Driving Change

È italiana l’internet delle merci, una rivoluzione dei trasporti pronta per essere realizzata. Si chiama Pipenet, è una rete di tubi sottovuoto nei quali viaggeranno capsule a levitazione magnetica a 1500 chilometri all’ora su tutto il territorio nazionale, e in prospettiva europeo. 

Posidonia spiaggiata: il primo impianto italiano che la utilizzerà per generare biogas e quindi energia si realizzerà a Pollica, nel Cilento, in provincia di Salerno. Ne abbiamo parlato con Stefano Pisani, sindaco di Pollica, che da anni si batte per realizzare il progetto, e sta vedendo il traguardo.

Matthew Bishop (MB): Hello, this is Matthew Bishop with Books Driving Change. And today I'm talking with Sharath Jeevan, who is the author of Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive. Sharath is a social entrepreneur who came out of the business world, consulting world, and helped launch STIR Education -- which is an organization that helps teachers improve their performance through their better motivation and sharing of insights -- he can elaborate on that -- in many countries, including India and Indonesia, and some parts of Africa. And now he runs Intrinsic Labs, which we'll talk a bit about as well, I hope. 

The audience for this show, Sharath, is people who are conscious of this crisis that we've been living through in the pandemic, [and how that] has revealed a need for greater public service to re-engage people with talent and insight and leadership capacity into the public realm of public service. And I wondered if you could say in a sentence for them -- why they should read your book?

Sharath Jeevan (SJ): Thanks Matthew, real pleasure to be on the show. And I think it's so important for those of us leading change in public service to know what deeply motivates ourselves as individuals and leaders. And that idea of really trying to find lasting motivation from within for ourselves, really with a view that that can help us motivate the people around us -- our teams, if we've got teams in our work, but also, of course, as citizens. Our work is ultimately geared towards that, and that applies, whether we're public servants, or we're political leaders, or trying to affect change, in the social sector, or nonprofit sector, etc. And these are universal themes the book talks about.

MB: In the book, you set out in a powerful way a number of the trends that have caused many people to lose touch with what it is that motivates them from within and to be driven by external factors - as to what you call “extrinsic”. To the extent that you really feel there's a huge crisis in the world of loss of connection with ourselves, and that that's underlying many of the issues that emerge all over the place, in different aspects of life, and is proving dysfunctional in many parts of the world. But could you just spell that out for us? What is the key problem that you think we need to solve at this point and that Intrinsic is setting out to solve as a book?

SJ: Yes, I think it's moving our dial, that motivational dial, [away] from extrinsic or external factors. So for example, in the world of work, we would think a lot about pay, about status, how fancy our job title is, how fancy our office is. These are critical things and we're not saying they're not important -- many people in the world don't have them, we need to make sure they do. But for those of us who do have those, they have a diminishing effect over time. That was a ceiling effect. 

I was talking to a trader in the City of London who got a £21.5 million bonus for the year. And his first reaction when his boss told him the news was, I had to work harder, because I know that someone else down the corridor got more than me. So that idea that there's never enough in some of these things, but we can keep chasing them, [although] that won't give us fulfillment, happiness, and actually won't give us success in the long term either. What we've got to do is move that motivational belt inwards to thinking about how we can really do what we do -- particularly in public service, because it's genuinely fulfilling, motivating, and rewarding. 

It's a bit like driving an electric car compared to a car driving on heavy diesel -- it should feel enjoyable in its own right. And we know the key pillars of intrinsic motivation are around “purpose” -- that sense of how work helps and serves others -- and “autonomy” -- that sense of us being in control of our destiny, as public policy leaders. And finally, becoming a “master” -- or becoming a better and better leader over time. We never get to perfection, but we're getting and developing and growing. So purpose, autonomy and mastery are key to us really moving that dial inwards. And we know that it's much more likely to lead us to be happy, fulfilled, and successful.

MB: One of the things you do very well in the book is marshall a lot of academic research that's supportive of your claim on intrinsic motivation. And I think maybe "purpose" in particular has become one of those buzzwords that I think everyone is talking about -- a lot of company leaders, a lot of political people, saying we need to have purpose, clear and everything. Just what is the evidence that purpose matters and can be a game changer? And, with a slightly cynical hat on, how do we tell real purpose, real change making purpose, from the sort of bullshit PR purpose that a lot of people might be inclined to say [they have], if they're under pressure, in these leadership roles at the moment to try and sign sound appealing to millennials?

