ne of the saddest ways the Thomas Merton quote manifests in our daily lives is in our tendency to underestimate our individual ability to make the world a better place. We may well accept the butterfly effect when it comes to an insect in South America creating a tornado in Oklahoma, but we dismiss any potential positive influence that our personal good behavior can have on the world at large. Learning to utilize the adversarial collaboration concept (the ability to communicate maturely across difference) is a marvelous way to start to embrace your personal power when it comes to being part of the solution.
In this chapter we build on the understanding we gained from the previous chapter about the complexity of human biases. We cannot and should not avoid being biased in meaningful ways. But, given that biases create robust differences between ourselves and others, it behooves us to learn to communicate maturely across that difference.
So while it’s true that our biases often drive us in unhealthy directions, defended as they tend to be by shame and misogyny, we now see that if we soften our certainty about our biases with curiosity, we can much more fruitfully explore which of them will carry us forward and which will keep us developmentally arrested. Once we have carefully chosen our biases, we next need to explore how to successfully protect those forward-carrying biases without invoking hierarchy. How do we participate in our “us” without invoking an “us-versus-them” energy? This article introduces a tool designed to foster non-hostile, non-hierarchical communication when two biases meet.
Adversarial collaboration
If we take this term attributed to psychologist Daniel Kahneman out of the field of research design and employ it in our efforts to enhance our ability to cooperate from a chosen biased position, we can learn how to bypass the entrenched thinking that occurs when we rely too heavily on our own point of view. Adversarial collaboration starts us moving forward by assisting us in sidestepping rigid or defensive thinking that often precipitates hostility and directs us, instead, toward a cooperative curiosity about how the other side of our divide might be better understood. This strategy approaches difference with the expectation that, if handled correctly, dialogue across a difference can be generative and expansive rather than confrontational or defensive.
The process goes like this:
1. Start by clarifying that both stakeholders are willing to put in good faith efforts to investigate how the bias of each side can contribute to a deeper understanding of the situation at hand. By committing to a bilateral, curiosity-based stance, everyone can more easily move away from a defensive (read: hostile) one.
2. Spell out extenuating circumstances that may affect communications such as scope, importance, urgency, etc. In other words, agree on the size, shape and time constraints of the situation.
3. Give each side of a split both permission and encouragement to state their position as boldly and unapologetically as possible. If one side feels free to describe while the other side commits to deeply listen, all kinds of communication pitfalls can be avoided (hyperbole, lying, disorganized thinking, etc.) Absent the need to self-justify, each presentation becomes invigorated by enthusiasm rather than obscured by guardedness, wariness, dishonesty or aggression.
4. The tasks of the non-speaker, therefore, are to listen carefully and to ask any necessary questions – without attacking – while waiting for their turn to enthuse over their own perspective.
5. After both speakers have presented, it is helpful to generate a pros and cons list for each position. That step tends to work best when the speaker for each position lists the cons and the listener for each position lists the pros. Again, care must be taken to remember that each participant seeks to maintain a strong desire to learn something rather than a strong desire to be proven “right.”
6. Once the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy have been captured, the participants can reassess the original problem. What are the dangers of continuing disagreement? Are we willing to not win if the price of not moving forward is high enough? Is a draw acceptable if the stakes are low enough? Wise collaborators start to look for areas of agreement, novel options, methods for determining if one way is better than another in this instance and so on.
7. If adversarial collaboration is being used to solve a problem, the goal is to design something you each agree to try in an effort to resolve the situation. The implication being that there is something beyond where we each are that is worth moving toward. The goal is data collection through novel experiments rather than shutting down through retreat and re-entrenchment.
8. If adversarial collaboration is being used to reduce disrespect, the goal is to willingly explore how carefully and thoughtfully both parties arrived at their respective positions. For most of us, when we understand how and why a person has come to value what they value, their position becomes more about them and their life and less a threat to how we have chosen to view things.
A tip: If you are the listener, watch out for a tendency to listen with a problem-solving attitude. Shift, instead, to a mystery-solving one. When we listen to try to solve a problem, we tend to listen only long enough to grab a handful of data, then retreat into our minds to churn out a solution to what we see as the problem. When we think we are facing a mystery, we are more likely to go out looking for lots of clues. That shift in attitude will keep you paying greater attention to the speaker and out of your Rolodex of opinions about what they need to do.
