the particular biologist that Rabia was studying, the sexiest creatures known – males having sex with females, males with males, females with females, young and old, a lot of sex going on, and no aggression. As the saying of an earlier generation had it – make love, not war.
Another frame is just how resilient we have been as a species, how our ancestors have survived two major ice ages and so much more. One of the key reasons for our resilience was the hunter gatherer females who were, Rabia says from her research,
“probably the most skilled human beings that ever existed on the planet, with the ability to kill animals to hear a snake in the brush to see a saber toothed lion to smell climate change days in advance, all while keeping her eye on her children. I mean, the working mom goes a long way back, like from always.”
Finally “the oldest grave that is known about with decorations and shells all over the parks and around, it was a little girl. It wasn't a big Chief. It doesn't seem like male chiefs were any more decorated than the females that were found.”
In this episode, Rabia is pointing her audience to a timeline. I've put that timeline on this page, as well as the original YouTube video if you would like to refer to that. I’ve also included here Rabia’s introduction to her Waking Up Together series which I like very much.
So my dear community, I hope in the midst of all this craziness, you get a chance to listen to this episode. It has changed the way I see the world and I’m sure it will do the same for you.
Warmly,
Susan
P.s. I’m working hard on my next online offering – Women Negotiation & Power - Level 1. If you would like to be on the waitlist to be notified when ready, enter your details here.
Listen (or watch) Rabia’s introduction to the HerStory series HERE.
https://youtu.be/TWSGtmviauQ
Subscribe to our blogs: Women, Negotiation and Power + The Peacebuilding Podcast
Ep 46 Susan Coleman and Dean Foster: Culture, Gender and Negotiation
As you know, I believe that empowering women, getting gender right on the planet, is the most impactful peacebuilding initiative we humans can undertake. Thus, one of my main initiatives these days focuses on building women's skill in negotiation. I'm super excited to say that I just completed my first online offering of what I call the mini-workshop series on women, negotiation and power. I had 14 participants, a great group from around the world that gathered weekly on zoom (thank God for zoom) for about a month. As always, I appreciated the diversity in the group. From national origin or current residence, folks were from the UK, South Sudan, Russia, Australia, Colombia, Morocco, Yangon, the United States (East and West Coast) and, notably to me, there was a lot of generational diversity.
For women, especially as we step into our leadership across the world, it feels to me critical that we are talking to each other across nation, tribe AND across age. We have a lot to learn from each other.
Most excitedly for me, I think participants got the connection between how we negotiate in our individual lives, in our families, in our workplaces, — and what is happening on the world stage. I can feel the power of a cohort of women who understand collaboration in the face of conflict, and how to use it for our own benefit and in our leadership in the world around us. If you or anyone you know is interested in staying tuned to this initiative, you can put your name on my Women, Negotiation and Power blog list here.
In this current episode, on negotiation, gender and culture, I talked with my colleague and return guest, Dean Foster of deanfosterglobal.com.
Dean has extremely stellar credentials in the field of cross-cultural communication, has worked with most major Fortune 500 companies, pretty much every cultural group on Earth, national governments, the UN etc. He is an author, speaker, and I like this — a “cultural concierge”.
Dean and I go way back and cut our teeth together with Ellen Raider and Ellen Raider International who was one of the first to teach intercultural negotiation around the world. Dean went on to quote-unquote “major” in cross-cultural communication with a quote-unquote “minor” in negotiation, and I went on to “major” in negotiation and collaborative processes, with a “minor” in intercultural communication.
Negotiation is a very culture-bound concept: Indeed, you can't really think about negotiation without considering culture. And certainly for women in many cultures, cultural norms clamp our mouths shut — we just can't negotiate period. For example, I had a client — a young woman from China that I was with in Seoul — and she was saying, “I love this material.” (We were doing a collaborative negotiation skills course.) “But I can't negotiate at home: I just do what I'm told. And actually, all the money I earn from my job, it goes to my brother.”
What do I mean by culture? It's often commonly thought of as artifacts, music, etc. I'll call that “high culture”. What we're talking about here is what goes on below the iceberg, if you will, what's happening in the deep root system of the tree, what I'll call “worldview”. Geert Hofstede, who was a Dutch researcher in the area, and whose thinking I've used over the years, defined culture as the “collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from another.” It’s like a group personality, if you will. Culture is to a group what personality is to an individual.
And culture is just the way that different humans on the planet have come up with the challenges and opportunities of living on our particular section of the globe.
In this episode, I wanted to explore with Dean a question that I started thinking about as I was writing my book on women and negotiation, which hopefully will be coming soon. He and I have shared with audiences for years the variables that research highlights as differentiating national cultural groups — like individualism, uncertainty, attitudes towards time, attitudes towards authority (often known as power distance), task versus quality of life orientation, things like that.
But how do these variables differ by gender within one cultural group?
If in one country, where the dominant cultural norm shows up as highly individualistic, does that mean that if the men and women were looked at as subgroups, they would be equally, highly individualistic?
So that's what we're going to talk about here. How does gender impact the cultural variables that research has identified? And we're going to do this just based on our own empirical evidence, our experience over the years of working in this area.
One other thing, this episode was recorded right at the beginning of the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US, but before the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests about racial justice and police brutality which then rippled around the world. From working all over the globe, one of the things that I've learned about us humans is that we are much more alike than we are different. That's true of nations, tribes, genders, all of it. We have the same categories of needs — physical, security, belonging, etc., the same categories of feelings — mad, sad, glad, etc.
But how these manifest is impacted by culture.
It may seem simple to say, but simple stuff is often most worth saying, and ever more important to emphasize in our shrinking and contentious world, that when you create a climate that is collaborative across difference, that allows people to meet their basic needs, you don't need coercive and violent police, and you don't need a hyper-militarized planet either. When you build a collaborative climate in a family, a team, a group or a world, you do not get — or you greatly minimize — “groupo- centrism”, my elegant word for identity-group polarization. You do not need to dominate one cultural group with another. You do not need to put trillions into weapons especially when that money is so sorely needed to heal our declining planet.
But understanding cultural differences is super important and super rich, and makes life much more interesting. So, if you are someone who has followed the cross cultural literature, or even if you have not, I know you will enjoy this conversation, about culture and gender.
We believe we have raised more questions than we have answered but perhaps someone listening will get inspired and do some welcome research in the area.
If you have any thoughts on our conversation, we'd love to you to share them in the comment section of our podcast blog below.
Find Dean’s bio and transcript here.