SJ: I think that you put the nail right on the head. A lot of problems we are having with this purpose discussion is that it has been taken to this PR territory, and thousands of staff are subject to these kinds of corporate workshops, or government workshops, where they're bombarded with purpose statements from the company and so on. 

What I tried to look at on "purpose" was look at that really simple definition. I was trying to define it from first principles around just how what we do helps and serves others -- take away all the airy fairy language and so on. The challenge, I think, is that actually organizations are getting better and better, to be absolutely fair, on defining organizational purpose -- why that company, or how it helps and serves others. I don't think we've yet cracked the question of how do we, as an individual leader in public service, contribute to that purpose. So what tends to happen is we get hired into a job, let's say a government somewhere, civil service, and I'll be honest, [you] seem like a robot who's there to fulfill the purpose of the government department or division. The challenge though I think is, in today's world, especially with younger workers, we ourselves want to feel a sense of a personal mission statement. And by that, what is our own North Star?

Let me just give you mine as an example: I help organizations and leaders to reignite inner drive by writing, coaching, consulting. So I help organizations and leaders to reignite inner drive by writing, coaching, consulting -- just a very, very simple 15-word statement. But it's a really helpful North Star that helps me remember why I'm doing what I do. And if I joined an organization -- I work for myself now, but I do write, consult for one, as you mentioned -- the question I'm asking is how am I contributing to that organization's purpose statement? But also, how are they contributing to mine? How are they helping me achieve mine? And when I think both things are in harmony, we've got a great marriage between an employee and an organization. I think we have a great motivational deal in place. But the temptation is we tend to forget the individual and forget that we all need that for ourselves as much as needed for our organizations.

MB: And then you also talk about "autonomy" and "masteries". What's the key issue today with autonomy, and what do you mean by that?

SJ: If you look at political life today, I'd argue we're in a really difficult autonomy situation, one where we've got two extremes. I talked about some of the research in the book about political leadership where you can have the extreme. For example in the U.S., perhaps both houses where it's almost like individual lawmakers -- it's Clint Eastwood extreme, or if you like, a Lone Ranger type behavior. But the other extreme where when you're an MPs, often in the U.K., they are often micromanaged. And how do you have the right balance between these two things is important. In enough autonomy you're representing a genuine community of constituencies for your elected office. But also, you also need to make sure that you are adhering to the broad direction of the party that you were being elected to join. How do you find that balancing act? That's a key piece. So it can't be either extreme. It can't be micromanagement, nor can it be a complete free for all. How do you negotiate between is a key idea in the book.

MB: But one of the things you generally observe is the people not feeling very much autonomy at work in that sense.

SJ: Absolutely. So I was talking, for example, about teachers in the book, and we have record numbers of teachers leaving every month. In the U.S., 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 teachers a month leave the profession. In the U.K. 40% of teachers want to leave. It's not because they don't enjoy teaching anymore. It's because they feel like they are being micromanaged. And their head teachers, their leaders in the school system are asking, What would Ofsted say, rather than what's the right thing to do for my school, my community. So they feel often like a pawn on a very big chessboard and unable to exert their own professional judgment and discretion. That's a really killer, killer blow for motivation.

MB: And that's a problem across government do you find in particular?

SJ: I think very much. So I spent quite a lot of time talking to lawmakers in a lot of different countries, in the emerging world and the developed world. And that sense of not being able to control their own destiny -- for example, many of them wanted to be in the “for one nation tradition” where they really weren't genuinely supporting the whole country. They feel more and more like they're being held to factions as well. 

MB: And "mastery" is the third concept. So you have purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Specialization has been a huge theme -- to the extent that we now have lots of books about how dangerous silos are. Because we've all become so specialized, we don't really know how to reach out across silos and think in a joined up way in decision making. But what do you mean by mastery? You mean something very different to that.

