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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Nonviolent Communication

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Graceful engagement

Enough Room at the Table is now available for digital view: Go to enoughroomfilm.com and pay what you can.
Image via the producers.

I first heard the term “graceful engagement” from the founding director of Intersections International, Rev. Robert Chase.1 He was describing to me the peace-building approach that Intersections uses across its programs, and once I heard it, I started seeing other examples everywhere.

This week, I came across a resource from the Institute for Welcoming Resources, a coalition of trainers that supports local congregations in nurturing their members and deepening their practice of hospitality. As IWR describes it, graceful engagement has three prerequisites:

1. Parties need to be open to learning, and therefore be open to listening or truly attending to one another.
2. Parties should be willing to perceive each other as peers and siblings rather than as “Us” and “Other.”
3. Parties will need to stretch beyond these first two steps, and actively attempt to recognize the Divine in each other, just as fractious siblings sometimes recognize their parents in their age-mates.

Graceful Engagement is a way of practicing holy conversation, where each person is treated as a loved child of God. It is about listening, sharing one’s own story, hearing one another’s perspective, finding commonalities and shared experiences. It is about building relationships around values that bring us together as opposed to things that polarize us.” —The Institute for Welcoming Resources (2013)

Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer have practiced this approach in their own context over the last near-decade, and a group of pastors, teachers, and lay people attempted to do likewise last spring. I participated in this extended conversation. If you still haven’t seen it, please download it and watch at your convenience.

  1. Intersections is one of McKenzie Consulting Group’s current partners and recently hired me.

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Throwing our voices in public communications

High contrast edit of theater seating photo by Elijah Flores. These seats are all black. The light source is above and in front of them.
Photo credit: Elijah Flores

The ventriloquist is an entertainer whose performance involves throwing their voice so that it appears to come from another source, like a puppet. Think Jeff Dunham.

The stage actor is an entertainer whose performance includes conducting conversations with peers on stage but projecting those conversations out into the theater audience. Think Shakespeare.

And then there’s the public communicator, a person whose aim isn’t to entertain at all, and whose actual audience may not be obvious either.

As Dr. Katharine Hayhoe explains in a talk with the Citizens Climate Lobby, sometimes the public conversations we have aren’t for the benefit of the people we’re ostensibly talking to.

Sometimes these conversations are for the people watching quietly, people who may never themselves speak publicly but who are engaged with the issues nevertheless. They’re open to interaction, willing to seek common ground where our values intersect, and merit even indirect dialogue as much as the people who prefer confrontational debates.

The filmed dialogue Enough Room at the Table is a good example of how this indirect communication can work.

Thirteen people gathered one weekend far from home to talk amongst ourselves and learn from each other about each other. We also gathered that weekend to talk to the audiences who watch our film, and to demonstrate in their asynchronous presence what quality dialogue can look like.

In the era of “fair and balanced” public conversations, moderators often set “both sides” of a question against each other as if they were peers. We’ve let this model of discourse loose on network news broadcasting for the last 60 years, current US election coverage is every bit a part of it, and we aren’t better informed or more socially cohesive for its influence.

What made Enough Room at the Table work as a conversation, filmed or not, was that it didn’t insist on the common foundation of false parity. It didn’t assume that all approaches to marginalized people are equal. We acknowledged that some approaches have caused and continue to cause harm, and we didn’t make room for the “freedom” to disparage or personally attack participants that’s so often accommodated elsewhere in the public sphere.

That made some parts of the conversation super awkward, and yet I thought that was just right: when we understand and accept the value of the people we speak with, we should wrestle with our customary words. We should hold conversation space as if it were sacred. Because it is. And the stakes are high.

When we throw our voices in this way, sharing what’s real and good with each other and with audiences we may never meet, we might be performing roles like ventriloquists and thespians, but we’re also helping our wider society to practice conversation beyond fruitless agonistic debate.

Even if the results are far less entertaining, they just might also be that much more whole. And that makes it worth it.

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Leading where you stand

Peace Pilgrim looks into the camera, smiling gently. She is an older, white-haird woman in a dark tee that reads "PEACE PILGRIM" in white all-caps letters. She is walking along the side of a major road.
Photo credit: James B. Burton/Courtesy of Friends Of Peace Pilgrim (ht: NPR)

In June, I wrote about organizational charts as a very limited representation of the way power, influence, and contribution flow in and around institutions. Our significance as people and value as community members don’t hinge on our job titles or institutional roles, I said.

