Speaking Up

In colombia, the most violent country in the world, the status quo works for almost no one. In proportion to its population, Colombia has the highest number of murders and kidnappings in the world. It has a home-grown academic discipline called violentology. In the first half of the 1900s, it had two bloody civil wars, the second one called simply "The Violence." Since the 1960s it has suffered from an increasingly violent mess of conflicts among the military, drug traffickers, left-wing guerrilla armies, and right-wing paramilitary vigilantes. Yet Colombia has also elected civilian governments for all but 5 of its 185-year history, making it the longest- lasting democracy in Latin America. The country is, like many places, both a disaster and a wonder .

During 1996 and 1997, a team called "Destino Colombia" wanted to use the Mont Fleur approach to find a better way forward for their country. It was then, and as of this writing still is, the only time that all of the armed actors (except the drug traffickers)plus a diverse group of politicians , businesspeople, and representatives of civil societymet to talk with and listen to one another, and search for a way out of the violence.

We met three times, for ten days in all, at a lovely old farm called Recinto Quirama, in the rolling green hills outside of Medellin. We had the whole spread-out property to ourselves : a high-ceilinged barn for a meeting room, an open -air, cobbled floor dining room and bar, a swimming pool, and simple sleeping rooms surrounded by flower gardens. I arrived a day before the start of the first workshop and was amazed to find such tranquility in the midst of war. Then I went for a swim in the pool and emerged to find the pool surrounded by soldiers with machine guns, there to protect the participants in the meeting from attack.

The most remarkable feature of the project was the participation of both of the illegal, armed, left-wing guerrilla groups: the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (the National Liberation Army). Six months earlier, I had given a speech about Mont Fleur to a meeting in Bogot . It had been broadcast on shortwave radio so that FARC leaders hiding in the nearby mountains could listen. After I finished speaking, a cell phone rang. It was one of the FARC leaders calling to ask me a question: "Do we have to agree to a cease -fire in order to be able to attend the scenario workshops?" Everybody looked at me, and I gave an answer that I hoped was correct: "The only condition is to be willing to talk and listen." They said that they would come.

Although the government had offered them safe passage to the workshops, the guerrillas thought that this would be too risky, and so they participated by telephone. Three men called in from the political prisoners ' wing of the maximum security prison outside of Medellin, and one from an undisclosed hiding place in Costa Rica. This arrangement produced some surreal moments, such as when one of the guerrillas called in from a prison pay phone, saying that he only had enough coins for a few minutes but wanted to offer his input on one of the draft scenarios.

Most of the team members were excited and terrified because they were talking with the guerrillas for the first time. We communicated using two speakerphones in the meeting room. When people walked by the speakerphones, they gave them a wide berth, afraid to get too close. Some of the participants were frightened of retribution for what they might say to the guerrillas. When I mentioned this fear, one of the guerrillas replied, "Mr. Kahane, why are you surprised that people in the room are frightened? The whole country is frightened." Then the guerrillas promised they would not kill anyone for anything said in the meetings.

Once the threat of force had been removed, the team was able to agree to a set of ground rules for their conversations. They agreed to "call things by their name "; to express their differences without irony; to assume the good faith of others; to be tolerant, disciplined, and punctual; to be concrete and concise ; and to keep confidences. They were proud of these ground rules because they knew that in the midst of much lawlessness and violence, it was essential to construct a safe space for talking and listening.

Within this cocoon, relationships opened and deepened. During the breaks in the meetings, people now started to huddle around the speakerphones, continuing to talk with the guerrillas. People worked hard all day, then talked and laughed and played guitar in the bar until late at night. I was deeply touched by their heartfelt commitment and communication; it was different from what I had grown up with in Canada.

The team joked about dynamics that were very close to the bone. One morning the representative of the Communist Party overslept after a long evening of singing duets with the retired army general. When he did not show up on time for the meeting, there was a lot of wisecracking about what might have happened to him. "The general made the communist sing," one person said. Then the representative of the right-wing paramilitary said, mock-threateningly, "I was the last one to see him." I was relieved when, a few minutes later, the communist walked into the room.

About half of the participants had lost a member of their immediate family to the conflict. One person's sister had been kidnapped and killed , another's son murdered, another's father assassinated. I was amazed when I realized that these participants were the ones who were most energetic and openhearted in their search for common ground.