SJ: I talk in the book about the “10,000 hour rule”, and this idea that a lot of the mastery discussions have been about technical prowess. And there's a lot of evidence that's true in technical domains, but a lot of the future of modern jobs today, they thrive because of the human skills. As a civil servant, for example, you've got to know how to develop policy and legislation. But you've also got to know how to influence ministers, how to work with colleagues, how to work with different kinds of disciplines. 

I look at the COVID response, for example, those human skills are much harder to subject to simple 10,000 hour rules. It's much more of the broader human aspects of our work. And so how do we codify those -- what I call the "order essentials of mastery" -- and try to make them something [people] actually actively want to work on, and become better and better at? They're often things that are actually not on a public servant's job description, that actually are the magic of the job these days. And how do you make them explicit? How do you codify them? And how do you find a systematic way of improving them, and also find people who can nurture your skills as you progress in your careers?

MB: So give us an example of where you've seen a different approach be applied, [one] that's really moved away from that sort of 10,000 hour rule approach, to something more holistic.

SJ: Giving examples from my own life with STIR Education. I had a finance director who was fantastic. And she was really, really good at making sure we had good reliable management accounts every month. The challenge is that as we became bigger as an organization, that actually a lot of her role was shifting from that technical aspect she was very comfortable into influencing our staff, or running our program for teachers -- for them to spend money better, to know how to use resources better, to make sure they felt more comfortable in terms of financial literacy, and be able to use the numbers themselves to make intelligent decisions. So we did a lot to try and break barriers down. Simple things, like she where she sat in the office. Often, finance tends to have their own little cubicle or room because they feel that what they've got is confidential information. So I said, Why don't you rotate around the office every day, every week, so you meet different colleagues, you can talk to them, see their reality. She spent many days in the field, with schools, seeing the work on the ground, and seeing a lot of the processes that we had time might be actually hindering progress. So it's trying to break down silos. And back to that personal mission statement, if you think my role at purpose level is to produce management accounts on time and accurately, that's one purpose statement. If it's to help the organization as a whole make better decisions, that's a different one. So how do you try and break some of the traditional ways of thinking down to open up jobs in public service and make them fulfilling and motivated?

MB: And you talked about STIR Education, and the book opens with this inspiring story and how you were surprised, in a sense, by the appeal of the message. Can you just talk a bit about what happened and why that's given you hope? And have you seen other examples since?

SJ: So, I got into this whole thing by accident. I'm an economist by background at the end. I was very much someone to believe in the hard skills of life around finance, or economics, and so on. I think what happened is, starting off in the slums of Delhi, we were trying to find some great teaching ideas to be shared around the world. That by looking for the ideas in some of the poorest parts of the world, there was not huge pride. In a sense, my teachers, for the first time, their ideas mattered. And they were actually important people in their own right, and they enjoyed meeting each other and sharing ideas. 

That buzz of energy would, almost by accident, even though we didn’t know what these terms meant at the time, but we're unlocking purpose, autonomy and mastery, almost as a byproduct of what we were doing. We realized we had confused the baby in the bathwater. And actually, magic was that ignition of teachers, that reigniting of motivation, and that r

The people that work in education and that take the responsibility of leading the education system are mainly optimists. If not, you cannot take the job.

In the latest episode of Books Driving Change, Agustín Porres and Matthew Bishop talk about Porres’ new book, Unfinished Business in Education, in which he interviews 31 previous education secretaries from around the globe. Each of them reflects on their time in office -- what they learned, what they achieved, what they failed to do, and what they would advise people going into that role today. They also talk about why the pandemic may be providing the perfect opportunity to enact sweeping education reforms, because of the crisis it has brought on, the innovation it triggered, and the fact that education is now much more visible in many national debates that it has been for many years. 

Porres has spent the last couple of decades working on education policy and is currently Latam Regional Director of the 

Varkey Foundation

, which works to build the capacity and status of teachers. It is also the sponsor of the 

Global Teacher Prize

. Before joining Varkey, Porres worked in various government roles.

Hansen-Quao has also served for three years on the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community, has worked as a leadership consultant to UN Women, and in 2016 was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in honor of her pioneering work nurturing emerging women leaders.

