Reflectiveness

The south african apartheid system was based on separating peoplewhere they could live, study, work, and playaccording to their race. People who challenged the system were banned from speaking in public, jailed, exiled, or assassinated. It was therefore not surprising that the members of the Mont Fleur team, coming from all races and political histories, some only recently released from jail or returned from exile , arrived at their first workshop in 1991 with radically different and strongly held views.

Given this background, the most extraordinary characteristic of the Mont Fleur process was the relaxed openness of the conversation. The team members not only spoke openly but, over the course of the meetings, changed what they said. They stretched more than the Basques, Paraguayans, and Canadians. This contrast allowed me to begin to answer the second question that I had been left with at the conclusion of Mont Fleur: How can we solve tough problems peacefully?

The members of the Mont Fleur team had listened, not only openly, but also reflectively. When they listened, they were not just reloading their old tapes. They were receptive to new ideas. More than that, they were willing to be influenced and changed. They held their ideas lightly; they noticed and questioned their own thinking; they separated themselves from their ideas ("I am not my ideas, and so you and I can reject them without rejecting me"). They " suspended " their ideas, as if on strings from the ceiling, and walked around and looked at these ideas from different perspectives.

What helped the team listen reflectively? Their personal qualities, their backgrounds in negotiating and in running democratic organizations, the historical turning point they faced, and the scenario methodology. Over and over, in those years , Nelson Mandela was modeling outstanding self-reflectiveness. He once said, "It was a tragedy to lose the best days of your life, but you learned a lot. You had time to thinkto stand away from yourself, to look at yourself from a distance, to see the contradictions in yourself."

South Africa was in a moment of high generative complexity. The de Klerk government had suddenly taken down the walls, and South Africans knew that they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to approach their problems in a new way. They realized that the old rules did not apply and that they had to be open in order to create new ones. In 2000 a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and SoL (the Society for Organizational Learning) conducted interviews with members of the Mont Fleur team. One of these interviews was with Trevor Manuel, who said, "There was a high degree of flux at that time. That was a real strength. There was no paradigm, there was no precedent, and there was nothing; we had to carve it, and so perhaps we were more willing to listen."

The scenario exercise also encouraged openness and reflectiveness. The scenarios were what-if stories to play with, not predictions or proposals to sell. They emphasized multiple views about what might happen, rather than a single story about what would or should happen. They dealt with dynamic complexity because they addressed the whole situation in terms of causes and effects; with generative complexity because they addressed ways the future might be different from the past; and with social complexity because they created space not just for one "official future," but for many perspectives. Above all, they articulated links between the choices that the team members and their fellow citizens would make and the way in which the future would unfold.

In his interview, Howard Gabriels, from the left-wing black National Union of Mineworkers, remembered the sudden, confusing opening that occurred during the team's first brainstorming exercise:

The first frightening thing was to look into the future without blinkers on. It was quite scary.... In the first workshop of the project we came up with 30 stories. At the time there was a euphoria about the future of the country, yet a lot of those stories were like "tomorrow morning you will open the newspaper and read that Nelson Mandela was assassinated," and what happened after that. Thinking about the future in that way was extremely frightening. All of a sudden you are no longer in your comfort zone. You are looking into the future and you begin to argue the capitalist case and the free market case and the social democracy case. Suddenly the capitalist starts arguing the communist case. And all those given paradigms begin to fall away. Those people that I thought were quite conservative were articulating very radical futures .... It was actually quite frightening in that one did not have the common base of a [shared political] manifesto, like your bible, that you could lean on.

When the members of the team listened reflectively, they were open not only to new ideas about the problem "out there," but also to new ideas about themselves. Johann Liebenberg was a white executive of the Chamber of Mines. Mining was South Africa's most important industry and the heart of its whites-only capitalism , with its operations deeply embedded in the apartheid system. On the left-dominated team, Liebenberg therefore represented the arch-establishment. His interview with the SoL researchers showed his and his teammates' extraordinary and exhilarating listening:

The team was a damn good team, a very diverse team of whites, blacks, Asians, coloreds, rich, poor, community workers, trade unionists, a really interesting mix. We would work together and play together ... You go for a long walk after the day's work with Tito Mboweni on a mountain path and you just talk. Tito was the last sort of person I would have talked to a year before that. Very articulate , very bright; we did not meet blacks like that normally. I don't know where they were all buried but they were there. The only other blacks of that caliber that I had met were the trade unionists sitting opposite me in adversarial roles. This was new for me, especially how open-minded they were. These were not people who simply said: "Look, this is how it is going to be when we take over one day." They were prepared to say: "Hey, how would it be? Let's discuss it." But their pictures of the future and ours were not the same, and here was an opportunity, spread over a fairly lengthy period of time, for actually learning how other people think.