Ep 45: Kristina Lunz: A Feminist Foreign Policy
If my country, the United States, were to adopt a feminist foreign policy, I believe there would be a major, positive shift on this planet. I tweeted that sentiment after interviewing my current guest, Kristina Lunz. I was a little nervous about doing it. I’m not sure exactly why. Speaking your truth is always a little scary, especially for us women. But I got a lot of likes on Twitter from men and women alike. That was interesting to see.
What is a feminist foreign policy? I will let Kristina mostly answer this question because she will do it much better than I. But I will say at the outset that, like this podcast, it supports processes and leadership that build common ground rather than dividing and polarizing people. It emphasizes more of the win-win, less win-lose to resolve differences.
Frankly, the egocentric “I want it now and it's your fault that I can't get it”, the “blame game”, is wearing super thin on me. This includes the drumming up of conflict and zero-sum thinking, and attacking people to get your interests met as a style. It’s not just developmentally juvenile, it’s plain dangerous, especially if the person using it has a lot of power. And its end-game is a homogeneous world where one dominant cultural group, often white straight men, are on top, with the rest of us supporting them and dependent on them for handouts and our survival. I know I’m not interested in that, and I know so many others -- men, women, people -- who are not either.
This podcast advocates empowering women, not just because it's an end in itself, which it is, but because it's the most powerful way to get to a more peaceful and sustainable planet for all of us. To begin with, you can only have real democracy when you have real democracy starting at home — and better sex too, by the way.
I hope you've noticed that what the countries with the best coronavirus responses have in common is that they are run by women. This is not because there aren't many great men leaders out there, but because these women are probably more effortlessly bringing the quality of collaboration to the table which is so sorely needed on the planet right now. My greatest wish for the silver lining of this pandemic is that it deeply underscores our interdependence and need to further develop our collaborative skills. As Kurt Lewin, a grandfather of social psychology said long ago, everyone understands authority, but democracy is a learned behavior.
The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP) was co- founded by my current guest, Kristina Lunz. It's an international research and advocacy organization, was established in 2016, and is dedicated to promoting feminist foreign policy across the globe. The problem CFFP addresses is outdated, patriarchal structures, and their vision is to create an intersectional approach to foreign policy globally.
Kristina tells me that research shows that…
“The most significant factor toward whether a country is peaceful within its own borders or towards other countries is the level of gender equality. So, if that's true, it's pretty easy. It just means that there won't be any peace without feminism. “
Kristina is an award-winning human rights activist, co-founder and Germany Director of the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy and advisor to the German Federal Foreign Office. She was also recently named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She graduated with distinction from University College London School of Public Policy, and did a second Masters at the Oxford Department of International Development in diplomacy. Her activism started at Oxford and has continued ever since.
I've learned so much from doing this episode and talking to Kristina. Here are a few of the many things that stand out:
I spent years traveling to The Hague to provide intercultural negotiation skills programs for ICTY, the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), but wasn't aware until now that 100 years ago, during the First World War, about 1500 women came to the Hague from many parts for the International Congress for Women. They called for an end to the First World War and to establish a set of resolutions to avoid another World War. These included, for example, the dismantling of the military-industrial complex, the prioritization of mediation for conflict resolution, and the democratization of foreign policy, reverberations of themes which have motivated me throughout my life. History is always so interesting.
I found it deeply moving that Sweden describes its government as “feminist” and created the first feminist foreign policy (for modern times) in 2014. This was followed by Canada, followed by Mexico. Check out the CFFP website to see the history of feminist foreign policy. It shows what's possible.
I found it interesting to hear about the actor, Emma Watson's conversation with the academic Valerie Hudson, and the latter's new book called The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide. I can’t wait to read it and hope to get Hudson on the podcast soon. In reading the transcript of that conversation, I learned from Emma Watson that I can refer to myself as “self-partnering” rather than “single”. I’ve enjoyed my journey of the last 10 years living without a partner, though I've dated some wonderful guys. Self-partnering somehow struck me as empowering because living without the protection of a guy can still feel frightening to so many women around the world, myself included.
So I'll stop there and let you listen to Kristina Lunz, a woman who is really on fire, and is going to do a lot to contribute to our common great future.
Find Kristina’s bio and transcript here.
Ep 44: Deborah Heifetz and Martha Eddy: Reclaiming the Female Body for Power in Negotiation
Dear Friends,
Wow, what strange, nerve-racking and global times we are living in. This pandemic certainly underscores for me how interdependent we all are and how important it is – MORE THAN EVER – that we pull together to create a more livable, humane, pleasurable and sustainable world. There is great power in where we place our attention – and we can focus on the positive world we are trying to create – the diamonds that form under great pressure, the lotus flower than blooms out of the muck. To quote a signature message of this podcast (Pete Drucker) “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Our podcast today focuses on negotiation skills for women, and the body. This topic evokes a lot in me. In fact, the night before I recorded it, I woke up at three in the morning and wrote down these thoughts.
• First, that (as my last guest Thomas Hubl suggested), “the feminine” is the body;
• That my body didn't belong to me for a lot of my life;
• That my sexuality also didn't belong to me until I did a lot of work to reclaim it;
• Regarding the phrases “I want” and “I need”, which are so important in negotiation and conflict resolution -- I wasn't supposed to have wants, and I'm not sure about needs either. As a girl in my family, I was supposed to serve, and I was supposed to accommodate;
• It was hard for me to have a clear connection to my “yes” and particularly to my “no”. And, if not connected to your “no”, it can be difficult to walk away from a negotiation -- which is fundamental to power;
• I didn't feel safe claiming value, a popular negotiation concept, because I was taught so deeply that I was supposed to let a man do that;
• Though, throughout the course of my life I have cleared out a lot of unhelpful acculturation, I'm aware of the depth with which these ideas still live in my body.
My two guests in this episode, Dr. Deborah Heifetz and Dr. Martha Eddy, are both dancers and embodiment conflict resolution experts. Among other cool things about Deborah, she served as a special advisor to the crisis management team of the Israeli police and acted in Track II Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. She currently lives in northern Italy where, with her husband and other Italian changemakers, they are working to have their geo- region become a prototype for human scale, community-based sustainable development.
Martha is an author, researcher and worldwide lecturer on somatics (i.e. the body as experienced from within), peace and violence prevention and the role of the body in negotiation. She lives with her family in New York City.
