I watched a TV news item recently where Govt bureaucrats were engaging with farmers on the Darling River about water allocation. It looked a bit confrontational and unsatisfactory, with several seemingly intractable positions.

I was reminded of this yesterday at the Festival of Dangerous ideas, in Megan Phelp’s-Roper’s conversation (“Love your Enemy”) about how kindness and conversation had a transformational impact on her life.

I was struck by her comment on the really dangerous ideas in our civil discourse- things like blinding certainty and dogma, and wondered how useful her insights might be in the challenges of attempting collaborative conversations with “difficult people” around some of the major water challenges like the Murray Darling Basin.

Briefly Megan’s story focuses on how she shifted from an entrenched religious position to leaving her church and now advocating for change in how people engage- from zealotry to an anti extremism educator- see her TED talk here 

 While I’m not advocating that we need such extreme conversion in the situations facing water planners, it did seem that a lot of the same elements Megan faced are evident in our conversations internally and externally as we face difficult and complex situations, particularly when positions are a bit entrenched:

  • knowing and certainty
  • being right
  • telling not asking
  • fear of others views
  • one view
  • blaming others

and seemed to me that some of what Megan experienced in her transformation can give us great clues about different ways of behaving when we face those “difficult” people:

  • learn my story, understand theirs
  • listening is not agreeing
  • assume good intent
  • disagree without demonising
  • show empathy and kindness
  • be generous and show gratitude
  • it’s OK to take in new ideas and maybe change your mind

In the twitter conversations that helped shift Megan, she noticed others using four small but powerful steps that made real conversation possible:

  • don’t assume bad intent- they believe it
  • ask questions- hear them
  • be patient- pause, breath, then come back later
  • make the argument- if we want change, we must make the case for it

Perhaps a bit of love is not such a dangerous idea.