Don’t Agree Too Soon – some thoughts on “polarization”

by Dr. Leandro Herrero:

Polarization gets bad press. It sounds confrontational, born out of rigidity, and it smells trouble. Something less ‘extreme’ will always sound more appealing.

Should consensus be the aim? Well, consensus is certainly a blessing when you are in the middle of a long, heated discussion, getting nowhere, and you want to get that 4 o’clock train back.

But don’t worry, the mind has its Rescue Operations Department on permanent alert. At some point, one of you says ‘I think we are all saying the same but with different words’. And a nirvanic feeling descends upon the room, a sense of relief, smiles and nodding, and, wow, what a fantastic and effective tranquilizer. It saved the day.

My rule of thumb is that, when one has reached the magic ‘I think we are all saying the same but with different words’, you can be pretty sure that you are not actually saying the same with different words. Far from it. All it shows is the need to get out of the conflict. It’s wonderful news for the 4 o’clock train and the pizza at home.

Polarization

These days, when people say that we, as a society, are more and more polarized, they may be referring to the fact that we are seeing very robust positions expressed and spread (with the compliments of social media) that seem so far away from each other that, the mere existence of that distance makes us unsettled. How can we be so far from each other? We are all watching US politics with high emotions. Earthquakes, disruptions, shock, all these terms are now used to describe the daily news, the expected type of normality. It certainly feels polarized, to say the least.

But polarization is not an absolute. My, for you polarized, view is for me a very reasonable position, far from polarized. So, we are polarized in relation to what? What kind of distance between poles?

Polarization (like radicalization) has become such a contaminated term that I am not sure it’s useful anymore. If polarization is synonymous to robustness of belief and its vocal representation, then I certainly prefer that much more than the always comforting artificial consensus that tranquilizes our minds.

What intrigues me in the current polarization discourse is whether we are perhaps living a modern version of the medieval philosophy coincidentia oppositorum, or ‘the unity of opposites’, which in my prosaic and unqualified interpretation makes me think that some apparently polarized views are in fact very close to each other, something that the holders of those views would be horrified to admit.

When some people say, for example, that we are entering into dark times (US politics again) I am puzzled that they seem to come from a sort of ‘Original Light’, despite the amount of darkness on their own side. Maybe, and I’m paraphrasing a saying from the UK at the time of a big rail disruption that was said to be caused by ‘the wrong type of snow’, it is the ‘wrong type of darkness’ that they are referring to.

Maybe what we lack is the ability to deal with those ‘polarizations’ without ending up killing each other or just dismissing any position not conforming with our individual view of life. The goal, after all, may not be to achieve consensus at any cost but being able to agree on a common path (shared space?) whilst still disagreeing on many things. I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here by redefining negotiation techniques, which clearly have a place. I am raising a flag of caution for the very frequent need to reach premature ‘closure’ all the time.

The opposite (here we go again) is to live in a permanent state of un-closure. Quoting an old management book title (I remember the title, I don’t remember anything about the book) ‘the indecision is final’. And, yes, many of our organizations seem to worship that way of thinking. Either the indecision is final, or the decision is final, but it will have fifteen minutes of fame.

Shared spaces

For me, one of the places where a Communications function could play a significant role is in helping or coaching people on how to avoid either premature closure or ‘the indecision is final’.  Similarly, in understanding and acknowledging polarization and helping not to ‘solve it’ but to find a shared space. A shared space is not a consensus, it’s a pragmatic, and perhaps imperfect, place to re-think or re-start.  My most preferred angle of a Communications function (from somebody without the word communications on their business card) is one of a broker (ideas, positions, people, connections). The broker role is underrated in our organizations and requires more than just simple ‘facilitation skills’.

Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale, wrote a little book (for me his best) in 2017 entitled ‘On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century’. The title of the first chapter reads ‘Don’t obey too soon’. It’s a warning about totalitarianisms, which Synder has written extensively about, and if I may say so, on one type of totalitarianisms.

Borrowing the idea, I would say, don’t agree too soon but act as fast as you can to find a shared space. If we are to advance beyond the current ‘polarizations’, we need to be prepared to occupy uncomfortable shared spaces, maybe transitional ones. Anything but pretending that ‘we are saying the same but with different words’.

Dr Leandro Herrero – Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, Author, International Speaker and Psychiatrist. For the past 25 years, Dr Herrero and his team have been transforming culture in organizations via his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for all the latest updates.

Written by: Editor