Possible, p.23
Possible, page 23
In my daily phone call with my mother, I told her about the request.
“Aren’t you going to go?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t feel right leaving the country right now with you being ill. I want to stay close.”
“You have to go. They need your help.”
“I know, but you’re not well. I need to be here.”
“I want you to go. Please go for my sake,” my mother insisted.
“Mom . . . I’m not sure.”
“Go help!”
She had the last word.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to helping is within us. It is the mistaken belief that we can’t really be of much assistance.
Help may be easier to provide than we think. We think we need to have an answer to help. We don’t. Instead, we can listen and ask basic problem-solving questions. We can offer counsel. We can facilitate genuine dialogue. And we can help mediate. The best answers emerge from a process in which the parties are fully involved and they themselves create and own the agreement.
Help can also be more useful to the parties than we may think. Asking good questions helps them zoom into what they really want and zoom out to see the bigger picture. Bringing people together to talk in a safe atmosphere can help people connect with and understand one another better. Mediating can help them reach a satisfying agreement they can all live with. The right kind of help can often make the difference between a destructive stalemate and a satisfying yes.
Last, if we are one of the parties in conflict, help from the third side is more available and accessible than we may think. The third side is all around us. As I learned in dealing with my family’s inheritance, we may be able to find help more easily than we can imagine.
Each of us is a potential thirdsider, and each of us has a supportive role to play in the conflicts around us.
Go help.
Chapter 11
Swarm
From Latent to Mobilized
When spider webs unite, they can halt even a lion.
—Ethiopian proverb
Who can do what tomorrow morning to interrupt the escalation to nuclear war with North Korea?”
That was the question I posed to twelve volunteers assembled for a two-week social experiment in a rental house in Boulder, Colorado, in October 2017.
It had all begun with a conversation five weeks earlier with Patrice Martin, a leading practitioner of design thinking. I was asking her advice about how design thinking—a human-centered approach to innovation—could help tackle seemingly impossible conflicts.
“What is your dream?” she asked me.
“What’s so often missing in these conflicts, Patrice, is a critical mass of creative collaboration. In Silicon Valley, they swarm tough, seemingly impossible software problems. My dream is high-performing teams of people swarming the world’s toughest conflict situations.”
“What does swarm mean to you?” Patrice asked.
“Come at the problem creatively from all sides. Deploy a team with diverse perspectives. Use radical collaboration. Continue intensively until you crack the problem open with new possibilities.”
“Why don’t you just simulate what you want to see happen?” asked Patrice. “Just do it for two weeks. That would give you an idea of what to do next. In design thinking, we call this rapid prototyping. You try out something rudimentary as an experiment and keep on improving it until you have something that works.”
“Sounds great. How would we start?”
“First, pick a problem.”
I had just returned from a second meeting with Dennis Rodman, and North Korea was very much on my mind.
“Is it better to pick a smaller problem that seems more solvable, or is it okay to pick a big, seemingly impossible problem?” I asked. “I’m thinking about how we can prevent a nuclear war with North Korea.”
“Pick the one where you have energy. There is magic in setting a date and just starting. Don’t wait,” Patrice urged.
My colleague Liza Hester and I picked a date five weeks out. We put out a call to our network of colleagues to see who would, with little notice, free themselves up for two weeks to participate in this unusual experiment. We interviewed and selected twelve people with a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds. They included an international lawyer, a couple of trained mediators, a strategic storyteller, and a military veteran. None had expertise on North Korea, but the point was simply to simulate a swarm.
I asked my friend Rob Evans, a masterful facilitator of collective intelligence and creativity, if he would help, and he readily agreed. He brought a gifted graphic artist with him. We rented a house nearby and filled it with huge display boards, flip charts, colored markers, plenty of sticky notes, and collaborative workspaces.
The social experiment began. We nicknamed ourselves a SWAT team for peace. Our job was to swarm the US–North Korea conflict from all perspectives to see if we could discern possible ways to avert a catastrophic war.
SWARM TO TRANSFORM
In the tech world, “swarming” refers to the self-organizing collaboration of a network to solve a problem in a flexible and innovative fashion. Instead of each person working on a separate project, team members focus their attention collectively on one project until it is solved. The goal is to deliver high-quality results in the time required with every team member playing to their strengths.
Swarming is precisely what we need to transform the challenging conflicts we face in today’s world.
To swarm a conflict means to surround it with a critical mass of ideas and influence.
Swarming uses the power of the many, mobilizing the latent potential of the community.
Just as birds gather in a swarm to defend their nest from a marauding hawk and interrupt an act of destruction, people from the community can work together in a concentrated way to interrupt a destructive conflict and set it on a more constructive path.
When the Kua people of the Kalahari hide the poison arrows and gather around the campfire, they are swarming the conflict. When business, labor, faith, and civic leaders came together to create the National Peace Accord in South Africa, they were swarming the conflict to put an end to apartheid.
Whereas hosting takes care of the people and helping addresses the problem, swarming adds to the mix the critical missing element of power. When conflict escalates and one party tries to impose its will on the other with force, it can take the power of a united community to halt the fighting and start the talking.