Hansen-Quao talks with Bansal about her journey, both professional and personal, and how her experiences have helped the vision she has for African governance and leadership. She and her family were forced to flee Ghana when she was a child in the early 1980s, and she grew up in Togo as well as in the United States. She returned to Ghana as a teenager and decided to take a bet on a new university, so she could be part of Ghana's future.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Matthew Bishop (MB): Hello, this is Books Driving Change with me, Matthew Bishop. And today I'm talking with François Bonnici, co-author with Cynthia Rayner, of The Systems Work of Social Change: How to Harness Connection, Context, and Power to Cultivate Deep and Enduring Change.

Obviously, this is a book that goes right to the heart of the mission of Books Driving Change, where we're looking at how do we build back better in this moment of crisis that the world is facing. And this book, I highly recommend it because it is full of great practical insights and wisdom, and some great case studies that I think many people will not be familiar with. And also, some very big thoughts about the way change happens globally and the way systems change could be brought about going forward. 

But François, I wanted to start by asking you, as I ask all of our guests, in a sentence - given our audience of people who are either engaged in social change work or considering it - why should they read your book?

François Bonnici (FB): Thank you, Matthew, for having me. I'm delighted to be on your podcast, and hello to everyone listening. Probably the same reason that I would want to read the book. Initially, Cynthia and I wrote it, and we thought, well, if we're the only two people who learn from this, then that's almost sufficient. 

So as both a practitioner and an academic and also working in the foundation space, and really a bit paralyzed by the overwhelming challenges we have, the complexity of it, and the narrative around systems change, that we didn't feel like we necessarily could take that back to working on a day to day basis. And so the book is called “systems work,” to imply and emphasize the day to day work we all need to do, and to emphasize that to achieve some kind of future systems change that we aspire to, whatever that might be, it's about the process of change. And it's about the people who are involved in that process of change that we wanted to emphasize. So we really hope it's a very practical approach, one that is rooted in 200 years of social change making, deep case studies, hundreds of interviews with experts. But coming away with both stories that move, that inspire, and a set of practical tools and lessons at the end of each chapter. So we hope it will be a contribution to the collective journey many of us are on to try and understand what do we mean by, and how do we do, this work towards the deeper systemic change, what we call deep and enduring change. And I'll unpack a bit further with you where we go with it.

MB: I want to start just by asking you a bit about how you and Cynthia came to write this book, which obviously came out of your work together at the Bertha Centre in South Africa. But, and I should say before we go further, that you are now currently head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is funded by two of the founders, or the founder and his wife, of the World Economic Forum. [That fact] is in itself quite an interesting focal point of discussions about the role of the system, and how you do systems change, and whether top down organizations can really deliver that. But how did you come to write this book?

FB: It's been a long journey. It's been five years. And so it started pre-COVID and got revised and updated during COVID, for reasons I'll explain. But I had started the Bertha Centre at the University of Cape Town as the first center for social innovation in Africa, dedicated to understanding approaches to social change that were innovative, that thought about social enterprise, that looked at what movements were doing. And we very quickly recognized the superficial approaches, or even the kind of service delivery type mindset, was not getting to the deep challenges and structural and systemic barriers that lay in my home country, South Africa, from hundreds of years of history. And that no fantastic solution was going to undo all of that. 

And that was a great barrier, actually a source of failure, for both myself and projects that Cynthia and I had worked in and organizations we'd worked for. Many organizations we worked with had these deep frustrations. But we also saw amazing organizations overcoming that on a day-to-day basis; overcoming the systemic and structural barriers around stigma, around poverty traps, around lack of opportunities, and turning that into agency.

So at the time we started exploring, and researching, and working with global collaborations, like the Rockefeller Social Innovation Fellowship. We did a piece of work commissioned by the Schwab Foundation, when we were at the Bertha Centre, called Beyond Organizational Scale, looking at how social pressures create systemic change. And what we found happening in the global conversation around systems change was quite different to what we were seeing with organizations we were working with, initially in South Africa, and then we were looking and working with organizations in Latin America, and India, and even in the U.S.

MB: When I was reading, one of the things that hit me was, there seems to be this real difference of opinion as to what systems change is, and how you do it. In the sense that a lot of people view it as a kind of fixing a system with a top down approach, and you found, fundamentally, a different experience on the ground with people doing the grassroots work.