As I recounted my 3a.m. thoughts to the two of them, Martha shook her head in agreement. As someone who is so deeply experienced with the body, she affirmed that my reality is pretty universal to women. She’s not aware of many, if not any cultures that uplift the strength and value of the female, such that the female body, or our experience as females in the body, comes forth as power automatically. It's like “swimming upstream to find our power and reclaim it” she says.
For Deborah, the first trauma she experienced was being born female. She had three older brothers, a very patriarchal father and mother, and felt inherently less valuable. She says, “ I was the whipped cream on the cake, but I didn't want to be the whipped cream, I wanted to be the cake. I wanted to be where the action was, where the real politic was.”
In talking about the inspiration for her work, Martha talks about the influence of her gender-fluid parents, her father who had sexual relations with men and liked gardening, her mother who liked to shoot out windows with her BB gun, and her very sensitive brother, who was not allowed to be the way he was in the very macho and rough climate of Spanish Harlem in New York City.
Deborah says “the body is the central location for social change -- that it all begins with the body.” Martha concretely observes that young women who literally can pull their own body weight up, have a different kind of agency, a different kind of ability to self protect. We women “need to self-assert, without hiding, to step, forward to stand up. These words mean something” she says.
Please enjoy these two unique voices and share with us in the comments below “What is your experience of the body in negotiation?”
Find Deborah and Martha’s bio and transcript here.
Our next two episodes coming soon will be with Kristina Lunz, the Co-founder and Co-director of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, named by Forbes in the 30, under 30, and a repeat guest, Dean Foster of Intercultural Global Solutions in which Dean and I, as two long-standing practitioners in the field of intercultural negotiation, will review the main cultural dimensions as they differ due to gender.
Ep 43: Thomas Hübl: Healing Collective Trauma
One of the things I love most about doing this podcast is I get to spend time with, and really "tune in" to some amazing people.
Thomas Hubl is one of them.
Thomas is a contemporary spiritual teacher – sometimes referred to as a modern mystic.
His teaching combines somatic awareness, advanced meditation and transformational practices that address both individual and collective trauma.
I was introduced to him through my friend and colleague Amy Fox and affiliation with Mobius Executive Leadership. He was working with a group of us organizational consulting types bringing the wisdom traditions to the world of work. I also participated in the online course he created with celebrated negotiation expert William Ury – Mediate and Mediate.
Thomas’ presence is incredibly light, smart, and deep and always seems to elicit in me an inner smile. He’s never afraid to tackle the difficult stuff and does it by listening, as he says, with “eyes all over his body”. It’s a whole body listening practice I have adopted from him.
In the short time I have known him, I have seen his visibility grow rapidly around the globe.
He is a master with:
Building community
Managing projection and his own authority in groups
Somatics
Epigenetics
and the specifc topic of this podcast, Healing Collective Trauma
As my listeners know, I started this podcast because there is a “process crisis” in the world – we use too much win-lose, debate-based processes to deal with our differences, and the media just loves it. Win-lose processes are certainly better than use-of-force but, because they are win-lose, they can lead to use-of-force quickly -- as we can see from looking around the globe. They are not relational, they are patriarchal in origin and they dumb down us humans in terms of how incredibly capable we are of managing complexity and building common ground with each other given the right container and good facilitation.
I wanted to interview Thomas because of the large group processes he has designed -- for up to 1000 people at a time -- to heal collective trauma.
This kind of work truly excites me.
As Thomas says “we have all been born into a collectively traumatized field and collective trauma needs collective healing.”
While I have never personally experienced one of Thomas large group processes, I can tell how amazing they are because of how many large group processes I have led and participated in. He started this work about 15 years ago under the banner of what he calls the Pocket Project and has brought together thousands of Germans and Israelis to acknowledge, face and heal the cultural shadow left by the Holocaust.
He has then gone on to do processes in other parts of the world addressing the various “scars” of humanity that exist everywhere.
The other day, I was talking to a very close friend who is now about 50, grew up in Germany and lives in the United States. I know her struggles well, her desire to break out and manifest what I call a culture-shifting entrepreneurial enterprise. Without knowing I was working on the post production of this episode with Thomas, she started sharing with me her heightened awareness that the only way she was going to move forward was to unfreeze the past – that there is an “absent”, “nowhere” feel to her and her entire generation of Germans, and how much she suspects now that WWII was a direct result of all the undigested trauma of WW1.
I felt the same kind of absence in Beirut when I was there a few decades back, and a similar awareness in myself about how I have had to unfreeze and feel the sexual trauma from my past in order to heal it and stop it from recycling to the next generation.
To quote Thomas in this episode...
"Many of the conflicts we see in the world are actually wounds that break open again, that show up again in different forms” because they have not been processed or digested.
So Thomas' processes are about exactly that – digesting and processing those scars around the globe we humans have created so they do not need to recycle themselves. It’s like a chimney cleaning he says. The more you do it the cleaner it gets, the less reactivity people experience, the more they are able to come fully into the present no longer triggered by unseen ghosts in their beings.
This resonates with my gestalt training and specifically the "paradoxical theory of change" – that the only way to “change” is to integrate fully the “what is” -- to embrace the shadow and the alienated parts of the self or system.
And, Thomas recommends, to do this kind of work in community, with solid facilitation, and presence.
Throughout the interview, we touched on patriarchy as a collective trauma, the thousands of years patriarchal structures have been in place, their connection to war, the woman’s holocaust in Europe where millions were burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft, the challenges for women to release our codependent conditioning and step fully into our leadership and power. “Yes”, Thomas agrees, “#metoo was a trauma eruption”. I am left with a desire to create a large group process with him to address it as I believe it is the core trauma of all the other "traumas of domination”.
So please give a listen, share widely if you can and leave a comment below.
Find Thomas’ bio and transcript here.
Important References / Links
William Ury - https://www.williamury.com/
Amy Fox - https://www.mobiusleadership.com/executive-team/#amy-elizabeth-fox
Mobius Executive Leadership - https://www.mobiusleadership.com/
Meditate and Mediate - https://ondemand.thomashuebl.com/p/meditate-and-mediate-essentials/
Greetings from South Sudan
Given my most recent interview with S. Sudanese, Riya Yuyada, I thought it might interest you to see this excerpt from my post to this list when I was on mission in S. Sudan in June of 2016.
Greetings from South Sudan. I am here working with UNMISS, the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in South Sudan. It’s a privilege to be here, to be part of and experience the UN’s substantial peacekeeping efforts, and always so interesting to see the world from its many different perspectives.
