Anyone who’s worked at building consensus on public policy knows the frustration of trying to reason with someone who just won’t change a position or even consider alternative possibilities. They may refuse to accept any evidence that seems to disprove their positions and become aggressive and disruptive in the face of challenges. Sometimes, it’s possible to write off this unshakable dissenter as an oddball individual, well-known to the rest of the group as such. But in a collaborative process each person represents a specific interest and has an important role to play in reaching agreement. A careful response is needed to move dialogue in a productive direction.

A number of recent studies and explanations are helping to clarify some of the possible reasons for intransigence of this type. In doing so, they’re also bringing out the fact that such behavior is not so unusual. We’re living in a time of increasing polarization of views on politics and public policy, and it’s especially important to understand the tenacity of extreme opinion and its impacts on consensus building and other forms of collaborative work.

In this and the next few posts, I want to explore ideas about why people can hold so firmly to existing beliefs no matter what contradicting information they may have, and also about practical steps that facilitators and collaborative leaders can take in response. This post provides brief overviews of the ideas of Elizabeth Bader, drawn from psychoanalytic theories of human personality, and the recent work of Williams Eggers and John O’Leary (If We Can Put a Man on the Moon) that draws on neuroscience research for some of their conclusions about obstacles to problem-solving in government.

These ideas address different levels of group interaction and, taken together, offer extremely helpful guidance for finding effective strategies. They do this by focusing on the non-rational elements that pervade consensus building groups. As Robert Benjamin has pointed out, the interest-based, joint gains negotiation model assumes that rational analysis will be decisive in formulating agreements. The dynamism of group interactions, however, is much more complicated, and requires understanding of very human but quite non-rational behavior.

Personal Identity Issues

Elizabeth Bader, an attorney, mediator and psychologist, has recently offered a model of the mediation dynamic that draws on psychoanalytic theories. The essay at Mediate.com, The Psychology of Mediation: The Mediator’s Issues Of Self And Identity, summarizes the first part of her longer academic paper of the same name. It places the tendency to cling to pre-established positions and demands in the context of human personality while also offering specific strategies for managing the problem during mediation.

To simplify drastically, she describes the ways in which many individuals grow up with a damaged sense of self. Instead of dealing with people from an integral and secure self-awareness, they have vulnerabilities, perhaps shame, that drive them to strengthen their sense of identity externally in careers or relationships. This can lead to confusing one’s own identity with the integrity of a position they bring to the negotiating table. It’s not just an issue. It’s become part of who they are.

That reality can prompt them to present themselves to the group aggressively and with an exaggerated sense of their own power. Their positions may come across as absolute demands, and they can appear intractable from the outset. Considering alternative ideas for resolving an issue – one based on the needs of everyone in the group – is the last thing they’re interested in. That process might be too threatening to their personal identity and provoke aggressive and disruptive behavior.

Bader seens this phase of inflated expectations as the first part of a cycle that hopefully moves beyond this personality-based imbalance. The mediator, or perhaps interaction with other members of the group, needs to bring such a person around to see that meeting the initial expectations isn’t going to happen.

They have to separate themselves from their rigid position and look at the situation more realistically as one that includes the interests of many parties, all of whom have to be dealt with. Bader refers to this realization as deflation. It marks the moment of letting go the original demands and becoming open to new options. Resolution of the issues can then take place. She calls this the IDR cycle referring to these successive states of inflation, deflation and realistic resolution.

A critical role for the mediator or facilitator is to provide a supportive presence that helps a participant separate self-identity from the issues. An effective method is to mirror back to a participant the content of their communication and thus assure the individual of a respectful and understanding response. That support helps reduce the perception of threat from the group, a perception that often leads to aggressive and disruptive behavior.

To provide that support, mediators need to be sensitive to these tendencies in their own interactions with a group. Inevitably, some participants press a mediator’s buttons and stir reactions relating to purely personal emotional history. The important thing is to be able to recognize what’s happening, let go of those associations with personal identity and focus on the moment of the group’s needs. She recommends the practice of meditation and mindfulness to cultivate this ability.

Her paper is full of valuable insights – which I’ve only touched on here – and it’s an important resource for its practical advice. Personal identity, though, is only one important way of understanding resistance to collaborative decision-making.