FB: I think that's right. And I think we had quite a frustration with even the term “systems,” because we all do mean very different things. And if you ask someone sitting at the World Economic Forum or if you asked grassroot activists, you're going to get very different answers. And so I grew a little bit allergic to the term, and then ended up writing a book on the topic. And it's not to discount any of them. And I think what we talk about in the book is that these challenges have complexity, they have scale, and they have depth. And what we had seen was that the focus of the conversations were around scale - if we can solve problems, and that everyone is doing it in a particular way, that is systems change. 

If we can do it in that complexity lens, where we have levers, and we can intervene in a system, and we are able to shift the balance of actors and systems and relationships, that is a form of a complexity view of systems change.

But what we felt wasn't part of the conversation was really the steps. And that we felt that both those other dimensions and approaches could represent a perpetuating of the system of actors of power -  if the existing actors, who are architects and gatekeepers of a system, are the ones redesigning it. And so what this book seeks to do is really emphasize a depth component; and more than just say this is an additional component, say it's also the critical necessary one to take all those three lenses on how we are strategic and start to meet the bottom up with a top down.

MB: And why do you think we've got to this position where even at a moment like this with COVID, and the World Economic Forum, and the great reset and all that, there's this very top down approach to social change? That, at least in terms of the general discussion, it is about how Biden's going to spend 3.5 trillion on infrastructure, and it's these big numbers, big change, very industrialized approach. And I think everyone that's been on the frontline in some way or another, quickly recognizes the very people who so much as these activities are intended to benefit, are the last ones to get asked what they think should be done or given any power to say that. How have we got to that situation?

FB: Chapter one of the book actually covers the industry of social change. And I do think there are some deep historical roots, both in terms of the industrial era, but also the kind of postwar period. We talk about the Green Revolution and how some of these big moments in history of social change reinforced certain practices, approaches, mindsets. But also how funding flows, etc. 

I think one of the big pieces of all of this is the power concentrated in both public and private sectors and how that is dissipated and fragmented in what remains, the “plural sector.'' I much prefer [the term] to “third sector” or “nonprofit sector,” because of its plurality. But because of its plurality there isn't the collective power for decision making - an authority to really state and influence how social change strategies happen. And they've been recipients of decisions and systems and structures and flows for so long that they've become dependent on it in a way. This is not a new narrative but perhaps looks at it in a new light. So we're somehow at that moment of recognizing that, if we just continue on that pathway, we're not actually going to change any of the rules of the game.

But those of us who work in this sector are also complicit in it in a way. So there's also a bit of a self critique in all of this; that actually, the fact that those of us who work somewhere in the sector, often have our livelihoods and careers dependent on the fact that these problems continue to exist. So in a way, the big shift for me was recognizing that the role or purpose of not for profit, social enterprises, social change making organizations is quite far removed now from the delivery of goods and services that can improve people's lives. And really, I quite strongly have seen that the ability to create agency, to empower and equip both people who experience particular problems or are invested in communities - whether they work for an organization or volunteering in a particular community somehow - [is extremely important]. That the purpose of social purpose organizations needs to shift. 

And I won't go too much into detail now, because I know you will want to unpack a lot of that. I've taken your question, and I've gone a bit further. But we are in a position of a great imbalance of power. And the heart of it lies there. But also not recognizing the real intrinsic value of many of these local organizations - whether they be larger networks, or local and small - in creating social capital, in fostering social cohesion. And that we don't have a good way to value and recognize, during this time of COVID, how critical that's been - [looking at] issues of trusts and social capital and being there for each other. And recognizing and having empathy with one another. And so I think that a lot of the book focuses on ultimately social capital and relational value, and how we build that, and how important that is for these longer term aspirational outcomes we have. 

MB: That's actually a very helpful framing, because as I read the book, I kept thinking this is really about how do you empower people. Not the vast majority of the population, but the people on the ground, who are the ones that are supposed to be being helped by so much of the activity - whether it be government, or nonprofits, or even business now that it's supposedly finding its social mission. But really, it's about that some of these things that are there in the dialogue, the popular conversations, amongst the elite are around networks, platforms, etc. But here, your book was really about empowering the people, the masses, and really giving them the ability to harness some of those tools and things in a different way. And there's lots of inspiring examples, so maybe just talk to a couple of them. I found the Slum Dwellers International a fascinating example of networking in action, but you'd say it's more than that. And then maybe talk about one other case that you particularly found very, very inspiring.