I am currently in Torit, S Sudan, a more remote part of the country, living on a UN compound surrounded by soldiers and barbed wire. I feel pretty safe but kind of “in jail” as I am living in a container with no windows and can’t leave the compound without real precaution. Beyond the barbed wire, I am looking at beautiful mountains which the hiker/explorer in me would like to check out but can’t. I am awed by both the military and civilian personnel who are here for months, sometimes years at a time, eating the same diet of potatoes, rice, maize, collards, chicken, goat, working hard and living with a minimal amount of the regular pleasures that I take for granted.
I have been to S Sudan two times previously (in 2012 and 2103) as well as having worked with UNMISS in Uganda in 2014. With the perspective of time, it’s interesting to witness the newest country on earth finding it’s footing. Things are very unstable here. People are desperately poor and the government still polarized around tribal lines.
I personally see some signs of a few infrastructure improvements: I now have a real visa, whereas before I was just given a letter; my US cell carrier was able to provide me coverage, I have pretty reliable internet and now the aircraft in Juba (the capital) are not all UN, but mostly commercial carriers.
It’s been really moving to get to know people here, groundzero for the beginnings of humanity. So many have been profoundly affected by war. They have been soldiers, they have lost loved ones, they have seen the unspeakable. The country is still flooded with small and large arms and, as one man said, nothing will change until that gets cleaned up. As is my way, I am also closely tracking the situation of women, which seems really tough. Just among the people I am working with, there are so many bright women, and I see them struggle to be heard and seen as equal valuable contributors. A young, very beautiful Dinka woman I have come to know stands out. She is the first of four wives. She and her husband didn’t conceive and so he married again. When that couple didn’t conceive, he married again, etc. Apparently, it was unthinkable to consider that it might be he that has the infertility issue. The woman is shamed for not having conceived, and burdened by supporting all of the wives as she and her husband are the only two breadwinners. I am aware of both her desire to empower herself and the tremendous hurdles she faces to do so. The topic of race is also very close to the surface. While race certainly plays out differently in Africa than my country, I have heard so many deep feelings about color expressed. There is still so much misinformation. With one group I was working with, I noticed some real light-bulbs going off when I made the statement that, at a genetic level, I may be more similar to the black S Sudanese person I was talking to than to a white neighbor at home. Race is such an illusion and yet we humans have made it so important – and so destructive.
If you haven’t had a chance to listen to Riya you can do so here.
Ep 42: Riya Yuyada: Crown the Woman
Some of the more interesting assignments I have had in recent years have been with the United Nations peacekeeping missions -- four times in S Sudan and once a few months ago in the Central African Republic. It’s hard not to notice that peacekeeping missions are often set up in countries that are plagued with what some call “the resource curse” – oil that brings with it conflict and often, in spite of its value, huge income disparities and violence.
But those of us who have worked with lots of conflict situations, also notice the phenomenon of "the lotus flower blooming out of the muck", or "diamonds being formed under great pressure".
In this episode, I am honored to bring you one of those diamonds, Riya Yuyada, a 28 year old bright and sassy woman who has known nothing but war and conflict in her native S. Sudan. Riya Yuyada fled S. Sudan as a baby and grew up in an IDP (internally displaced person) camp in nearby Uganda. In spite of the challenges of growing up in a refugee camp and then later living in the midst of a very “cold peace” in S Sudan with regular outbreaks of civil war, she has grown herself into an impressive young woman and built an organization called Crown the Woman.
Crown The Woman (CREW) is a “women founded and led nonprofit, non-governmental, non-political, humanitarian and national grassroots organization that aims at empowering girls and women to ensure they harness their potential and contribute to nation building economically, socially and politically. Established and registered in 2016 by concerned young South Sudanese women who realized the need to promote meaningful gender equality and equity as well as the need to recognize, appreciate, strengthen and empower women. CREW strives for realization and respect of women’s rights, enhancement of women’s security and the prioritization and provision of women’s basic needs. CREW has a special focus on investing in young women and children as the means of securing the future of South Sudan’s women in nation building and development.
Two themes that stand out to me from this episode.
The first is what I have concluded from doing this podcast for the last few years -- that the most impactful peacebuilding initiative we can undertake on this planet is to empower women – in our family, organizational and planetary systems. In the case of S Sudan and many countries like it that have been plagued by civil war, it means women equipping themselves to be part of the peace process – go Riya!! -- and men welcoming them in to sit alongside them at the negotiating table. For more on this, please go back to Ep 31 and my interview with Dr. Scilla Elworthy, A Business Plan for Peace. Peace agreements last longer by a lot when women are involved in the process.
The second theme is interdependence. From the affluent and island continent of the United States from where I write, it’s easy to think of S Sudan as a far off land. But, of course, as the famous environmentalist John Muir said, “when you pick up anything in the universe, you will find that it is connected to everything else". While I’m grateful for the oil that has heated my house and runs my car, I’m also aware of its cost in the form of global conflict and its impact on the lives of people like Riya. It’s felt good to move off of fossil fuels to solar and wind as much as I can. An important step not just create a cleaner world but a more peaceful one.
Find Riya’s bio and transcript here.
Ep 41: Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry: Nurturing Our Humanity
Probably a deep reason I went into the field of conflict resolution long ago is that growing up as a girl in the heart of an affluent, male-dominated, Wall Street kind of culture meant that I had to reconcile deep love for the members of my family -- especially my powerful Dad -- and my resistance toward many of their views and behaviors. In my fierce college days, I framed things as, my Dad was a “capitalist” whose clients supported the coup in Chile (they did), and I -- deeply influenced by the raging American war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, my new awareness of the hundreds of times the U.S. had intervened militarily into Latin America, and women’s studies -- declared myself a “radical socialist feminist”.
Now after many years of growing, ripening and getting tossed around by the currents of our human existence -- seeing the contradictions in lots of things and people -- I am less interested in polarities and much more interested in finding common ground, deeper dialogue, genuine contact between people, in spite of difference.
So, I would say now that perhaps I am part “capitalist” – a lover of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity, part “socialist”, a firm believer in taking care of people’s basic needs and our planet, and the rest of me, well just rogue goddess -- wanting to move beyond what my next guest calls models of domination to those of true partnership.
Riane Eisler is well into her later years and is still generating unsurpassed insight and contribution into how we can live well together on this planet. I interviewed her first in Episode 28 (please give a listen), and said then and repeat now that she is one of the brightest lights and most innovative social thinkers out there.
