Peacekeeping

There is a perennial debate among facilitators about voting during collaborative process. Most of them do not like the idea of using voting to select the final plan of action. The debate is about whether voting has any place – whether voting fits with our process values about how we treat evidence, inference, and one another. For a long time I never understood the passion of the no-voting-never-ever-not-even-to-take-the-group-pulse faction. We live in a democracy. How could voting be a bad thing?

Then I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This is a novel about a family of missionaries serving in the Belgian Congo before and during the transition of the Congo from colony to democracy. However, the natives of the town where they are serving don’t understand this democracy idea. How can anyone do a good job of ruling a people when 49% of them voted against you? This changed forever my view of the role of voting in coming to consensus.

It’s easy to understand why so many facilitators like voting. Without some form of voting, there is no easy process, no quick steps, for coming to consensus. That’s why it can take days to come to consensus on what to do with the output of a 15-minute brainstorm. However, there are a few ways of approaching consensus that can help. One of my favorites is peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping is a way of looking at consensus that is used by the Navajo nation in Arizona and New Mexico. I was taught this method by Emmett Curly during a dinner discussion. “Taught” may be too strong a word. The native way of conversing is not the western way, so I will try to tell the story in the native way.

On a 2015 trip to the Navajo and Hopi reservations, led by staff from the Grand Canyon Trust, we had an opportunity to listen to Emmett Curly talk about his work with the low-profit, limited-liability corporations (L3C) initiative – an initiative intended to obtain investment for Navajo-centered, environmentally- and culturally-responsible development in the area recently opened up by the repeal of the Bennett Freeze.

I think most of us were expecting an examination of the L3C concept, criteria for responsible development, expected economic impact for the affected chapter houses, maybe even a list of potential projects and investors. We were expecting Western details about the things Anglos care about.

What we got instead was an old Indian talking for over a half an hour, telling us a rambling story about growing up Navajo in the off-reservation oil fields where his father worked. He talked about being an outsider in the Anglo schools, and how, whenever he started to make friends, his father would have to move the family to another place, another oil field, another job and another school, and Emmett would have to start all over again. Eventually he gave up trying.

He talked about being invited with his father to the fancy homes of the managers and owners of the oil fields. He talked about the clothes and possessions of the other children in his schools. He talked about the nice neighborhoods he could see and walk through but could not live in. He talked about going to boarding school. He talked about going back to the reservation, and how it felt like coming home. If we were listening with Western, Anglo ears, it was hard to align the details of what years he spent changing schools and what years he was in boarding school and when he came back to the reservation.

We never got any of the details of the work of the L3C. But, if we were listening with other ears, when he was done, we knew why the work was important to him and why it should be important to us. We knew why he said, “I learned that there were different kinds of people. Up here are the affluent people. Below them are the middle class. Below them are the poor people, and below the poor people are the Navajo.”

Then I asked him a question about tribal councils. Not an Anglo question. After listening to him, I had on my other ears. I told him my story. I told him how I had studied and practiced leading groups through a process of dialogue, and how many of the practices and values I used were ideas I had learned from studying action research. I told him how, when I learned that action research was first articulated by John Collier of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), I had assumed that it was a technique that Collier had invented to help solve the problems of the native peoples the BIA was responsible for. Hosteen Curly actually knew John Collier and knew what I was talking about.

Then I told him how, as I learned about native practices and the Indian ways of governing, I came to understand that Collier did not invent action research, he learned it from the peoples, tribes, and nations that he worked with. Then I asked Hosteen Curly if I got it right. That is when he talked about Coyote.

Coyote is known for his wisdom and cunning. But Coyote is also a trickster: a joker who takes very little seriously, and will trip you up if you take yourself too seriously. And that is a paradox. In one creature, in one Being, in one Ideal Form, exists both the serious and the playful, the sober and the joker.

Then Hosteen Curly told us about peacekeeping, the Navajo process of coming to decisions. In any group of 20, Hosteen Curly told us, you will probably have 30 or 40 ideas. But if you listen to the stories, with the right kind of ears, the ideas usually sort themselves out into four major themes. And if you play with those themes, you will find that two align on one side and two on the other. And if you continue to talk and listen and share, you find that those two pairs of ideas represent forces in opposition that must be brought into balance. You find, in the center of the four ideas, the paradox that includes all the issues, all the forces.

You find Coyote. And that is when you can find an answer that everyone can get behind. Peace can never be found when you just list the ideas and take a vote, when you require everyone to take a position in favor of one force or the other. That way leads to half the people being alienated, trying to implement a solution with only half the people committed to making it work, and the forces remaining out of balance.

One of the best things we can do as facilitators of process values is Coyote Listening. Then we are ready to take our part in the peace keeping.

Next week we will start our May series on the process values of a Buddhist tradition.