So Miki Kashtan’s comments on leadership beyond influence and the power to enforce stood out to me tonight. Kashtan, who I’ve been reading on and off since May, uses nonviolent communication principles to design group dynamics that enable all group members to claim responsibility for their group and its outcomes: the ability to author isn’t limited to the people at the top of the pyramid.

What actions count as exhibiting leadership? Speaking up, for example, when others are nervously noticing something going on and saying nothing, can be a form of leadership…

If we are committed to the whole, we are fully open to being influenced, not only to influencing others. When we take on a leadership stance, we act with the intention to serve the whole, and whatever that means—even if it means changing our own preferences or desired outcomes—is what we choose to do.

…So much of the definition of leadership revolves around influence because the people who write about leadership are immersed in the organizational world, which is mostly organized with one person on top leading the rest, mostly in the form of making all or most of the decisions that affect the whole.

I don’t have any faith that this model is going to take us into a future that works… I see the way forward to be many more of us taking on the active, empowered stance of leading, wherever we are, and whatever our official position may be.” —Miki Kashtan, Reweaving Our Human Fabric, pp. 178-179

This approach to leadership insists that we all belong and that there are ways for each of us to contribute. It acknowledges the power those beyond the organizational chart hold, and it also threatens to disrupt the power of those smoothly running the system as it already is.

In Kashtan’s vision, organizational leaders who might otherwise command and expect it to stand fast can gain the experience of receiving collaborative feedback. Organizational members used to being overrun and dominated can gain the experience of having their perspectives solicited and fairly considered. And each person can gain the experience of acting with the whole in mind.

“We can improve the outcomes for all of us” is the heart of this approach, and there’s been no better time in history than to give it a try.

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Life Skills: Non-defensive listening

Photo: Nick de la Force via Unsplash.com | Photo of Australian dark tan sand dunes. The sun is below the horizon; the sky is very light blue and bright yellow.
Photo: Nick de la Force via Unsplash

Once upon a time, one of my mentors said to me, “When you hear something new, use the Three Heap method.

“Heap 1 is for things you accept.
“Heap 2 is for things you reject.
“And Heap 3 is for things you don’t have enough info on, things you’re going to just hold for now.”

My mentor said, “Keisha, Heap 3 should be your biggest heap. You can’t learn anything from Heap 1 since you’ve already swallowed it.
“And you can’t learn anything from Heap 2, since you’ve already spat it out.
“But Heap 3, you can still learn something from.
So hold it.”

Non-defensive listening is fundamental to learning and it’s also a cornerstone of non-violence. I call it a life skill because it opens the way for a quality of life with others that transcends the perception of threat and moves to diminish and demonize.

Listening makes it possible for us to stretch beyond the world that we each build with our own private perceptions and experiences. It allows us to account for the worlds that others around us live in and incorporate their knowledge into our own. We live on the same planet as each other, and yet we live in different conceptual worlds. Those differences aren’t trivial, and genuine community, community that has passed beyond the pseudo stage of shallow approval, creates and cultivates space for threshing those differences for whatever wheat might be hidden in the chaff.

Listening non-defensively and holding that third heap doesn’t at all mean that we’ll ultimately agree: there’s a second heap for good reason! Some things are simply too toxic to be consumed and should be spat out for health’s sake. Communities determine for themselves which dynamics are unacceptable to them and their membership.

What’s critical, even in that process, is that we practice how to look beyond the debate to the real human needs underlying people’s attachments to their beliefs or ideas. This can’t become a world that works for all if we keep on masking human needs behind appeals to power, authority, and the right to exclude. We have to practice the vulnerability involved in articulating our needs and asserting responsibility for meeting them in ways that don’t require others to suffer.

Here’s Miki Kashtan on how to directly engage someone with whom you deeply disagree:

Judging someone is an indication that a need of ours is not met. The first step in transforming judgments is to recognize and connect with our unmet needs.

The action we’re judging is itself an attempt to meet needs. The second step is connecting with the needs of the person we’re judging so that we can open our hearts with compassion.

When we experience challenge in transforming our judgments, we can reflect on what needs we might be trying to meet by holding on to our judgments. Connecting with this set of needs may be essential to enable the previous two steps to proceed.” –Miki Kashtan, Transforming Judgments and Enemy Images

Discover more in Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future.

Listen. Listen deeply. And be willing to reply.