At its most basic, when we engage in adversarial collaboration, the wiser parts of our minds recognize that our ideological views are just the result of ideas we have about how the world works. Indeed, the origin of the word reinforces this belief: an ideological view is simply a story about a fact pattern someone has observed and thinks is meaningful. From this perspective, biases are no longer seen as sacred but as a starting point for compelling discussions.
An example
We can use a fictional couple, Tom and Sally, to provide us with a concrete example of the adversarial collaboration process.
The first-born daughter of the couple is ready for kindergarten and her parents are bickering over private school versus public school. Tom attended private school and is adamant that that is the best way to go. Sally, having been a public-school kid, disagrees, also adamantly. The bickering calcifies into repeating accusations about the other’s lack of flexibility, and the word “snob” is starting to circulate. Having just been to a terrific workshop on the process of adversarial collaboration, Sally and Tom sit down with cups of coffee to try this new approach. As Tom settles in to listen quietly, Sally starts with fond reminiscences of walking to school with her close friends, getting to know classmates from quite different backgrounds, being one of the top students in her class, her parents making friends with the parents of her friends and so on. When it is Tom’s turn to enthuse, he speaks of the many extracurricular activities the school provided, how comfortable he felt with all the classmates in his small cohort, the close relationship he had with many of his teachers, how supported he felt when he was diagnosed with a learning disorder and so on. After sharing an animated recounting with each other, they found themselves soothed by the process of giving and receiving gentle curiosity rather than stony silence. A natural composure followed, creating the space for them to acknowledge that each option had lovely benefits. Loosened from the need to defend, Sally was able to admit that she was often bored in class and Tom realized that most of his childhood friendships were engineered by his parents and were too often contingent on their willingness to drive him somewhere. Moved away from a contentious attitude, they were each less interested in winning a “hierarchy” battle and more interested in working together to solve this now-clearly-complex problem. The discussion became about their daughter, what type of school might better suit her, and how they might provide some of the missing pieces that each choice could give rise to. With adversarial collaboration decisions don’t become necessarily easier, but we definitely become more potent in terms of making them from a calm and resourced place.
The gender effect
I want to point out here that the two roles needed in the process of adversarial collaboration, listening and speaking, are equally important. There should definitely be no hierarchy between them. But we have a problem. In the current patriarchal climate, the two roles have been “assigned” to genders. Men are supposed to speak and women are supposed to listen. What that split does, of course, is elevate the act of speaking, and speaking in the way men are comfortable speaking. It falls to women to be good listeners. In the cultural schools of hard knocks, therefore, men learn how to speak and women learn how to listen. Again, in the service of clarification only, I’m going to state generally that men tend to need to learn three basic listening skills, and women need to learn three ways of speaking more boldly. As always, the lines will be blurred with it comes to individuals.
If we can agree that men and women have slightly different biases and that the male bias is routinely elevated by the patriarchy, it follows that, to some extent, men and women are adversaries. This gender difference will compound the basic interpersonal difference that exists between any two people. Because this compounded difference provides us with such a clear example of the need to learn to communicate well across difference, I’m going to focus now on male/female communication. But please remember that descriptions of both communication problems and solutions apply equally to all of us.
But, in general, it could be said that women need to learn to be more adversarial and men more collaborative.
Men and listening:
Very specifically, we are calling upon men to devote some time and energy into learning three basic interpersonal skills: facilitative listening, expressed empathy and skilled stipulation. As the three links in that sentence suggest, each of these skills has its own article focusing on basic training. What I am going to cover here are the underlying difficulties that block men from developing them. All three of these skills involve existential and feminist concerns that exacerbate the cultural stumbling blocks men are exposed to in terms of being a skilled listener.
1. Facilitative listening – Listening is a skill that the patriarchy does not take seriously. Can we let that last sentence sink in for a moment? Did your mind jump to the poignantly earnest question: How can that be? How can there be any skill more important to the human animal than facilitative listening? And, the obvious follow-up question: How can there be no training programs to help people learn this skill?