Confirmation Bias

William Eggers and John O’Leary examine evidence from neuroscience that helps explain the blindness of highly rational people to information that contradicts a course of action they’ve already decided on. This is one part of their extraordinary study of government efforts to solve major problems, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon

They call it the Tolstoy Trap, the resistance to accepting or trusting information that disproves what people already firmly believe to be true. Their vivid writing reviews many failed government policies that resulted, at least in part, from the refusal to pay attention to evidence contradicting an action the leadership already believed in. These critical mistakes range from the Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s to price controls for fighting inflation in the 1970s, the Challenger disaster of the 1980s and many more.

Everyone uses a cognitive filter to sift through new information, often to find the facts to support what they believe. That’s why a consensus building group may find members drawing exactly opposite conclusions from the same data. Where one might find confirmation of the value of public health care services, another can find only evidence of bureaucratic blundering and inefficiency. One member may see proof for the perfect solution to a water supply problem, another may read in the same data a government invasion of private rights.

This is a phenomenon that’s been well known for centuries, but evidence from neuroscience has recently mapped the specific brain areas involved in this process of selective response – also called motivated reasoning. These studies bring out the role of emotion in shaping interpretation.

One study by Drew Westen and others (downloadable here at note 26) gave both positive and negative information about 2004 presidential candidates to committed partisans. As information was being evaluated, neuroimaging indicated that regions of the brain associated with rational analysis were inactive and only emotion-related areas were busy with the problem.

Partisans also applied disparate standards for evaluating information. They readily accepted supportive evidence for a favored candidate, but the threatening evidence favorable to the opponent was subjected to a much stricter test and easily discredited. The conclusion was that a distinctive form of reasoning comes into play when there is a strong emotional stake in the outcome. There is an emotional need to have an existing belief confirmed.

Like many mediators and facilitators, I’ve often heard the force of this emotional dimension when inflexible participants respond to technical information. The next question is what to do about it.

Most of the suggestions offered by Eggers and O’Leary are already used in interest-based consensus building and mediation. They recommend, for example, such steps as building agreement on data prior to consideration of issues, beefing up the option-generating process, and strict use of scientific principles in analyzing information. These are sound ideas but assume that more rational analysis will persuade people who are not responding to that mental model. They also suggest role plays that ask participants to advocate positions they oppose, and that seems more promising, as it gets to the evocative aspects of persuasion.

Another approach might be to start working with stakeholders before any proposals are formulated or collaborative groups are convened. As the Open Government websites at federal agencies are now doing, stakeholders and members of the public can be asked for ideas on possible approaches. A transparent process involving exchanges among stakeholders, including agency staff, could then be used to refine and synthesize the full range of suggestions into practical options. A diverse stakeholder group could be convened at that point strictly to review the appropriate data and technical methods that would be used to analyze the feasibility of each option. Recommending proposals or making decisions would thus be separated from these earlier phases. It’s the prospect of an imminent decision that immediately raises the stakes and intensifies the emotional propensity of advocates to interpret information in distorted ways.

There are a lot of other ideas about why people resist changing their views, and I’ll discuss more of them in the next post. After that, I’ll pull together a resource list of the methods suggested by each of these approaches.

What are the techniques you believe are most effective?

Related posts:

1. Mediating on Two Tracks: the Rational and the Rest of Human Nature

The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative may well be an historic step forward in meeting the goals of transparency, participation and collaboration. But the way these goals are being translated into practice – and evaluated – at least in this early phase, makes me wonder if the initiative will lead to greater accountability and trust in government.

Trust is not so much a feeling as a measured confidence in the reliability of a relationship, a confidence developed over time by fair and open behavior as well as fulfilled commitments. At a public institutional level trust can’t depend on the goodwill and promises of today’s agency leadership but has to be reflected in day to day operations and interactions with all levels of staff over time. The delivery of concrete benefits is one crucial purpose of Open Government policies, but the long-term changes in culture and procedure are what set the groundwork for trust and productive collaboration.

As this NextGov post reports, internal government factors, such as cultural resistance of some federal employees, can impede early progress. An initiative toward greater openness across the vast federal bureaucracy can’t happen overnight. Yet results tend to be measured only by immediate changes. (For example, have a look at this Washington Post article as well as this one and the White House response.)