What I have always liked the most is that she transcends the polarities of right v. left, capitalist v. socialist, religious v. secular, north v. south, -- “it’s useless”, she says, “because there have been repressive violent regimes in every one of these categories.”
Instead, her frame is models of partnership v. domination and a special emphasis on how gender shows up in both.
In my 20’s, when I first read her book, The Chalice and the Blade, it was such eureka moment that was then reinforced by Harvard social anthropologist William Ury in his book, Getting to Peace to learn that humans have not always been in a state of war and violence -- that, in fact, the vast majority of human existence on earth is characterized much more by what Riane calls models of partnership v. domination, or what Ury articulated as 2,500,000 years of possible coexistence to 10,000 years of coercion.
So many smart people that I talk to believe humans have always been violent, and that there has always been war. But, there’s a lot of evidence that this is just not true. And there is also plenty of evidence that during those times, men and women lived together as equals and that, in many societies, the Divine was often a revered goddess, and maybe even a super sexy one.
What Riane so clearly adds to this discussion is that all domination systems, whether they are left or right, are always characterized by rigid gender stereotypes.
“It's not coincidental”, she says, “that whether it was Hitler in Germany, or ISIS in the Middle East today, secular Western, religious Eastern, or the rightist fundamentalist alliance in the US, that a top priority is always getting back to this quote, ‘traditional family’. It's a code isn't it?” she says, “for authoritarian, rigidly male dominated, and highly punitive family.”
Impetus for this current episode is Riane’s new book, Nurturing our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape our Brains, Lives and Future which she has written with Douglas Fry. It’s a delight to get to know Doug through this episode. I knew of his work as an anthropologist, documenting earlier partnership societies and the gender balance within them.
Doug has a very special voice and perspective and I found his calm demeanor made me feel better and more hopeful about the world.
A couple of ideas they share that I especially like. . .
That gender is a key component to domination systems and is connected to the ranking of any human being over other groups whether it’s about race, religion, sexual orientation. . . In other words, you get rid of gender ranking and you get rid of a lot of “isms”,
That as the status of women rises, men no longer find it such a threat to their status, masculinity or role to also embrace caring values like universal health care, generous paid parental leave and have the freedom to be more fully themselves . .
That in the partnership societies that Riane and Doug explore in the book:
there are the narrowest gender gaps
there is an investment in people starting from early childhood
there’s no homelessness
no violence (although certainly people lose is from time to time)
military budgets are just a few percentages of government spending (compared to $.57 on the dollar in the US)
they are always in the highest ranks of the global competitiveness indices
AND, perhaps the most important of all, people are the happiest!!
Go figure.
Hope you get a chance to listen to Riane and Doug and tell us what you think here.
Find Riane and Doug’s bio and transcript here.
If you are interested in upcoming content on Women, Negotiation and Power, please join our list here.
And please share the episode and like us or leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ep 40: Saba Ismail: From Northwestern Pakistan to Global Leadership
I like to think of myself as fairly courageous. In fact, one of my mottos (adopted from Barbara Stanny (Huson — an earlier guest on the show) is to “do something scary every day”. So, I readily take work assignments in war zones in Afghanistan, South Sudan and most recently the Central African Republic; I go backcountry skiing on glaciers in remote parts of Alaska; I try to be courageous with my own inner evolution — to keep growing as a human; to be honest with myself and others, speak truth to power and to keep doing what I can to create a more peaceful and sustainable planet.
But whatever courage I may have doesn't hold a candle to my current podcast guest, Saba Ismail, who grew up in Northwestern Pakistan, the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman. Saba and her sister, Gululai, and the well-known Malala, who comes from the same region (and was shot in the head simply for advocating for girls’ education), are speaking up in the face of many forces that would like to silence them and which would terrify me if I was confronted with the same. I'm glad I can give a platform on this podcast to young women like Saba, who now is 32.
Here are a few excerpts from her bio:
"Saba Ismail is a feminist, peace activist and is working for the empowerment of young women. At the age of 15, with other young women fellows, she co-founded “Aware Girls”, a young women-led organization working for empowering young women by strengthening their leadership. . .
The young women of Aware Girls engage in Countering Violent Extremism (or CVE) programs in which young people are persuaded to not join militant groups and instead create open spaces for dialogue, and promote nonviolence and pluralism in the community.
She was one of the first to convince the diplomatic community of the importance of including youth in building a more peaceful world.
Foreign Policy Magazine acknowledged her bravery and activism by recognizing her as one of 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013 and she has been acknowledged in the “30 under 30 Campaign by the “National Endowment for Democracy” for her long struggle for democracy, peace and women’s rights."
Here are some of my favorite "frames” of the episode:
She couldn't even talk -- First of all, a few months back when I first reached out to Saba, she didn't even feel she could talk to me because her sister was in hiding from the Pakistani military and things were just too dangerous to bring any more attention to the situation. . .
The Critical Role of Fathers -- Saba grew up in jihad, the influences were everywhere and as a young person she believed them. But when her father, a human rights activist, realized what she was bringing home from school, he intervened to make sure that all of his kids, especially his girls, were given information and education to counter the indoctrination. The critical role fathers play in the empowerment of their daughters is well-documented and I have experienced it personally:
when I was working with two factions of Kurds in northern Iraq and i suggested it might be good to have some women among the representatives, it was a father who insisted that his daughter join us even though her mother and grandmother were dead set against it;
when I had the privilege of working with the senior women leaders in the Afghan government, many of them shared with me that they would never be where they are without their father's support;
in Saba’s story, a father who really paved the way for her sister Gululai and her to make a real difference to their community and world;
and finally, in my own life, my father who loved me a lot but was ambivalent about my professional success -- how much effort it has taken me to transcend his messages.
Advocating nonviolence in Madrassas -- Saba and Aware Girls going into the madrassas to convince young people that the Koran doesn’t support violence and jihad;
Pakistani Military -- the Pakistani military seem so hell bent on oppressing young women like Saba and her sister rather than recognizing them as the global peacebuilders that they are. I mean really!! What the heck!!
What Saba calls the #Metoo Movement of Pakistan -- the delegations of women, many illiterate, that traveled to the northwest of Pakistan in spite of great difficulty, to show solidarity with other women that were being harassed and defiled;
U.S. Supporting Military Solutions, not Aware Girls -- that my country so often supports authoritarian regimes like what currently exists in Pakistan rather than the development of young women and men like Saba. How our ‘war on terror”, rather than making the world safer, has led to way too many kids like Saba growing up in cultures of extremism, jihad and violence. Shame on us.