As the work progressed, the team became less afraid and more willing to speak frankly. I was particularly struck by one remark. A landowner said that he had had a lot of firsthand experience of the conflict with the guerrillas, that he did not trust them at all, and that he believed that the country's best hope for peace would be to intensify the military campaign against them. Saying this was courageous because he was directly challenging not only the guerrillas but also the rest of the team and their hopeful belief that a negotiated solution was possible. He was willing to be impolite and controversial . But by now relationships were strong enough so that such a statement did not rupture the team. Furthermore, when he said exactly what he was thinking and feeling, the fog of conceptual and emotional confusion that had filled the room lifted, and we could all see an important underlying dynamic in the team and in the country.

This insight made its way into one of the team's published scenarios, Forward March . In this story, Colombians, frustrated with failed attempts at peace and intent on rebuilding a broken nation, elect a strong government to impose order through military force, believing that "harsh problems require harsh solutions." Straight talk among the scenario team enabled them to talk straight to the country.

I do not know how or even whether the violence in Colombia will end. The Destino Colombia team succeeded in working together peacefully, but they failedas all others haveto generate the same dynamic in the country as a whole. A United Nations-sponsored study of the project called it "a treasure still to be revealed." Andres Pastrana, president of Colombia from 1998 to 2002, tried and failed to end the war through negotiation. His successor, Alvaro Uribe, concluded that negotiation could not work and that the country's problems could only be solved by force. He has stepped up the military campaign against the guerrillasthe option described in Forward March .

The first step along an open waythe first step out of the apartheid syndromeis for the actors in the system to speak up. Often this is extremely difficult. People hesitate to say what they are thinking for many reasons, not only extraordinary but also ordinary: fear of being killed or jailed or fired , or fear of being disliked or considered impolite or stupid or not a team player.

Around the time I was working in Colombia, I was taking a part-time master's degree in applied behavioral sciences at Bastyr University in Seattle. I thought that I had gone as far as I could go as a facilitator with an education only in physics and economics, and that I needed some professional training in leadership. I quickly found out that learning to lead means learning how I as a leader functionincluding my own fear of speaking up.

The core learning process of the program was a kind of awareness training based on the Training Group, or "T Group," pioneered at the National Training Laboratories in the 1960s. In this process, six of us sat in a circle and talked for twenty minutes or so, observed by the teacher and the rest of the class. The only rule was that we could only talk about the "here and now": what we were thinking, feeling, sensing, or wanting at that very moment, in response to what somebody else had just said or to something that was arising within us. This process produced conversations that were utterly banal: "I am feeling flushed and angry after your remark about Mary's tone of voice." At the same time the experience was extremely rich, because in this safe classroom space, we got feedback from our classmates that was immediate and straightforward.

I learned a lot from these T Group sessions about my own patterns of behavior. At the beginning, I tended to hang back, observing and making smart comments. I was told I came across as distant , closed, and condescendingnot at all what I wanted. I realized that I was stuck in a personal version of the apartheid syndrome. I hesitated to speak openly because I was afraid that if I said what I was really thinking, the others would be angry and would distance themselves from me, there would be a conflict, and the group would spin out of control and split apart. But I discovered , to my enormous surprise, that the opposite was true: the more open I was, the closer others felt towards me and the closer our group became.

I also learned how my patterns of behavior had their roots in the dynamics of relationships in my family. As a child, I had learned to distance myself from conflict as a way of protecting myself from arguments between my parents. If I wanted to change how I handled such situations now, then I had to relearn these deep-rooted responses, which was hard. This challenge of understanding and changing myself taught me some humility about the prospect of understanding and changing anyone else, let alone a group or larger human system.

In the safe environment of this course, I built up my capacity to speak up and to deal constructively with authority and conflict. I was then able to support the Destino Colombia team in doing the same. Yet even now in many situations, I hold back from saying what I am thinking. It is therefore not surprising that in much more dangerous situations, many people do not have the courage to take the crucial step of speaking up. Often when it is most important for us to speak up, we find it most difficult.

In this context, the conduct of the Destino Colombia team was exemplary. In the heat of terrible conflicts such as Colombia's, many peopleif not killed outright are melted down and destroyed in spirit. But others are raised up and purified. Extraordinary circumstances turn ordinary people into heroes.

The members of the Destino Colombia team who had suffered most directly from the war were the ones who made the most courageous and catalytic statements in the meetings. In the Basque Country, the most outspoken and open person I met was a woman whose husband had been killed by ETA. She was now providing support to victims on both sides of the conflict. "Victims are generous because we have nothing more to lose," she said. "If the politicians would let us, we could be a doorway to a solution."

These people dare to say what they see and think because they believe that their situation demands this of them. They have the courage to overcome their fears of losing what they hold most dear: control, identity, position, power, their life. These people demonstrate to the rest of us what we need to do, in our more normal circumstancesin our families and workplaces and communitiesif we want to change the status quo. We must speak up.