Many fear that government agencies could look at the initiative as an exercise in check-list compliance and so rely at times on quick scorecard evaluation. That’s understandable since the public is a long way from trusting the government to meet the promise of openness, and many in government don’t trust the public to get any closer to decision-making than they already are. Given that reality, check-list and scorecard seem the only reliable ways to measure progress. But both keep the focus on details of short-term action rather than deeper and more lasting change.

But there are alternatives. K. D. Payne, for example, uses much more comprehensive methods of measuring transparency and trust relating to open government, summarized in this post. She also discusses the research of Brad Rawlins and his paper, Measuring the Relationship Between Organizational Transparency and Trust.

The underlying change that can lead to greater trust as well as concrete results is just as much about values and process as immediate delivery of benefits. As stated in the Open Government Progress Report, a major purpose of the Open Government Directive is to “instill the values of transparency, participation, and collaboration into the culture of every agency.” The Directive is intended to “hardwire accountability” into the structure and processes of federal agencies.

But the approach to hardwiring leaves a lot to be desired if the goal really is to go beyond short-term accomplishments and achieve a new default behavior built on openness and accountability. I don’t underestimate the difficulty of creating any long-term change in Washington. The intense pressure of politics and 24-hour media coverage constantly push for the quick turnaround. Nevertheless, lasting changes of default behavior have been achieved. For example, environmental review and public participation, despite short-comings, became the norms of federal decision-making over decades of increasing institutionalization.

The Open Government Directive has a very imbalanced way of beginning this process. It puts transparency about data far ahead of the other values of participation and collaboration. The latter seem to await definition through each agency’s Open Government Plan, but all the attention up front and the early standards of measuring progress are about data. Not only is there an imbalance in implementation, there is also an overly limited working definition of each of these three values and the practices based on them.

The Administration describes its approach to the three in these quotes from the Open Government Progress Report:

Transparency promotes accountability by providing citizens with information about what their government is doing and by putting government data online.
…..
Greater access to information about how the government does its work, drives greater citizen participation. This Administration’s commitment to public participation is based on the simple notion that many of the best ideas come from outside of Washington.
…..
While participation brings information to government so that officials can make more informed policy decisions, collaboration focuses on finding innovative strategies for solving challenges.

It’s certainly important to achieve all three as stated in this way. But transparency involves a lot more than publishing data, participation more than getting ideas from the public and collaboration more than coming up with innovative strategies for solving problems.

Let’s take the principle of transparency since that is the primary focus of the initiative at this point. Data sets are a start but not enough to achieve accountability. To quote from Brad Rawlin’s research:

Therefore, transparency is defined as having these three important elements: information that is truthful, substantial, and useful; participation of stakeholders in identifying the information they need; and objective, balanced reporting of an organization’s activities and policies that holds the organization accountable.
…..

Transparency cannot meet the needs of the stakeholders unless public agencies know what they need. Therefore, stakeholder participation elevates disclosure to transparency. Stakeholders must be invited to participate in identifying the information they need to make accurate decisions.

Transparency also requires accountability. Transparent organizations are accountable for their actions, words, and decisions, because these are available for others to see and evaluate. It requires that persons in transparent organizations contemplate their decisions and behaviors, because they will most likely have to justify them before an open court of opinion.

The Administration has a long way to go in achieving transparency in this larger sense, but this is what’s necessary to build public trust in government. It may be far more than anyone can expect, given the constant barrage of crises the White House has to deal with. But the Open Government documents themselves have created high expectations, and, if they can be met, a collaborative approach to public decisions could become the new standard.

Related posts:

1. Ideas for Implementing the Open Government Directive

The real test of a collaborative agreement only begins when the changes it requires hit the streets. That’s when it gets personal. Carrying out an agreement usually means that particular people will have to do things differently, pay costs they’re not used to paying, live with new restrictions, new requirements.

The negative side of change is often the first to be noticed, even if an agreement’s hoped-for benefits have been well-publicized. They may look fine on paper but quite different when change comes knocking on the door.

Half a century ago, Eric Hoffer wrote in The Ordeal of Change:

We can never be wholly prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

That’s especially relevant when it comes to implementing a collaborative agreement. Every collaborative leader and practitioner works hard to ensure that all the interest groups necessary to produce and support an agreement are in the room.