FB: You hit the nail on the head in terms of practically talking about what kinds of discussions are happening at the global level or in actors of powers - the network organization, background organization. And we actually see some of those same practices at the grassroots - using digital platforms, using those kinds of approaches, but with a different set of actors. And we'll talk later about how we might connect the micro and the macro. 

But Slum Dwellers International, an incredible organization I've been following for years, comes originally out of India, had their global headquarters in Cape Town down the road from us, and we ended up working with them at the Bertha Centre. So we got to know a lot about their work. They have, in many ways, quite a traditional and well-known approach to having a federation - in which its members are actually the representatives and leaders of the organization. And the organization itself is some kind of federation secretariat. And it's federated across the world, because these movements of people who live in informal settlements - slums, favelas - self organize and elect their own leadership. And there's a really important history of Jockin [Arputham] and Sheela [Patel], who actually have been part of the Schwab Foundation, who were founders of that movement, but served as very different kinds of leaders than we generally have held up to be the change making leaders that we've spoken about over the past couple of decades. 

In the same spirit, I actually would love to talk about Nidan, and more specifically, about one of the other case studies from Bihar in India, that was created in the spirit and traditions of SEWA [Self-Employed Women’s Association] - a self-employed women's collective that works with over 1.2 million women across India, through their cooperatives. And in the spirit of that worked with the street vendors, the informal workers and street vendors in India. So as you probably know well, 90% of India's workforce is in the informal economy. All labor law to protect, support, and uphold rights for workers only covers 10% of the workforce. And therefore street vendors were, in particular, at risk from municipalities and cities trying to clean up and impose hygiene standards, or corrupt officials seeking to extort and impose abuses on street vendors.

An Nidan has been really interesting in terms of, at the core, what it does is not to try to help solve any of these problems - simila

Matthew Bishop (MB): Hello, this is Matthew Bishop with Books Driving Change. And today I'm talking with Peter Coleman of Columbia University, one of the co-founders of the Difficult Conversations Lab, which explores what do we do about toxic conversations, a subject that hopefully won't refer to the conversation we're having together now -- which will hopefully be a very positive conversation. But, obviously, we are at a time of increasing polarization in the world. And a lot of conversations seem to end up being more counterproductive than productive. 

Peter has written a book called The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, which is something that anyone listening to this podcast will want to know the answer to. So Peter, can I just start by asking you in one sentence, given the audience that this podcast has of people engaged in trying to bring about positive change -- why should they read the book?

Peter Coleman (PC): Well, thank you, Matthew, for having me. So the reason I wrote the book is that I feel that there is significant misunderstanding of the nature of the problem of what I call “toxic polarization”, which is unlike typical forms of polarization -- it's more extreme, it's more entrenched, it's more long term. And so what I offer in the book, and I think is relevant to your listening audience, is a different theory of change. Typically, how we think about addressing things like political polarization is that we go after key pieces of the problem. But we don't understand how the problem works as a whole, as a system, as a series of forces that kind of align and feed each other in complicated ways. 

And this book offers an alternative theory of change, it contrasts our typical kind of scientific approach of looking for the essence of a problem, and says this problem of toxic polarization has many essences. And more importantly, these essences align and feed each other in complex ways that really make it, as a cultural phenomenon, highly resistant to change. And so it's important that we understand how problems like these, wicked problems, actually do change, and what to do about them based on science. And so that's why I wrote this book -- to offer this alternative theory of change.

MB: And it is an optimistic book, fundamentally, which is interesting because you start talking about how everyone's feeling so miserable now, and this is actually a reason for optimism. Why do you make that point?

PC: Well, because one of the things we've learned from the study of deeply divided societies that actually do come out of this time and pivot into a more constructive direction, is that there are a couple of basic conditions that often are associated with that kind of change. One is that there is a sufficient level of misery within the political middle -- what in ripeness theory they call a “mutually hurting stalemate”, where you are sort of exhausted and fed up and really don't want to continue to engage in the same way, and you want to do something different. And certainly in America, but in many places in the U.K. and around the world, there is a growing, exhausted, middle majority that's fed up with the political vitriol that we see, the dysfunction that we see, and really seeking an alternative. So in that way, the ground is ripe for a movement that offers people a vision for how to change. But in addition to being miserable, they need to have some clear sense of what to do. What is the alternative? What are the steps? And that's why I wrote this book.