Facilitative listening is a very, very basic ability that anyone can learn – even men. But it can be a hard sell convincing them that they are currently terrible at it. Men think they are listening but they rarely are. What men tend to do when attending to the words coming from someone is to assess what the words being spoken are demanding of them in terms of their repertoire of masculine behavior. Bless their hearts. Their minds remain focused on what they are going to do next rather than on what is being communicated to them. Listening, to men, is a call to action. Male action. And, I must say, that listening stance is better than an even more problematic one that men adopt: what am I hearing that will allow me to take over this conversation? Is there a break coming where I can jump in? Do I know more than the speaker so that I can trump their position? How soon can I change the subject to something I want to talk about? This second stance could be called adversarial confrontation. Neither “listening” strategy advances understanding.
The matriarchy, on the other hand, is all about facilitative listening. Women learn from an early age that there is tremendous personal potency to be had in collecting existential data from people. Beyond creating emotional intelligence, these data fuel the intuitive power we see developing in women as they mature – the ability to utilize the amazing calculating power of the human brain to crunch all the anecdotal data she has gathered in order to reach highly reliable conclusions. Women also understand how the listening side of I-Thou tenderness powers their lives through connections that are the result of facilitative attention to their interpersonal world.
By the time they are grandfathers, men may be better at listening and slightly more aware of the delight inherent in an I-Thou connection, but, man, what a waste to wait so long to be a solid contributor to and beneficiary of the human existential experience. So let’s take a deeper dive into the existential issues that underlie listening.
Facilitative listening is essential to intimacy. While it can never close the existential gap between two humans, it is the only way we have of getting inside the head of another person. That last sentence will be lost on most men. No one has proven to them that there is a lot to be said for getting into the head of another person. (Or the scarier corollary – having someone get inside your head.) To that I would say, given that facilitative listening is the only way to feel the intimacy of glimpsing inside someone else’s head, why don’t you try it before you reject it?
Men are likely familiar with the satisfaction of being on the receiving end of good listening skills – probably through their conversations with women. But even if that sense of satisfaction leads men to want to get better at listening, men have a paradoxical glitch in their system that makes listening skillfully difficult. This glitch is most obvious in the male/female relationship but is equally present in male/male conversations.
Because men have been trained to have little respect for the ways of women, they live in significant psychological distance from the women in their lives. That distance throttles down the data flow coming at them from the female side of life. Insufficient data create a superficial understanding of a situation (in this case the world of women,) and a superficial understanding breeds little curiosity. Absent genuine curiosity about their womenfolk, men can really fumble when it comes to listening well. Training wheels (perhaps an apprenticeship to an older female or reading novels written by women) will often be needed to support men’s halting attempts to listen skillfully, ask insightful questions and digest the information coming back at them. As men gather more information about women and the intimacy grows, their curiosity should naturally increase about what it is like to be a woman in today’s world.
Let me say further that men’s incomprehension around the lives of women – their inability to even think of questions to ask them – is due to their privileged status which ensures the absence of so many of the things that factor into a woman’s daily life. It’s hard to be curious about something you have never experienced. Maintaining culpable ignorance, defined by philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky as “the failure to know what one ought to know, when such a failure implicates one in a moral lapse,” can no longer serve the American male. There is simply too much data available to them with respect to the reality and cost of sexism to women. Lack-of-curiosity-fueled culpable ignorance makes men complicit in the maintenance of misogynyy.
What all this means is that there will likely be a lag time between when a man will start trying to listen to a woman in his life and when he will actually be interested in listening to a woman in his life. So maybe what we need to encourage men to do is to be curious about why they lack curiosity about women. They certainly don’t need to become women, or to totally understand women, they just need to listen to women long enough to acquire the data needed to move to the next interpersonal skill.
Once men experience the satisfaction of facilitative listening to the quite receptive women in their lives, they might start generalizing that behavior to conversations with men. What men will uncover when they listen well is a way of being a human analogous to moving from a black and white world into full technicolor. No longer do they exist in the lonely isolation of stoicism. Now they can navigate the intensely colorful world of true intimacy.