Even processes that are well designed can’t possibly include everyone. Representation is not a perfect system. There is a wider public and there are operational staff within implementing organizations who haven’t been in the loop. They may hear of it only during or after formal adoption. Even if they’ve heard of it, the potential impact may not have been clear.

The first test of implementation takes place inside the very organization(s) charged with turning its provisions into actions. Those actions may require changes in the way staff and managers do their work. They may have to master new skills, new procedures, new goals and metrics to measure progress. That can look risky to both career prospects and professional self-esteem. And fears at that level will likely trigger resistance to change.

As noted in the earlier post, resistance is often considered an irrational obstacle to implementing new ideas and methods. There is likely a group ready to embrace the changes; they “understand.” The resisters “don’t get it” and stubbornly cling to their familiar ways.

What is often overlooked, however, is that those in favor of the change also have an emotional response. Instead of feeling fearful and threatened, they feel empowered and excited. In both cases, what happens is that people personalize the change. They favor or oppose it by imagining what it will mean for their own lives and jobs.

Marketers and politicians, among many others, have long understood that people don’t accept something new simply because they hear a list of excellent reasons. They have to be moved to act in a new way. When it comes to accepting the changes called for by new policies, both the staff charged with carrying them out and the members of affected communities need to translate the abstractions they hear into specific ways their daily personal and work lives might have to change.

Yet responses by leadership to emotional resistance usually rely on efforts to educate, to provide additional information to persuade the skeptics. That’s a rational strategy. It assumes that if each individual grasps the benefits, which seem obvious to those who support the new agreement, they should understand how their interests will be met and their situation improved, despite certain trade-offs that might be necessary.

It’s also assumed that emotion is a negative that clouds judgment. Reason should prevail through a calm appraisal of the pro’s and con’s. Emotion needs to be vented, gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. They are matters of individual adjustment.

If the change is deep enough, those assumptions don’t capture the reality. There are several dimensions that will not be touched by additional information and education.

• Emotion and reason are not good or bad. They are different ways of evaluating experience. Emotional responses indicate not only the intensity and hence importance of the concern. They also are signals about basic values that shape daily life. And as noted above, they are a principal means by which individuals internalize and make sense of impending change.

• Emotions are not entirely internal to individuals. People react on a feeling level to an event or perception of some kind and look to others experiencing the same thing for validation of that personal reaction. If you learn that most of the other staff in your program or neighbors in your community or whatever type of group you’re part of may share the same feeling you do, it’s a great relief. In that sense, emotional responses are highly social and are legitimized by being shared.

• One of the realities that is often forgotten in the push to carry out the terms of an agreement is that whatever change it requires is experienced in a broad context of other, unrelated shifts that are taking place at the same time. If the cumulative effect makes life or work harder, the latest change might be experienced as the last straw. Future benefits may not materialize, but I’m paying yet another price in the here and now.

So what to do?

• Start by recognize the legitimate feelings of the opposition – and show understanding of the larger context of change that is also putting pressure on them. Demonstrating that understanding lets people know you want to be responsive to the impacts they face.

• Take a collaborative approach in figuring out how to proceed from this point. Those who believe they’ll be harmed need to have a chance to communicate exactly what they’re concerned about and know that they’re really being listened to. If the response is more one-way flows of information to show how mistaken they are, that may only increase the frustration. They’ll believe they’re not being heard, and the divide between adopters and resisters will be reinforced.

• Create a forum to allow the expression of the fears of loss related to specific changes but then go beyond that to elicit ideas for action that respond to those concerns. This may well require the help of a facilitator trained in the many methods for working in this context. They will know how to structure and conduct meetings of this type to produce positive outcomes.

• To build on those results provide learning opportunities on how to put new ideas for action into practice. Organizational staff need training and/or mentoring tied to their specific assignments and assurance that they’ll be given adequate time and opportunity to master new skills. Community members need hands-on workshops close to home that give them a chance to learn step by step what they can do to carry out the ideas they’ve helped develop.

There is no way to accommodate everyone’s needs or respond to every concern. But there are ways to address the ones that are widely shared. Publicity campaigns and testimonials won’t do it. Responsive collaboration during implementation can make a positive contribution.