MB: I'm very struck by how you are coming at this -- as someone who, as you talked about in the beginning of the book, grew up in a very difficult situation. You weren't in a well-to-do family, your father was being pursued by violent men, I think you say for gambling issues, you ended up getting your Ph.D. after a long and difficult process and welfare support, and all sorts of things in a single-parent home. And you know many people. You identify as much with Trump supporters in some ways as you do with his critics. About halfway through the book, you say, “Dear reader, I hope half of you are Trump supporters and half of you aren't”, or words to that effect. This is such an unusual voice at the moment, given the politics that we're seeing in America, and as you also say, around the world. How do you feel we can get beyond this pro-Trump/anti-Trump mindset and get to some of these underlying systemic changes that we need?

PC: My journey to some degree is unique, because I was born in a place and at a time with folks that were disenfranchised, and I was as a young person I kind of worked my way out of that. And now I live this Columbia University professor on the Upper West Side of Manhattan [life], which is a very progressive arena. So I've experienced both worlds, and have empathy for both worlds. And ultimately, I think that's the question -- is how do we create some kind of trusted process or system where people can rediscover the empathy that we have for one another, and rediscover some sense of unity and connectedness? 

And again, what I propose, or what I argue, is that this is hard. We are, in some ways, in a mass addiction. I see toxic polarization as a bio/psycho/social/structural process like addiction. It's something that's within us, it’s, in some ways, [something] we’ve embodied in our neurological structures -- how we see the world, what we react to emotionally. So there's a kind of basic internal component of this, but then there are psychological components. And it's embedded in our relationships -- who we speak with, who we don't speak with. It's embedded in the media that we do and do not consume, in the internet spaces that we do and do not travel to, and even physically where we go in our life. So there are many levels and layers to this trap that we're in. And it's not going to be something easy to escape from. It's not just that we decide, Okay, I've had enough of this, I'm moving on. We definitely need to have that. But we really need to recognize that this is going to be hard work. And some of the folks that have read the book have suggested, Wow, this is hard work. And the answer is yes. 

John Paul Lederach, a colleague of mine who does a lot of peace building around the world, once in Northern Ireland said to a Northern Irish audience, “It's probably going to take you as long to get out of this conflict as it did to get into it.” And he said, he almost got thrown out of the room. Because people don't want to hear that, they want to hear that there are simple solutions. What I lay out is a sequence of processes, strategies, steps, that can move us in a much more positive direction. But they're not simple answers to this complex problem that we're embedded in.

MB: One of my takeaways from the book is, and you also refer to it in various points in the book, this notion of “complicate things” as a way to to help. Because there is a tendency to think quite simplistically about this. Those of us that are saying, “Let's try and heal the divide, or let’s try and put a Trump voter in a room with a progressive and the hope that they'll figure things out.” And it's all quite naive. Where do people tend to go wrong when they try to take that approach?

PC: So that approach is based on something called “contact theory'', which Gordon Allport developed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, to break down racism in this country. And it is the basic idea that if you have groups of people that have no contact with each other, no connection to each other, that sometimes just bringing them together and having them realize that each one is a human with kids and interests, and they like music, and they like to dance, and they start to rehumanize members of the other group. And that can have a transformative effect. And that's a very powerful theory and model that's often used in intergroup disputes. But when you have groups of people that are deeply passionate, deeply ideological, and living in parallel opposing media echo systems, then just saying, Go off and have a cup of coffee in the same room and chat with one another, can easily backfire. And in fact, if you push some of the people that encourage such interventions these days, they'll tell you those stories of these well-intentioned, well-designed interventions that blow up and that backfire. 

And in fact, there is Pew Research suggesting that when people get together across political divisions these days, the vast majority of us leave those conversations more frustrated, more alienated from the other side. So it doesn't help, typically, under these conditions, to just bring people together. And so what I argue is that we need to know what the science tells us. Contact theory has been studied over 500 times for decades. And what we know is that there are certain conditions where that works. And there's certain conditions where it doesn't work. And when you're dealing with true believers, it doesn't work, it's insufficient.