2. Expressed empathy – This skill builds surely atop the skill of facilitative listening. Empathy is a much more complicated, nuanced interpersonal behavior than people realize. It is in no way a reflexive “I feel you.” tossed off in a “conversation.” Effective empathy demands that you
bracket off your ego in order to listen carefully, imagine the reality of the other person within their particular context and then sort through your personal experiences to see if there is a good enough match within to be able to relate to what the other person is describing. If you have developed the ability to listen skillfully, you are halfway there. Again, the steps involved in this double-looping set of skills are laid out in the article on empathy.
Empathy presupposes that you have some understanding of your past emotional reactions to the events in your life – often, sadly, a big ask for men. If your personal repertoire of feelings is of the mad/sad/bad/mad variety, your empathic responses will too often be shoehorned into misfitting expressions of simplistic emotional reactions. Responses that are too big or too blunt will shut down the speaker. Rather than feeling empathically understood, someone receiving these ham-handed responses will simply feel hurt and confused. A wise man, therefore, willingly does him homework – learning the skills that underlie emotional intelligence. There are simply tons of information about how to go about that on the internet.
Tragically, many, many folks actually develop an empathic response in their minds, but fail to deliver it. Men, for a variety of reasons, are much more likely to avoid expressing any empathic feelings or thoughts they may be having. I would hope as men come to enjoy seeing their empathic responses reassure the females in their lives, they will be more and more likely to pass these empathic gifts along.
An empathic response should always be expressed as tentative or else you risk forcing your presumptions on the vulnerable speaker or estranging them with a wild miss. This aspect of empathy may also be difficult for men who have been taught to always speak with confidence. A cautious empathic response encourages both participants to join as equals in a real-time exploration of the existential process of designing a life on the fly by exploring their mutual lived experiences. If you have never experienced the thrill of such an exploration, I highly encourage you to discuss the skill of empathy with one of your wise women friends.
3. Skilled stipulation – Stipulation takes empathy to a qualitatively higher level by going beyond understanding the emotional, behavioral or cognitive situation of another. When you stipulate to the truth of another person, you are honoring their sacred, existential right to self-determine and confirming their grasp of their reality. Stipulation is saying “You are right for you and, even if we differ in our sense of things, your ‘rightness’ is no less valuable than is mine.” In order for men to be able to do this for the women in their lives, they must not only want to do so, they must be able to recognize that (and how) the life of a woman differs greatly from the life of a man. You can see how stipulation will only be possible if the man has committed to learning how to carefully listen to women and to feel empathy for them.
It's crucial, here, for men to understand that stipulation is data driven. As a man, you must realize that you have to study the women in your life in order to gather sufficient data. You must watch how they move through their worlds; how others respond to them (especially if others respond to them differently than you do); what their faces are telling you about what may be going on inside of them; what throughlines consistently describe their lives; what they fear; what makes them feel safe and so on. If a male has not gathered facts like these about the females in his life, he is in no position to stipulate.
Stipulation from the men in a woman’s life is of great value. Not only is it valuable because of its rarity, male stipulation is also precious because it presents women with unique validation from those human creatures who live brave and lonely lives. Because it is coming from deep in the masculine quadrants of human existence where few women ever go, this validation completes the affirmation women receive from their female counterparts, thereby deepening a woman’s confidence in her existential choices. Once a man recognizes that stipulation is a gift actually easily given, he can make a quick and powerful calculation concerning the net gain for learning this skill. In other words, men can recognize that the satisfaction of being able to provide precious stipulation to the women in his life is a very tangible reward for learning attachment skills. Stipulation is a much more wonderfully romantic gift than flowers. And it is a powerful aphrodisiac.
Let me reiterate, underlying these three interpersonal skills must be genuine curiosity. A man has to actually want to understand what life it like for the woman with whom he is involved. He needs to wonder about her sources of energy – what infuses her and what drains her, and why. He must be willing to release his sense of social superiority in order to see her ways of navigating the world as different but of equal existential value. He ought to think about what it would be like to have to deal with what women deal with day in and day out. In other words, the phenomenological exploration of another cannot use male embodiment as emblematic of human embodiment. A huge challenge for men. They must train themselves to regard the women in their lives as situated in the female realm but with extensive familiarity with and experience in the domain of men. The danger being that, because women display many “male” characteristics out in the world, they will be judged by male standards. Women need first to be understood as female.
