Preface
How this book came to be
Think about the last time you tried to have a serious conversation with someone who didn’t already agree with you. How well did it go?
What if you could step into situations where political, social, and environmental issues have gotten people stuck? What if, in difficult conversations, you could stay true to yourself while strengthening your relationships and creating powerful new ideas and results?
Laura, a college senior, heads to the seaside for a last hurrah with her friends. Together, they’ll bring a beautiful close to their four years of school and celebrate their upcoming graduation. On day three at the beach, one of her friends says he doesn’t believe the science on global warming. She gasps in disbelief and berates him. The next three days are awkward for everyone. Later, stepping back, she realizes that her approach harmed the relationship and didn’t convince anyone to think differently. She apologizes to her friend, but she also shares a fuller range of her thoughts and feelings about climate change. The new conversation restores their relationship and creates an opening for her friend to reconsider the issue.
Kevin, a young business development manager, is working for a fast-growing renewable energy technology company. He encounters a new idea that inspires him—and could transform the whole industry. Full of passion and energy, he runs straight to the office of the new CEO, a former venture capitalist brought in by new owners of the company. Kevin gives what he thinks is the most compelling pitch of his life. Gradually he sees in the cold expression on the CEO’s face that something is terribly amiss. He flails for a minute, recognizes he’s no longer welcome, and quietly backs away. He feels rejected and begins to consider whether this is an appropriate company for him anymore. After a period of reflection, he realizes that he didn’t take the time to make his idea relevant to the CEO’s own concerns or his language of financial return. His revised pitch works. The company launches a new service model that rapidly accelerates renewable energy adoption across the world.
Passionate about healthy living, Michaela repeatedly cajoles her mother to address her obesity. Every time, the conversation escalates into nagging, fights, and disappointment. Michaela realizes that her own antagonistic stance may be contributing to the problem. She shifts gears and acknowledges that she has been more interested in being right than in being helpful. She takes her mother to the grocery store and they plan meals together. They enjoy three dinners together in the same week after not eating together for more than a year.
Stories like these aren’t the norm. All too often, our well-meaning attempts to drive our agendas forward can get stuck in the noisy traffic jam of competing ideas, priorities, and ideologies. It is rare that we break through gridlock and produce the results we really want for ourselves, our relationships, and our world—but sometimes we do. We love these stories about the power of conversation to make a better world. We wrote this book because we want more of them, and we have ways to help.
Our journey
This book began as a collection of our own stories, reflection, learning, and experimentation. Both of us have taken on crusades for a better world, in roles as student activists, organizational consultants, and university teachers. Along the way we missed opportunities for productive engagement, and we created collateral damage with our families and colleagues. Sometimes we resolved that damage, but other times we just got stuck, amplifying the polarization around political, social, and environmental issues.
As time has gone on, we have learned together how to turn around these situations into important successes and we’ve been invited to help others do the same. Jason has worked with senior leaders in a wide variety of companies like Biogen, Bose, and Lockheed Martin to help overcome internal barriers and advance their sustainability strategies. At a top-tier business school, MIT Sloan, he elevated the Sustainability Initiative from a small, passionate group of students and faculty to a strategic cornerstone for the school. He has inspired hundreds of students at MIT Sloan to care about sustainability and make it part of their careers. Gabriel has built coalitions to protect the environment in conservative institutions and has developed communities of change leaders within and beyond the American heartland through the creation of Byron Fellowship. He has led trainings for corporate leaders in partnership with organizations like PwC, Starbucks, Whole Foods, New Belgium, Sustainable Brands, Retail Industry Leaders of America, and GreenBiz.
In the beginning, we publicly reflected on our own experiences—where we succeeded and where we fell flat. People asked us for “the curriculum,” so we made one. We began running workshops about having authentic conversations when people don’t agree and going beyond “preaching to the choir” on issues of sustainability and social justice. We developed the methodology within our own teaching, and we made the work available to others. This curriculum has been incorporated into courses at a number of universities, such as Cornell and the University of Michigan, by colleagues who demonstrated that our success was teachable and replicable. And we’ve been invited to work inside organizations and to provide training for sustainability professionals including vice presidents or directors from more than 150 major brands. Together, we’ve coached about two thousand sustainability champions.
Our workshop participants range from young activists to seasoned leaders, from undergraduates to corporate executives. Through the experiences they generously share, we gain a unique window into the pitfalls of advocacy. We also learn their stories of success, how people find pathways through gridlock and polarization toward understanding, agreement, and creative action. While our work started with a focus on environmental advocacy, it has grown to support a range of broader “progressive” movements for sustainability, social justice, and public health.
If there is one fundamental insight in our work, it is that there is no script, no set of talking points that will move our agendas forward. Getting a “stuck conversation” unstuck is not about finding “the right thing to say” but about making a more fundamental shift—a shift in who we are being. Polarization and gridlock persist when people clutch onto fixed perspectives, fixed ways of thinking and being in the world. People break through when they free themselves up and expand their thought and action repertoire. They get in touch with the future they really want to create, and they create a stance and way of being that is aligned with that future. From there, the words and conversations flow naturally. Through this process, we can navigate artfully in unexplored territory. We can respond authentically to people’s resistance. We can be consistent with our values while exploring new ideas that emerge out of the tension with others’ values. When we fumble, we can re-engage and keep the conversation going forward.
This is not a book about gridlock in the way we typically talk about it, as an abstract phenomenon somewhere out there in the world. Yes, it is relevant to our political gridlock and polarization, where dialogue rarely occurs among people with different ideologies and party affiliations. Yes, it is relevant to organizational or bureaucratic gridlock, where people with different priorities and agendas struggle to find alignment and take action. In all these cases, breaking through gridlock begins in a conversation. And we’ve discovered your best training can be in your most intimate moments of getting stuck—at the dinner table or a holiday gathering.
A note on our language
In some cases, “they” is intentionally used as a singular pronoun to promote the use of inclusive language.