Think about the last time you tried to have a conversation with someone you didn't already agree with. Maybe it was about, I don't know, voting in an election. Increasing the diversity of your team, trash and recycling, whatever it was.
Your blood is boiling. There's some place that you want to go with the other person, but you just can't seem to get there. Now, we're all friends here.
You know, in that moment, what are you thinking and feeling about the other person that you might not say aloud? My friend Gabriel Grant and I have run workshops with more than 2,000 people. And we've asked that question using an anonymous polling technology.
And here are some typical responses that we've gotten. You don't care, do you? I'm right, you're wrong.
She can't see the evidence. He's an idiot. You're so closed-minded. How could we be related? Does this sound familiar?
What do we do about those people on the other side? Because you know that we have to. It's a polarized world. Everyone's taking sides.
Everyone's got an opinion. It's climate change or coal jobs. Build a wall or open the gates. So many of the big issues we face right now are stuck in a kind of gridlock.
And sometimes we see that gridlock out there on C-SPAN. Other times it's right across the table. Thank you. How do we bring our conversations back to life?
I think that we need a new way to think about these types of conversations. When things get polarized, we can get zapped. And we can experience this as a kind of dilemma. Like either I keep the peace, but I stall out on an issue I care about, or I raise my voice and I put myself and the relationship at risk.
What if instead we could see this polarization as a kind of energy, creative energy, energy for action? What if we could make conversation really come alive? Think of a situation where you have someone where, you know, the relationship matters to you.
You care about their actions, their decisions, their opinions, their feelings. Could be a colleague, a neighbor, a family member, a friend. And, but there's some issue where you've gotten stuck.
What would be possible for you if you could really make that conversation come alive? What would be possible for them? For us?
For all of us? For our nation? Because if you think about it, what is a nation but a tapestry of conversations?
Now, I should say, I have stumbled into this topic. You know, I don't work in Washington, D.C., bringing politicians together across the lines. I'm not forced into difficult conversations because of my identity. As a straight, cis, white man, I get to hide from a lot.
My job is to educate business leaders at MIT. But we teach them how to use the skills of business to tackle big social and environmental problems. And it turns out that the tools you can use to talk to a skeptical CFO or customer about climate change might just be the tools that we need to heal our democracy. Now let me take you back for a moment to 2006. I'm a graduate student and I was an environmental activist. And, you know, we were organizing a student group for sustainability at MIT.
We wrote letters, we got signatures. on a petition. One night, we cornered the president of MIT on our bicycles, and we said, you should take sustainability more seriously. We saw ourselves as the righteous ones. You know, we were fighting the power of the MIT administration and those big, bad fossil fuel companies funding them.
The trouble was that we weren't quite getting where we wanted to go. We got meetings, but no promises. For every push, we'd get a push back. And we started to wonder if we needed a new approach.
And then I met... Elsa Olivetti. She was a grad student.
We were in a meeting with some MIT administrators. And like me, she was passionate about the environment, but it was clear that she had the ear of the administrators in a different way. And at one point in the meeting, she said, Jason, it seems like your approach here is someone should do something, or we're here to tell you what you should do. My approach has always been, we're here to help.
That gave me pause. I kind of tensed up. And I realized a couple things.
You know, one is, I wasn't seeing things from their perspective. I was asking them to do all the work, when in fact we all needed each other. And I had to let go of something if we were going to move forward.
I had to let go of feeling right and righteous and certain about our agenda, of feeling safe among our allies yelling from the sidelines. These worked for me like a kind of bait, and they kept me stuck. And, but I was ready to get unstuck.
So just for the moment in that meeting, I took a deep breath. And I let it go and I took on this approach like we're here to help. And almost immediately, the tone of the conversation shifted. We got into action.
We focused on what students could do, mapping campus energy use, brewing biodiesel. And the administration also stepped up. You know, launched a task force, invested in campus sustainability because now we were allies.
And we unleashed a wave of creativity and innovation. Because when we let go, we get going. Now, this idea of bait, you know, other people have looked at this.
And Harvard psychologists Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy, they talk about this as our hidden competing commitments. So, yeah, we're committed to moving forward. on some issue that we care about.
But we also have these hidden competing commitments to preserving a sense of ourselves as right and righteous, to maintaining that feeling of certainty and safety. And so, we stay stuck. We all stay stuck. Think about how much benefit we get from polarization.
Think of all the great comments you get on your Facebook feeds or your Twitter stream when you, you know, from people on your side, when you get in a good jab against the other side, right? Politicians love to fire up their base, but so do we. The challenge is that, you know, signaling our allegiance to our side, it doesn't solve problems. It doesn't generate new ideas.
It doesn't design and test policy. To do that, we have to let go of the bait and start listening to other people's perspectives. And when we do that, we can start to find out what they're holding on to.
And here, another concept becomes really useful, this time from behavioral economics. It's called loss aversion. Scores of experiments have shown that we focus on what we have to lose.
We'd rather miss out on a $100 payoff than give up the $50 we already have in our pocket. The reason you might resist my environmental... agenda isn't because you don't care about your children or about the polar bears or about the polar bears children. It's that my environmental tax might cost you hard-earned money.