Find Saba Ismail’s bio and transcript here.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Please share this episode, write a review on Itunes or wherever you get your podcasts, or write a comment on the blog below.
Ep. 039: Stephanie Savell: The Costs of War
"What they saw was that there really is very little conversation in the United States about the many costs and consequences of these post 9/11 wars. Huge financial costs, in my mind, this is kind of the biggest story that no one talks about in the United States today."
Stephanie Savell
First and foremost, I am a fierce mother.
While I’ve had my challenges in life, mostly I've been blessed.
But I’m worried about my kids, grandkids -- all of our kids.
Recently we had one of the hottest heat waves ever here in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City where I live. I escaped to the relative coolness of the woods and pitched a tent, but there really was no escape. The forest, the ground, the trees, the critters, all of us were just plain HOT.
My thoughts drifted to what life will be like for our kids in 30 years, and their kids and kids in 100. I cried, and swore to the trees. And then I got re-focused to what I can do to make a difference. This podcast is my antidote to despair.
As an intervener in complex systems, I was heavily trained in gestalt theory. One simple and yet important tool us gestalters use is “figure/ground” analysis. When scanning the landscape, is there a tree that stands out in the forest? When scanning a complex system with “soft eyes”, what smacks you in the face?
Scanning our planetary system right now, what "smacks me in the face" is climate change. Two other big "trees" that catch my attention are:
--that the United States, my country, spends more on the military than the next 7 countries combined (maybe even 10 -- I hear different numbers) and,
--that women are waking up all over the planet and, along with enlightened men, changing the conversation around gender.
If you listen to this podcast, you know that I and many of my guests believe these phenomenon are related.
It's for this reason, that I had been looking for someone to talk about military spending even though it's not exactly the niche of this podcast. I initially found an NBC reporter, William Arkin, a longtime war and military reporter, who had resigned in protest of the extent to which the mainstream media are in bed with the military industrial complex, but changed course when I learned about Stephanie Savell from the Costs of War project at Brown University. I asked Stephanie, a millennial woman with deep knowledge on the topic of US military spending, to direct her comments to her fellow millenials, Gen Z and beyond, those who will be most affected by what is currently happening.
When Stephanie tells people about her work at parties, she gets "crickets". It seems, she says to be "the biggest story in the United States that no one wants to talk about."
Run by three women, The Costs of War project, is one of the lone academic centers that is tracking just how much the United States has spent on the military after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and just how effective, or ineffective those expenditures have been.
As she concludes, our "war on terror" has not been effective at stopping terrorism – not even close. It has not made us safer, not reduced incidents of terrorism, but rather has increased them".
It has also made a few people and organizations extremely wealthy.
One thing I learned that especially surprised me is that the "war on terror" is mortgaging our children's future as it's being paid for on a credit card. Stephanie explains that we currently spend $.57 of every dollar on the military but that slice of the pie will only increase in the future to pay off the trillions of dollars of debt we will owe.
Those of us in the conflict resolution field are well-aware that conflict is created by frustrated needs. While listening to Stephanie it dawned on me how the debt service will freeze out anything else we as a country might need or want to spend our money on -- frustrating needs, creating conflict, inviting authoritariansm to manage it.
We can do so much better than this. The absence of peace is just a failure of imagination.
I recently came back from the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the Central African Republic where I was delivering Negotiation and Conflict Resolution programs. My clients invited me to create a program specifically for women peacekeepers which I'm really excited about. (Sign up here for our blog on Women, Negotiation and Power to learn more).
From the perspective of CAR, the US seems like such a relative isolated island of peace and prosperity -- the envy of many in the world. But, as Stephanie tells us, we have boots on the ground in 80 countries, and are using our military often to support increased authoritarianism around the world -- not the democracy we like to be known for.
I also just completed my bi-annual intercultural negotiation program for NASA and space partners, concurrent with the 50th anniversary celebration at the Apollo mission. Those first, amazingly beautiful photos of our fragile blue pearl were so transformative to human awareness about the wild reality of our existence. More than anyone, astronauts know about the interdependence of the entire planet and see first hand how, when a storm whips up in Africa, red earth settles in Houston, Texas.
We have two basic choices.
We can to increasingly learn to collaborate with each other -- partner, celebrate difference, innovate, create a more pleasurable human existence from the intimate to the global.
Or, we can pursue throwback models of domination, control, pain, and coercion.
For my kids and grandkids I hope we choose the first.
Find Stephanie Savell’s bio and show notes here.
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Ep. 038: Robert Fersh: Finding Common Ground in the Belly of the Beast
"I began to see that it wasn't a matter of being a liberal or conservative that made you a compassionate person, you just saw the world differently. And so, once you have that veil lifted and you see the humanity of people, you can't stereotype them and dismiss one point of view..."
Robert Fersh
A main focus of this podcast is to explore the best process interventions that build common ground and consensus in diverse and often polarized groups.
But the reality is -- unless you are a process person like me – e.g. a facilitator, coach, mediator – you probably don’t pay attention to process.
Process is a little like plumbing: if it’s working, you don’t notice it, but if it’s not, watch out!!
I started this podcast because HOW we come together to resolve our differences has everything to do with whether we will be successful. If you create the right “container” with the right ingredients -- including meeting conditions, stakeholders, design (see e.g. Ep 22, Future Search with Sandra Janoff) – you will make significant progress in bridging divides that seem unbridgeable. I pretty much guarantee it. The climate you create is key.
So, that’s why, when Convergence and Rob Fersh came to my attention, I got interested.
A divide that currently seems unbridgeable to many, especially those living in the United States, is the one between the Democrats (the left) and Republicans (the right) in the US government.
Most Americans these days are pretty despairing at the level of polarization and acrimony in Washington. As noted by our last guest, Melanie Greenberg, the American legal system is "antagonistic by design" and, in Washington, a town with many lawyers, the predominant ethic is the adversarial model. To add fuel to the fire, we have a media that uses polarization and conflict to sell newspapers and a government that is spending $.57 of every dollar on the military. So, in my view, organizations whose purpose is to create a more collaborative climate are sorely needed
Rob founded Convergence in 2009 “to promote consensus solutions to both domestic and international issues”. Convergence has “mediated”, public policy issues where opposing sides agree on a goal but disagree -- sometimes intensely -- about how to get there. The organization creates “containers” that allow opposing sides to build relationships and think together more clearly about creative ways forward. To date, the Convergence model of "dialogue leading to action" has been applied to health care, education, incarceration, and other hot public policy topics such as gun safety and climate change are being explored.