MB: And you illustrate this at the start of the book with this discussion, or description, of an effort around the anti-abortion/pro-choice debate in Boston, where a number of leaders on both sides were brought together, and they met together over over a period of time, and it seemed to make a difference. Can you just explain what was the magic sauce in that approach?

PC: I think tenacity, courage, and perseverance. So there was an incident that happened. Boston in the ‘80s and ‘90s was a very divided place. It's highly Catholic, 36% Catholic population. And the abortion debate was very hostile and intense in that community and becoming increasingly so. And then in 1994, there was a horrific shooting that took place in a couple of women's clinics -- women were shot dead, harmed, injured, and it was a rupture. And it really kind of destabilized the status quo. 

And so the Archdiocese and the Governor and the Mayor were all calling for sort of talks. And how do you change a culture of vitriol and hate through talks? It seems to be an almost impossible thing to do. So there was a group called the Public Conversations Project. And I tell this story in the beginning of the book, because I think it's a great parable for our time. We too, in the pro-Trump/anti-Trump world or pro-Brexit/anti-Brexit world, we are true believers in some ways.

MB: The abortion issue is coming back up on the agenda in America in a big way, in that true believer way, is it not?

PC: Absolutely yes, it's being triggered in multiple states simultaneously. So, it is a parable of our time. But what happened was, this group called the Public Conversations Project had been doing dialogue processes with pro-life/pro-choice groups, bringing them together before the shooting. And so they had a network there. And what they did is they reached out to three prominent pro-life leaders and three prominent pro-choice leaders, and they said to them, “Would you consider just coming together for a couple of weeks, and have some conversations in order to prevent further violence and kind of bring the temperature down?” And all of these women were afraid of the other side, literally. The pro-life women met in a Friendly's restaurant and prayed to God that they would be forgiven for sitting down with these evil murderers. And the other side was very afraid of their reputation and their physical safety, especially in the wake of this violence. But they agreed to come together, they talked for about a month, and albeit difficult, it went well enough that they decided to go to the one year anniversary of the shooting. And the conversations continued. And they actually had in-secret dialogues, clandestine dialogues, between these six people and the facilitators that their families and communities did not know anything about for five and a half years. And then in January of 2001, they came out publicly in the Boston Globe, they co-published an article called Talking With the Enemy -- which I'd recommend that your readers or your listeners read. And they talk about this experience and how it changed them and their relationships and their understanding of the issues. 

And ironically, and I think, importantly, they all to a person became further apart on the issue of abortion. Their attitudes on the issues became even more crystallized, so that they still fundamentally differed on the issue. But their relationships and care and respect for one another, and care for their community, and the rhetoric they used in their activism, all changed fundamentally. And that interaction with those six women and two facilitators had first and second and third order effects in the Boston community in how activism around these issues were taken up and what the rhetoric was. And ultimately, they think even sort of affected the movement more broadly in terms of bringing down the temperature of hate and vilification of the other side.

MB: That goes to one of your points about, Let's get away from the actual point of dispute in these situations and think more about the context, the broader context, that things are operating in, and find common ground in the context, which you can build on. 

PC: They were able to recognize that they all cared for women -- young, pregnant, teen pregnancy. That they had common interests about violence and keeping violence at bay in the community and protecting one another from that. They could actually write grants together. And ironically, this was 25 years ago, and today, they're still friends. It's still a group of people that celebrate births and deaths and come together when they need support. So they grew very fond of one another. And they fundamentally differed on this issue. And that is the essence here. It is when policy becomes personal and becomes ideological. [For example when we] take things like “Let's build the wall” or “Not build a wall” as the slogans for immigration, we lose a sense of the immense complexity of immigration policies and over simplify the issue that positions them. And then we're nowhere, that's when we get stuck.

MB: So what would you draw as lessons from that for today and how the abortion debate might play out less harmfully, then some people feel it will do now, in America?

PC: What I do in the book is try to use the evidence-based science that has been done by our group and by other groups, and pull out five basic principles of what helps to basically navigate the wa