Openness

If talking openly means being willing to expose to others what is inside of us, then listening openly means being willing to expose ourselves to something new from others.

I observed the power of this simple directional shift in Houston, Texas. I was working with a group of powerful and public-spirited businessmen. They had a high confidence in their ability to wisely guide the city into the future and a low confidence in government and politicians .

The businessmen were concerned that the younger generation of business leaders were not sufficiently enthusiastic about becoming responsible "city fathers" and that politicians would step into this vacuum and ruin the city. They organized a team that included younger and minority businesspeople and a few leaders of large nonprofit organizations to talk about the situation and decide what to do. They were reluctant, however, to broaden the membership of the team further to include politicians and community leaders. They were afraid that a more diverse group would be both more awkward to work with and unnecessary. Businesspeople had previously figured out amongst themselves what was best for the city, and they could continue to do so.

These businessmen were willing to listen to each other, to CEO role models, to experts, and to younger business leaders. But they did not want to listen to anybody else. I thought that they were being arrogant in not valuing the potential contributions of non-business people. And I was being arrogant in not valuing their ideas about how they should contribute to their city.

One of our workshops was held in a big suburban hotel. The conversation was bogging down as the team members repeated their by-now-familiar views. I was getting frustrated with how closed, insular, and un-self-critical their views were. Then one of my cofacilitators, poet Betty Sue Flowers, pointed out that a large, loud convention of tattooists was getting started in the ballroom across the hall. Men and women with tattoos on every visible surface of their body were sharing our bagels, coffee, and fruit platters. Tattoo artists were setting up exhibition booths with huge photos of their work. Boxes of tattooing paraphernalia were piling up in the lobby. Rock music was blaring.

Flowers had worked with Jaworski on his book Synchronicity and was highly alert to meaningful coincidences. She suggested that during our next break each of us should walk across the hall and conduct a short interview of one of the tattooed people and then report back on what we learned. We were all uncomfortable with doing this, but we agreed. These encounters turned out to be a magically opening exercise. Many of our group found their interviews enlightening and reassuring. They saw for the first time what it was like to be treated as an outsider in Houston. They discovered they had more in common with the outsiders than they had assumed. These encounters let the team glimpse a part of the Houston system that had been invisible to them.

(I, by contrast, found my interview unexpectedly frightening. The man I interviewed had a tattoo of Jesus, to cover up one which he preferred but which was too unpopular to show openly: a swastika. Opening up to other people and to what is going on in the system of which we are part is not always a comfortable or comforting experience.)

This listening exercise was a turning point in the work of the team. As they talked about the dynamics between themselves and the tattooists, they understood that the issue of inclusion was central not only to how the city would develop but especially to how it would be led. By the end of the project, after several more meetings, they had concluded that the business community could no longer be led by a small number of white male CEOs of large companies. They decided that their core tasks had to be to "widen the circle" and "deepen the bench" of business leaders to include more women, minorities, and leaders of small companies, and to place greater emphasis on cooperating with politicians, city officials, and community leaders. The team went on to sponsor a series of ambitious initiatives to shape the future of Houston in this way.

To solve a complex problem, we have to immerse ourselves in and open up to its full complexity. Dynamic complexity requires us to talk not just with experts close to us, but also with people on the periphery. Generative complexity requires that we talk not only about options that worked in the past, but also about ones that are emerging now. And social complexity requires us to talk not just with people who see things the same way we do, but especially with those who see things differently, even those we don't like. We must stretch way beyond our comfort zone.

Looking back to my time as a student, it was absurdly closed of me to think that I could understand or influence the Brazilian energy situation without ever having been to Brazil or talked with a Brazilian. It was also absurd that in two years at PG&E, I never once had a meeting outside the PG&E building. Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, pioneers of the Future Search method of multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action, argue that such stretching is essential: "Peer-only events ... have little effect on the larger system. So our guiding principle, when we make out a Future Search invitation list, is: we want the 'whole system' in the room, meaning a larger system than usual."

One reason the Destino Colombia project had been less influential than it could have been is that the organizers decided to exclude any representatives of the administration of then-President Ernesto Samper, because his election campaign had been partly financed by drug traffickers. Manuel Jose Carvajal, the project's convenor, said to me afterwards that he thought this attempt to be "antiseptic" had been counterproductive, because as a result, the Samper government had resolutely ignored the team's ideas and its seminal work in constructing cross-boundary relationships. I talked about this with Max Hernandez, a Peruvian psychoanalyst and political activist. "Such a desire to be completely clean," he said, "is like an obsessive-compulsive disorder , where the patient is always washing his hands. It is not healthy to try to keep yourself away from everything unclean in the world."

Then Hernandez told me a story about one of his own experiences in Peru with cross-boundary dialogue. At one workshop, a businessman and a trade unionist left the meeting room and went for a long walk. Afterwards, the trade unionist told Hernandez: "I learned that this man's dreams are not my dreams. But nor are they my nightmares." "You have to remember," Hernandez told me, "that deep, dangerous conflict isn't usually the result of your rational argument versus my rational argument. It's the result of your rational argument hitting my blind spot, and vice versa. Listening openly helps us defuse this dynamic."

Norwegian professor Torkel Opsahl also understood the vital importance of open listening. During 1992 and 1993, he chaired a groundbreaking commission in Northern Ireland, called "A Citizen's Inquiry." The commission took written and oral submissions on the conflict from a wide range of community and political groups. When someone charged Opsahl with "talking with the Irish Republican Army," he replied, "I am not talking with the IRA. I am listening to the IRA."

Quaker peace activist Gene Knudsen Hoffman puts this imperative clearly:

We peace people have always listened to the oppressed and disenfranchised. That's very important. One of the new steps I think we should take is to listen to those we consider "the enemy" with the same openness, non-judgment, and compassion we listen to those with whom our sympathies lie. Everyone has a partial truth, and we must listen, discern, and acknowledge this partial truth in everyoneparticularly those with whom we disagree .

Open listening is the basis for all creativityin business and engineering as much as in politics. John Elter was the Xerox vice-president and chief engineer who led the innovation program that created the company's radical "Zero-to-Landfill" environmental vision and its Document Center products (which have brought in $40 billion of revenues ). I once asked him what role he thought open listening played in the nuts-and-bolts creativity of new product development. "It is everything," he answered . "The challenges of product development are not about products. They are about interpersonal relations: power, trust, alignment. My team worked hard to learn how to listen, without judging , to what the other person was trying to sayreally to be there. If we listen in the normal closed way, for what is right and what is wrong, then we won't be able to hear what is possible: what might be but is not yet. We won't be able to create anything new."