Rob came to Convergence after serving as the U.S. country director for Search for Common Ground, an international conflict resolution organization. He also has years of experience working on the Hill for various U.S. legislators.
What I think will stand out to you, as it has to me, is the commitment that Rob brings to creating a safe and neutral environment for opposing sides to come together and think constructively about the best ways forward. “At a minimum", he says, "at a time when people don’t talk to each other well, the people that we get to come to our tables -- who are very diverse politically and otherwise -- have an amazing experience of seeing and understanding people -- and temperatures get lowered – and, at the best end, we are having a real impact on the issues we care about." As he notes, when you create a good climate, people stop the demonization, trust builds, and it’s even possible to create solid and lasting relationships though people may still disagree on a number of issues.
So, I invite you to tune in and hear Rob’s stories. Get inspired. It will give you hope that we can find common ground in the belly of the beast.
Find his bio and show notes here.
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Ep. 037: Melanie Greenberg: Making Peace in a Polarized World — And the US Is No Exception. .
“Peacebuilding is not about negative peace which is the absence of violence. Peacebuilding includes the processes that societies use to resolve conflict - because there will always be conflict - and to do it through negotiation, dialogue, consensus-building and politics rather than through deadly violence"
Melanie Greenberg
When I travel outside of the US I often think that American citizens have no idea what a “war zone” we are actually living in. Guns are rampant every where. Military hardware comes back from global combat for use by our police departments further escalating violence. Since 2001, the US has spent $32 million PER HOUR on war with each taxpayer paying a total of $24,000. US military spending far exceeds every other country on earth including China which comes in a very distant second. Those of us in the conflict resolution field know all too well that when you create an adversarial climate, you get identity group polarization. Sure enough, racial tensions in the US are at an epic high and, while “the feminine” is rising, girls and the feminine are under harsh attack with a man in our White House who brags about sexually assaulting women and a Supreme Court majority that does not protect women by law from domestic violence (Castle Rock v. Gonzales). We in the US typically think of ourselves as the envy of the world to which certainly there is some truth. But we are numb to what it costs us — on every level — to dominate the planet.
So when I heard Melanie speak at the AfP (Alliance for Peacbuilding) annual conference about the Hands Across the Hills initiative which applies the same peacebuilding approaches used in the most deadly conflicts around the world to conflicts in the US I was intrigued and wanted to learn more.
Melanie is one of those souls who exudes both integrity, kindness, high professionalism and intelligence. She is currently the Managing Director at Humanity United (HU) overseeing the peacebuilding and conflict transformation portfolio which develops, refines and implements strategies to build peace and counter violent conflict. Before HU, she was the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and before that the president and founder of the Cyprus Fund for Peace and Security. She has helped design and facilitate public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Caucuses and much more. Check out her impressive bio here.
Because she is one of the most seasoned and respected practitioners in the peacebuilding field, I wanted to hear her definition of peacebuilding, how it has emerged as a field and what she sees as the trends.
“Peacebuilding” emerged in around 1990 and was first articulated by Boutros Boutros-Ghali from the United Nations. Melanie describes the various streams coming together (at least in the US) to form the peacebuilding “river”: the Vietnam anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement which required large scale consensus processes to resolve disputes around land, and the ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) movement giving rise to mediation and other collaborative processes as an alternative to the American legal systems which is also known as “the adversary system.” All of these movements, she says, inspired people to act for themselves and realize that building peace wasn't just the role of the government but could and should belong to citizens as well. She continues on with the clear definition of peacebuilding quoted above.
She sees many exciting trends in peacebuilding — what we are learning about the connection between neuroscience and peacemaking and how peacebuilding is becoming more systemically integrated into our institutions. Cool to know that many of the large peacebuilding organizations have come together to improve the “branding” of peacebuilding — to make peace enticing, and counter the news culture of “if it bleeds it leads”.
The most discouraging trend to her is that, among practitioners, the US is now generally seen as a “peacebuilding problem”. All of the criteria that are red flags for a peacebuilding initiative are present in this country — the level of gun violence, the tensions, the polarization, the number of deaths from violent conflict. In the Hands Across the Hills initiative, peacebuilder Paula Green is creating dialogue between people from a very conservative area from Eastern Kentucky and a very liberal area from Western Massachusetts. Please see our show notes for more information.
Melanie talks about her early years and what planted seeds in her to do the work she does today. She and I have some commonalities on that front — both white women who grew up in pockets of relative privilege but surrounded by racial tensions. We both then went to law school and had a similar reaction to the American legal system which she describes as “antagonistic by design” and then into conflict resolution & peacebuilding fields. I suspect this has something to do with our sensibilities as women and speaks to why creating gender balance on the planet is so important for all of us.
So whether you are somebody who formerly considers yourself in the conflict resolution world or someone who just wants to know more about the field and what's possible, I know you’ll enjoy this interview.
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Ep. 036: Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering
“As practitioners, we need to be creative and bold in how we are gathering."
Priya Parker
When Priya Parker published her recent book, the Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, Susan and her colleagues commiserated that we hadn't written it ourselves. The book is excellent, highly recommended and we are greatful to Priya for having written it with such great artistry.
How we meet and how we gather is critical not only to the quality of our lives and connections, but to our ability to build a more innovative and peaceful world. It is the HOW that is the main focus of the Peacebuilding Podcast -- what are the best tools, techniques, processes that can build common ground in complex systems.
Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor. She helps activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, philanthropists create transformative gatherings. She works with teams and leaders across technology business, the arts, fashion and politics to clarify their vision for a future and build meaningful purpose driven communities. She began her career and has been deeply impacted by the field of conflict resolution where she has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, Southern Africa and India.
Some highlights and main ideas from the episode:
The first is just simply who Priya is and where she comes from, the perfect person for the job that she has. “Priya” “Parker” -- Priya is from her mom who is a South Asian Indian, and Parker, from her dad, a white Anglo-Saxon American. Her Mom, as she describes it, is a vegetarian, very liberal, comes from families that worships cows; Her father, very conservative, from an evangelical Christian background, and from a family (of cattle ranchers) that slaughters cows. Her parents divorced when Priya was 9. She spent her childhood going back and forth between these two very different worlds while thoroughly immersed in each. It was a rich learning laboratory for somebody who ultimately has become a professional gatherer and facilitator of diverse groups.