During one of the Mont Fleur workshops, Liebenberg was recording on a flipchart while Mosebyane Malatsi of the radical black Pan Africanist Congress unofficial slogan : "One Settler [White Person], One Bullet"was speaking. Liebenberg was calmly summarizing what Malatsi was saying: "Let me see if I've got this right. 'The illegitimate, racist regime in Pretoria ...'" Liebenberg was able to hear and actually to articulate the inflammatory perspective of his opponent .

Liebenberg became friends with Gabriels, who had been his adversary throughout acrimonious and violent mining industry negotiations and strikes. Gabriels described how each man came to see the situation from the other's perspectives:

In 1987 we took 340,000 workers out on strike. Fifteen workers were killed and more than 300 workers got terribly injured, and when I say injured, I do not only mean little scratches. He was the enemy and here I was sitting with this guy in the room when those bruises are still raw. I think that Mont Fleur allowed him to see the world from my point of view and it allowed me to see the world from his point of view.

One of Liebenberg's comments illustrates how the team became able not only to see their situation from the perspective of others, but also to understand their own role in creating the situation:

Look, I suppose that subconsciously we were all aware that what was being done to our brothers and sisters in this country was wrong. People were not being treated with dignity but ... somebody else was doing it. I was treating people with dignity. But I was not doing anything to get my brothers to treat their brothers with dignity . So it was like the Germans in the Second World War. They saw nothing. Heard nothing. Nothing. That was the Gestapo that was doing it, not me.

To create new realities, we have to listen reflectively. It is not enough to be able to hear clearly the chorus of other voices; we must also hear the contribution of our own voice. It is not enough to be able to see others in the picture of what is going on; we must also see what we ourselves are doing. It is not enough to be observers of the problem situation; we must also recognize ourselves as actors who influence the outcome.

Bill Torbert of Boston College once said to me that the 1960s slogan "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" actually misses the most important point about effecting change. The slogan should be, he said, "If you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution." If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way that they are, then logically we have no basis at all, zero leverage, for changing the way things areexcept from the outside, by persuasion or force.

Reflectiveness is challenging in three ways. Philosophically, we are accustomed to believing that there is a world "out there" that exists apart from us and that we can see and manipulate objectively. But modern cognitive science teaches us that "cognition is not a representation of an independent, pregiven world, but rather a bringing forth of a world. What is brought forth by a particular organism in the process of living is not the world but a world, one that is always dependent on the organism ..." Psychologically, we defend ourselves by focusing our attention first on what others are doing that is creating the problem situation. The shock I got from my Bastyr University T Group training was from seeing my own contributionoften unintentionalto creating the reality that was unfolding in the group . And politically , Torbert's axiom means that we can never help address a problem situation from a comfortable position of uninvolved innocence. If we want to help, we must first understand and acknowledge our roleby commission or omissionin creating the situation.

Avner Haramati is a psychologist and one of the leaders of an Israeli voluntary organization called Besod Siach, which in Hebrew means "the enigma of dialogue" and which comes from a Jewish prayer that refers to quiet communication among the angels. He told me about his experience working with groups in conflict and the central role of reflectiveness. "One key dynamic in any dialogue," he said, "is each party's monologue: the conversation each party is having among themselves. Once we organized a dialogue among leaders from the Israeli left, the settlers, and the ultra- orthodox . After the meeting ended, I got a lift back home in the car of the ultra -orthodox group. That conversation was much more lively and revealing than the conversation in the meeting had been. The big impact of the dialogue on them was that they got an alternative, challenging perspective on themselves and on their own policies."

In 1995, two years after I had left Shell, the company faced two serious crises in its relationships with external stakeholders. In both the case of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an anti-Shell activist, by the government of Nigeria, and the case of the planned dumping of the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea, the company dangerously misjudged what governments , nongovernmental organizations, and the public expected of it, and so came close to losing its social "license to operate ." Eventually Shell responded by engaging with these stakeholders and by making changes in its business practices, including incorporating human rights and environmental reviews into all project decisions. What I found significant is that the scenarios we had written in previous years had been insufficient to motivate the company's managers to effect these changes in their practices. Nor were they strongly motivated by the public criticism or boycotts as such; like managers of any large institution, they were used to being attacked . Their strongest motivation came from the self-reflective shock of seeing how much the perception that others had of them differed from their self-perception. Gary Steel, a senior manager, said, "As the public reacted against Shell after [Nigeria and Brent Spar], the company became an uncomfortable, disappointed, disenfranchised, negative place to work. It got to the point where at dinner parties, some of us were reluctant to say we worked for Shell."

The Mont Fleur team contributed to creating a new reality in South Africa because they were able to see themselves, reflectively and self-critically, as actors in the unfolding national drama. They understood that South Africa would change only if they themselves changed. If we want to change the systems we are part ofour countries , communities, organizations, and familieswe must also see and change ourselves.