In the previous post in this series, I discussed the concept of the public as a network comprised of interrelated groups, some focused on private interests, some focused on larger community concerns or institutions. The approach to public involvement that definition suggests is a collaborative one that draws citizens into the early stages of formulating policies and plans. At its best, such an approach provides the incentives for collaboration pointed out by Charles Leadbeater.

1. Neutral Space: The convening agency provides a location and structure to facilitate the process, but sets the meetings in a neutral environment separate from agency control. This is a safer, less intimidating space that helps foster active contributions from participants.

2. Equal Voice: The convening agency provides a central goal to focus efforts but doesn’t try to control the flow of ideas. Participants get equal time to explain their views. There is no hierarchy within the process that might inhibit dialogue.

3. Recognition: The experience offers recognition for the contributions of individuals and fosters a sense of meaningful involvement in helping to reach the goal.

4. Creativity and Dialogue: The structure facilitates free interaction and honest dialogue among people with diverse points of view and values. This stimulates creativity as new ideas emerge from multiple perspectives on how to address the issue.

5. Decision-Making: As Leadbeater points out, creativity alone does not produce a clear result or product. The ideas and options have to become part of decision-making, and this is the critical role of the convening agency. It needs to make a commitment to use the ideas generated by the public as it makes decisions. It needs to be clear to participants that their contributions are actually helping shape the agency’s policies and plans. That’s the point of the whole effort and the primary incentive for citizen involvement.

Looking at current public participation methods with these conditions in mind, it becomes clear that many of them are not intended to reach this level of collaboration.

The typical public participation plan offers a menu of activities that fall into two major categories. There are, of course, many alternative ways of classifying these techniques, and this one may seem an oversimplification. However, I’m trying to emphasize this major distinction. One set of methods gives little opportunity to citizens to add real value to the decision process. The other encourages a creative interaction that adds considerable value to the formulation of policies and decisions.

Informational Methods

Sending information to the public:

• Publications & presentations
• Websites
• Mailing lists
• Open houses
• Document depositories
• Tours

Gathering input from the public

• Surveys
• Hearings
• Written comment forms
• “Hot lines”
• Scoping meetings
• Interviews

Collaborative Methods

• Workshops
• Planning Charettes
• Focus groups
• Advisory committees
• Joint Fact Finding
• Consensus Building

The group of informational techniques – whether the flow is from agency to public or the reverse – can hardly be called participative. Even though a convening agency may commit to consideration of ideas received through commenting, each is treated as the concern of one individual and receives some form of isolated response – or a response that deals with a group of similar comments. What the public gets back, as a means of acknowledging that the ideas have been considered, is a listing and explanation of those responses, in other words, a document for passive consumption. That’s usually the end of the process. There is no attempt at engagement and interaction that could lead to a more creative exploration of public concerns.

The premise, at least as communicated to citizens, is that public contributions have little value to add in developing a plan or decision. In addition to fulfilling legal requirements for public participation, this form of input signals the agency if its project might be raising red flags and potentially serious opposition. At a basic level, the agency is looking for indications of consent or opposition. From a public perspective, there is not a lot of incentive to invest much time except for the purpose of adding comments to the public record.

I need to emphasize that this approach may be completely appropriate and not result from any ill intent on the part of an agency. It may be the best that can be done, given constraints on time and resources. The plans or decisions in question may stem from emergency situations that demand the fastest possible response. They might also be required under court order to be completed according to an imposed timetable. Or an agency might be responding to directives from a legislative body or chief executive, over which it has no control. There are many reasons why more resource and time-intensive collaborative approaches might simply be out of the question.

If they can be used, the collaborative techniques present a much richer opportunity. From the public’s viewpoint, they have incentive to engage actively in the knowledge that their contributions will have a meaningful place in decision-making. For its part, the agency can gain considerable value from bringing diverse interests together for interaction and dialogue.

By having this level of engagement early on, there is not only the possibility for generating potential solutions that might not otherwise have come to light but also a greater likelihood that a decision will have a broad base of support in the community. The agency also recognizes that the public can be a helpful partner in shaping policy.



Related posts:

1. The Wisdom of Crowds, Collaborative Networks & Public Policy
2. Who’s the Public? Two Views
3. Who’s the Public in Public Involvement?
]]> http://www.crosscollaborate.com/2009/06/whos-the-public-how-should-they-participate/feed/ 0