We began the conversation talking about language. The word “peacebuilding” makes Priya cringe a bit because "there can be no peace without justice". Susan explains that there is strong evidence that we no longer need armed conflict, that it’s a huge waste or our precious planetary resources, and that HOW we bring people together and, in the words of Bill Ury, make the room and world safe for conflict is key. Priya agrees and quotes a friend: “if we had more conflict in the world, we would have less violence.”
Susan’s favorite ideas from the interview are the linked ideas of the power of modern ritual to help groups connect across difference and creating temporary, alternative realities in gatherings to, in a sense, make them safe for conflict.
Pulling from shamanic traditions, Priya describes how she creates rituals, processes and experiences that actually help people experience alternative worlds where people can deal with the “danger” of conflict and difference. She shares an example how she created a unique and fun process with an architecture firm to help them shift out of their polarization and “stuckness”.
In the course of interviews for her book, Priya realized that the most powerful rituals come from more monocultural groups. But, many of these don’t work anymore -- both for people coming from those cultural groups and for communities or gatherings that are multicultural. So how, she asks, do we intentionally, purposefully, create a sense of ritual, maybe perhaps even a sense of the sacred, that will ultimately be the magic that allows people to connect, make contact, transform and move into a different state? How do we reinvent modern ritual to match the needs of our communities in an explicit way that allows us to connect with each other when we are note the same?
She also explored the process that we facilitators do of elevating the invisible – clients generally don’t think about process, but we facilitators know that it’s the process every bit as much as the content that can make a huge difference to transformation. In her work, Priya exposes the hidden rules of engagement, like etiquette from certain traditions, and superimposes on these “pop-up” rules or norms that are — democratic, temporary and learnable -- for the sake of the gathering.
We spent a good bit of time talking about how (in the words of William Ury) you make a space “safe for conflict”. This idea is very aligned with Susan’s experience – that you cannot create a shift or change in a system unless you have created it in the room. (She experienced this profoundly when she used fictitious negotiation simulations to allow warring factions to connect in spite of face issues that would have prohibited.) We as facilitators know that our clients can not transform to different ways of being together, different understandings of what those differences are hopefully a more innovative way of being together unless they have a very meaningful experience in their often short time with us. Priya probably as much as anyone is really isolating all the ingredients of this secret sauce that makes this possible.
We explored creating safety for conflict around a topic as charged as race. Priya shared how impressed she is with the book White Fragility. The author talks about how the “groundrules” often set by facilitators unwittingly privilege the power holders. Susan shared how much she appreciates the simple but powerful groundrules for gatherings used by Black Lives Matter that she sometimes uses in her facilitation work:
Lead with love
Low ego, high impact
Proceed with the speed of trust
We hope you give a listen and enjoy this episode. It is chock full of insights and practical suggestions for any kind of gathering you might be at the center of holding.
Find her bio and show notes here.
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Ep. 035: Barbara Huson: Becoming Your Own Prince Charming - Women, Money, Power & Peace
In this episode, Susan turns to the topic of money and its connection to women’s empowerment and building a more peaceful planet.
Susan often finds herself saying “follow the money” if you really want to understand what's going on in a complex system. As earlier guests on the show have pointed out, our war system is hugely profitable to some (and very costly to all other people and life) – approximately $2 trillion dollars a year. We also have a virtual global epidemic of women’s codependency on men – by one seasoned expert’s estimation -- about 90%, and women not taking charge around money is a very good metric of this. Women stepping into their power is key to building peace on this planet and, as money is the currency of power, women getting smart about money goes hand in glove.
That's where Barbara Huson comes in, not because she professes to be an expert on our military expenditures or global peace but rather is the leading authority on women, wealth and power.
Barbara provided critical inspiration to Susan in getting this podcast going with her guidance to “do something scary every day” and “connect to your purpose”.
Barbara is a bestselling author. She's written books like "Prince Charming isn't Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money", "Secrets of Six Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to up Your Earnings and Change your Life", "Sacred Success: A Course in Financial Miracles", and others. She's been featured on 'Good Morning America', 'The View', 'The O'Reilly Report' and a lot of other popular news shows. She is a journalist, coach, savvy business person and just a simply wonderful, insightful person with a compelling personal story about empowering herself around money.
In her own words:
“I grew up relying on my father (the “R” of H&R Block), then my husband, to manage my money. But early in my marriage, I found out my husband was a compulsive gambler. And here’s the insane part — I continued to let him manage the money because that’s how scared and intimidated I was by money. It wasn’t until a devastating financial crisis became a personal wake-up call. I got tax bills for over $1m for illegal deals my ex got us in. He’d left the country, I didn’t have $1m, and my father wouldn’t lend me the money. I had three daughters — one just a baby, and I was not going to raise them on the street. That’s when I knew I had to get smart. And I did.”
Barbara’s weekly blog post “Words of Wealth” is really one of Susan’s favorites: It’s short, clear and ALWAYS has something valuable to say about the deeper internal gook of how we are about money. Barbara attests to how hard she works at it – it clearly pays off.
So here are a few of my favorite parts of the interview:
“Its not the money that’s going to give us power” Barbara says. “I don’t believe that money gives you power. Money has no power. It’s the process of who we have to become to be good stewards of our money. We have to become a powerful woman, and a powerful woman, is someone who knows who she is, who knows what she wants and expresses that in the world unapologetically.” Women are still so deeply codependent from so many centuries of conditioning. As a result, we will undermine ourselves in all kinds of ways such as caretaking dysfunctional men or putting ourselves in harms way, because of our deep belief that our survival simply depends on it. Throughout the episode, Susan and Barbara both share personal stories of how they fell into this trap and pulled themselves out of it.
Barbara confirms what Susan has been hearing in different venues, that -- at least in the United States --70% of all wealth will be transferred to women in the 21st century. Women are earning more money and inheriting more, but not necessarily commanding this resource with confidence and power but rather often handing that job over to men.
Finally, according to Barbara, when it comes to money, women are motivated by different things than men around money. They will yawn and glaze over when it’s just about money for money’s sake but get more fired up when they begin to see the power of helping their families and communities. That’s why her target audience is women who want to create wealth because they are purpose driven and know, as Mother Teresa said, that it takes a check book to change the world.
Given that, Susan takes the leap that if women get much smarter about their own money, we might also start paying attention and saying NO, like Leymah Gbowee did around war in Liberia, to the trillions of global annual military spending that is not addressing any of our very urgent planetary problems today.
Please listen to this delightful person who is so generous and simply great fun to just spend time with. Whatever gender, you will gain a lot of insight.