I want to address here a fear I think gets silently activated in men when they think about providing emotional support to the women in their lives. That fear being: women are emotionally insatiable. If men give an inch toward greater commitment, in other words, they will be giving a mile. It may be true that, when first initiated, positive input from the men in their lives will seem to fall onto dry soil. That is because of the starvation state of women. But please hear this truth: facilitative listening, empathy and stipulation are extremely nourishing. When provided with just a light touch in a healthy relationship, the receiver is easily satisfied by the richness of customized positive attention. And, yes, the male partner may need to proactively compensate for the paucity of stipulation his partner receives out in the world, but, again, it doesn’t take much for the female to feel safe and respected in her own home.
Tragically and I must say infuriatingly, the patriarchy gives shelter to male withholding behavior in terms of these three elementary interpersonal skills. In fact, misogyny fetishizes male emotional withholding, turning it into a virtue men seek to embody. Examples abound. Dismissive minimal responses that shut down communication are seen as macho and impressive. Males routinely punch down with their humor – making a joke out of the requests from the females in their lives for listening, empathy and stipulation. And while research consistently shows that men both talk and interrupt more, it’s women who are caricatured as being chatty – implicitly giving men permission to ignore women’s words.
But when men include these three skills in their daily lives, they will find themselves routinely looking across at the lives of the women they are around rather than down. That slight shift in metaphorical posture will show up in all the ways people communicate – word choice, tone of voice, nonverbal communication, not interrupting, astute questioning and so on. We are asking men to believe that if they will listen to women, they can both remain men and minimize the pain they inflict on their womenfolk. And gather novel and important information about what it means to be a human being.
Women and speaking:
While it is absolutely true that women have significantly less stature, less influence and less freedom than do men, that doesn’t translate to no stature, no influence and no freedom. As the younger generations of women are learning, women can and must gather what resources they have to take responsibility for contributing to an unsettled status quo with bold, autonomous behaviors.
Very specifically, in order to participate fully in adversarial collaboration, women are now called upon to learn these self-defining skills: speaking up, demonstrating independent thinking and asserting.
1. Speak up – For many women, their first step toward adversarial collaboration is for them to find their voice. It can be difficult for women to speak up when men are in the room. They are not wrong to fear dismissal, ridicule or retribution if they speak out, but women need to learn to hold the floor when they believe their words are valuable. This doesn’t have to involve a soapbox move. It can take the form of pulling someone aside to explain privately your position, writing an opinion in a letter to the editor, or organizing other women to join in expressing feminist concerns. But the more women learn to speak up in the room where it happens, the better. In the spirit of Take Back the Night, women need to habituate to Take Back the Room. Much of feminist literature describes the process of learning to speak up. We need a compendium of such inspiring writing for every woman to keep by her bedside for nightly review.
Women can learn a lot about speaking up with clarity and brevity from watching how men do it. The coherence with which men speak is impressive. Their posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, choice of vocabulary and so on all align to communicate their confidence in what they are saying. And their expectation of being believed. It makes sense to accelerate the learning curve for grasping how to do what men do by spending some time in imitation of men’s ways of speaking up. The most effective and charismatic women, however, move on quickly to customize their way of speaking to better fit the preferred empathic stance of women. An empathic speaker is aware of to whom she is speaking. She will alter her message accordingly thereby avoiding the pitfalls of mansplaining. What she will not do is assume that the listener(s) are mute, naïve or passive. With frequent verbal and nonverbal check-ins, a skilled speaker will include the listeners in filling in details and taking the material to new and vivid frontiers.
But speak up she must. No longer can a woman tolerate the suppression of her thinking by the silencing of her voice. She must commit to responding – again and again – to efforts by the dominant culture to hush her up.