My regulation might cost your flexibility, your freedom. My green cleaning product might leave mildew on your shower tile. And so if I'm asking you to give up on something that you value, that you care about for what I'm offering, then there's no deal. No matter how self-righteous and noisy I can get.
But if instead we listen for what other people value, and we take it seriously, we can generate new ideas that neither of us could have thought of alone. So let me offer a metaphor. Think about buying a car.
Five years ago, if I said to you, I've got this great car to sell you. It's energy efficient. You'll save money on gas.
You'll reduce your carbon footprint. You might have pushed back and said, yeah, but isn't that going to be a little... slow off the starting block.
You know, I got places to go. I can't be late. And if you bought that SUV or that sports car, I would judge you mercilessly from the comfort of my holy Toyota Prius.
But now think about the next generation electric car companies. Tesla, BMW, Chevy. What they're saying is, well, we're actually going to take both of these concerns seriously, power and environment. And you might think you have to make that trade-off, but actually, here's a car that has the power and acceleration of a luxury sports sedan and the footprint of that Prius. They're not asking us to let go of our desire for a nice, powerful car.
They're asking us to let go of our fear of the trade-off. And it turns out that there is a tool that you can use to take conversations in that kind of a direction. We call it transformative contrasting.
Sometimes when conversations get really polarized, you have to draw a contrast between what they expect of you and what you're there to do. Between the trade-off they fear that they'll have to make and the new possibilities that you're there to open. Think about the National Organization on Disability, the NOD. They are known for creating the American Disabilities Act. And they would run into so many businesses who would say, oh, geez, the ADA.
It cost me so much money to build those wheelchair ramps. so much red tape. The businesses were focused on what they had to lose.
So the NOD started creating a different kind of conversation. They said to businesses, they said, look, given your past experience, you you might expect us to get stuck with being righteous and certain about our agenda. And you might think that I'm going to pursue solutions that force us into a trade-off, increase your costs, increase the hassle of building or maintaining your facility.
But that's not what we're here to do. What we want to do is... We want to help you increase the value of your business by attracting talent that you couldn't have attracted before among populations that wouldn't have been able to work where you in your facility and and in the process we want to try to So let's work together to break those real or perceived trade-offs.
And this approach has worked. The NOD has now worked with companies like Lowe's and Starbucks to increase access to talent. by creating accessible workplaces, and increase employee engagement across the board and community goodwill, strengthening the businesses in ways they hadn't anticipated. And so now you could imagine there's some businesses that weren't on board with the more activist agenda now suddenly have the most to gain from working with the NOD. So we've brought this transformative contrasting approach to friends in industry.
So let's say that I've got a... mutual fund of socially and environmentally responsible companies. It'll be great. You can feel good about your investments.
And then you'll say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Isn't that going to slow the growth of my retirement fund? Our friends Sean and Rob work for a big investment management firm called MFS, and they were running into exactly this challenge.
Investors were saying, yeah, sorry, we can't do that socially responsible stuff. We have a duty to maximize our return. The door was closed.
And so they did some contrasting. They said, yeah, I get it. You're worried about that tradeoff, and you should be, because some past funds have made those tradeoffs, but that's not what we're here to do. What we want to do is manage the risk. risks of social and environmental disruption, harness the benefits of environmental technology, increase return while investing responsibly.
And that approach opened the doors, both inside the organization and with their clients. Now, again, these examples are with inside organizations or with customers. Could this really move our nation forward? I think it can, because a lot of the big social, environmental, economic issues we face, they show up in mundane, everyday ways with the people closest to us.
And that means that the power is in your hands. It's in all of our hands. So think of a conversation where you have gotten stuck with, you know, a person where the relationship matters to you and the issue matters to you. And notice that in that context, there's something that you're standing for. There's something that you want to have happen.
But you might also be holding on to that bait of being right. Righteous, certain, safe. Take a deep breath and locate the bait and let it go.
And then acknowledge what the other side values. Acknowledge the things they're worried about losing or giving up. Acknowledge the trade-offs they might fear.
And draw the contrast. Let them know that you're not there to trade off their values for yours. Help them let go of that concern. And then what becomes possible is that you can start inventing together. You can generate new ideas that neither of you could have thought of alone.
I know this approach works. My co-author and I have seen dozens of people break through gridlock in their immediate relationships and then build the confidence to step onto a wider stage. Because, you know, if you can talk to your boss or your neighbor or your uncle, you can talk to your city councilman or your congressperson. In fact, I believe that if we can get good at this, we can get our politicians and our business leaders to join our conversations.
We don't have to wait around for the next speech or tweet. We can figure out how to create living wage, healthcare for all, and a thriving economy. We can protect the climate and create good jobs.
We have to. Look around. It's up to us to create a new tapestry of conversations. One where we don't have to change each other's minds, we don't have to agree, but we do have to really engage with each other.
And if we can do that, we can go from being stuck to being unstoppable. And it just starts with a conversation. So let's get going.