2. Demonstrate independent thinking – When women speak up, they need to do a gut check to determine how authentically they are speaking. In other words, they need to practice disclosing the female perspective without being an apologist for it. This is female narcissism – a willingness to be an authority on themselves and their feminine point of view. This ontic self-affirmation presents a robust proclamation of woman as woman, an unapologetic love of the feminine from an ontological sense rather than a cultural one. This is an essence that every woman will recognize existing for her in the heart of her being – where she lives generously creating her community with facilitative listening, empathy and stipulation. Once women learn to trust in their existential faith that the way women see things is as valuable as is the way men see things, they will move more quickly into the act of demanding adversarial collaboration everywhere sex differences exist.
It's important to note here that most women remain unaware that their heads are chock full of rich data. Because their attention to attachment has been so consistently mocked, they fail to see what they have achieved through the years of paying close attention to the existential lives of others. Further, perhaps absent the “legitimacy” of a sophisticated philosophical vocabulary or the “force” of adversarial confrontation so common in male speak, much of the wisdom of women appears as tentative or, worse, only applicable to the lives of women. This is a tremendous loss. Women, because of their deeper reservoir of knowledge of what it means to be a human being, can speak with authority on all topics that relate to designing the world of humanity.
Self-affirmation underlying confidence (which, again, they usually get reinforced only by their women friends, women writers and so on) needs to be and deserves to be reinforced through confirmation by the men in their lives. That requires women to handpick the men around them. Only men who can be trusted to stipulate will be men who matter.
3. Assert – If you think about it, an assertion is an invitation for the receiver of the assertive behavior to stipulate the person asserting. Assertion, as opposed to aggression, is a request to meet at a boundary to negotiate growth and change. As such, it cannot guarantee getting what you want, but assertion will provide moral clarity at the boundary. You may not get the behavior change you wish for, but, if you don’t, the other person will have gone on the record in terms of denying your – likely legitimate – request. Once you have asserted, in other words, the relationship has to change. Either they change their behavior to accommodate your request (stipulating that their behavior needed to change), or they have to change their knowledge of themselves to include the understanding that they have denied your reasonable request. If they just straight up reject you by not even listening (because they cannot tolerate this new information,) the relationship is severely damaged.
But at its most basic, an assertion is a request to be heard and respected. For a woman who has been raised in an environment that stole her sovereignty before she was an individuated person, making any kind of request can feel impossible. Years of being unstipulated and experiencing severe pushback when she does speak can cause her to doubt her reality and retreat. When this is true, a corroborating community will be an absolute necessity for her. Once again we arrive at the truth that, until and unless men start to learn the skill of stipulation, all corroborating communities available to women will be made up of women.
It is also true that women don’t enjoy being assertive the way men assert. It is more comfortable for most women to tackle this behavior within the context of attachment. To that end, she will put considerable effort into attending to her attachment to the other person as she frames her assertion. She will also check in with the recipient to detect any damage done to the relationship and offer reparative steps as necessary. Many assume this attachment-based assertion is weak because it lacks the direct and demanding tone of male assertive behavior. But, is it?
Assertiveness can and often does require a willingness on the part of the woman to go several rounds with the other person. Men are used to pushing their opinions out into the world so will not be quickly or easily dissuaded from continuing to do so. Short of going to the mat, however, repeated assertions can often break through a pattern of narcissistic male blindness.
Socialized into willing self-sacrifice, women find autonomy frightening because it stretches the tethers that link them to others. They fear, rightfully, that some of these tethers will be severed when they engage in autonomous behaviors. Can women handle endangering some of their relationships by limiting their donations? In no way are we asking women to forego their spectacular skills in the domain of human relations, but we are asking them to have the courage to tolerate the loss of some relationships along the way as they engage in speaking up and speaking out.
In conclusion
Though neither a panacea nor quick fix, adversarial collaboration represents a lovely way to habituate to gentle curiosity across difference. It can work both between people and within our minds when seemingly incompatible positions create an antagonistic stalemate. By agreeing to participate in the process of adversarial collaboration we already lower the temperature with the expectation of mutual respect and a willingness to privilege fairness and creativity over winning.
Back to the butterfly effect. Every time you participate in adversarial collaboration, a soupçon of maturity ripples out into the world, moving us culturally toward the aspirational goal of egalitarianism.