With power comes responsibility. The more power is exercised, the more respect needs to be shown if that power is not to backfire. The intention of a swarm is to transform the conflict for the long-term benefit of the parties and the community.
I appreciate that the word swarm is an intense one, bringing up connotations of menace for some, as when bees or insects swarm. It may help to remember that it is not a person who is swarmed; it is the conflict that is swarmed. Attack the problem, not the person.
SWARM WITH IDEAS
Swarming is the culminating move on the path to possible. It integrates the balcony, the bridge, and the third side.
“We are on the balcony,” I told the volunteers on the SWAT team for peace, “a place where we can see the bigger picture and focus on what really matters. We are trying to build a golden bridge for the parties. And we all belong to the third side, the larger community worried about a conflict that threatens our world right now.
“You have one job, and that is to figure out who can do what tomorrow morning to interrupt the escalation toward nuclear war. That is the question I want you to live and breathe for the next two weeks. Read as much as you find useful, call up and interview experts, be open to new ideas, and see what you can come up with.
“I’d like us to write a script in which these two leaders, each with their finger on the button, end up finding a better way to deal with their differences. What are their victory speeches?
“Our motto is humble audacity. Let’s be audacious enough to believe we might make a contribution. At the same time, let’s be humble enough to know how little we know so we can listen with a beginner’s mind to all the knowledge and experience out there.”
We broke up into small groups and set up a Team Trump and a Team Kim. The teams were assigned the task of learning as much as possible about the leaders both as human beings and as decision makers. What motivates them? What was their childhood like? How do they see the world? How do they make decisions—who influences them, and what can change their minds?
“Even if you disagree with the person, try to put yourself in their shoes. What does it feel like to be in their place? Practice strategic empathy—empathy with a purpose. Only by understanding them do we have a chance to influence them to make the right decision.”
Team Trump researched every statement and tweet Donald Trump had made on the subject of North Korea going back twenty-five years. They wrote each one on a sticky note and placed them in a row on a display board to see if any patterns could be discerned.
The team also researched specific instances in which Trump had changed his mind on a political decision. How had that happened? Who had he listened to, and what factors had influenced him most? We came to appreciate Trump’s unusual flexibility—how he could change his mind on a dime and still frame it as a win.
One team member, Gia Medeiros, who worked in marketing and strategic communication, called up a reality TV producer who had worked with Donald Trump on The Apprentice.
“If this were a reality TV show, how could it end well?” she asked him.
“Well the first rule of reality TV is ‘Whatever you do, don’t be boring.’ The same person can’t always be the villain. You always need a surprise or plot twist.”
That was an aha! for us as we thought about how to find a way out for Trump.
We reached out to speak on Zoom with experts: professors who had studied the conflict, ex-diplomats who had dealt with North Korea, ex–intelligence analysts, anyone who could give us insight. We also sought out unlikely perspectives such as that of a former gang member who talked to us about effective methods for interrupting violence between gang leaders. The team listened carefully for any insights and wrote them down on sticky notes. We posted them on the flip charts and analyzed them for clues and further questions to pursue.
The entire house was filled with display boards with large sheets of paper capturing all we were learning, almost as if we were trying to solve a crime and track down all the missing data. We listed all the key players in the drama—from Washington to Pyongyang to Seoul to Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, and beyond. The team wrote up background profiles of the key individual decision makers. That was the virtue of having twelve minds single-mindedly focused like a laser for two weeks on a single question: Who can do what tomorrow morning to reduce the risk of nuclear war?
At the end of every day, we assembled in the living room and listed on a wall chart:
“What have we learned today?”
“What worked?”
“What needs to be changed for tomorrow?”
And every morning, we assembled again to ask ourselves about any insights or new questions and plan the day accordingly. Our relentless focus was on learning and improving what we were doing. We were practicing “rapid prototyping.”
Our aim was to swarm the problem with multiple perspectives and ideas and to find multiple points of contact that could open the way for productive negotiations. Many creative possibilities emerged and were posted on the walls.
“Keep the ideas flowing,” I told the team. “But take them lightly, remembering how little we know. The key for us is to listen even more carefully to those who have thirty years of experience. Creativity that is ungrounded is useless. Experience without creativity won’t bring us a new approach. It is the blend of creativity with experience that is needed. Grounded imagination is the key.”
Understanding that it takes great teamwork to overcome tough challenges, we engaged in radical collaboration, sharing our ideas and perspectives freely, cheering on the creativity of others, and helping one another every step of the way. Each person felt encouraged to contribute their full potential. Together, our collective intelligence was far greater than the intelligence of any one of us.
The work pace was intense. At the same time, it felt satisfying to be tackling such a dangerous problem instead of just worrying about it. And—perhaps odd to say because of the gravity of the topic—it was fun. We ate together, went for walks together, took exercise breaks outside in the garden together. Our facilitator, Rob, played music during the breaks and encouraged us to move our bodies, dance, and shake out the worry.
We tried any modality that could open our minds, sharpen our creativity, increase our ability to collaborate, and augment our dogged persistence as we pursued one angle after another.
As we know from sports and music, the spirit of play can bring out our best performance and highest potential. In this experiment, I got a glimpse of the same power of play applied to the serious task of transforming a dangerous conflict.
It was a simulation of what I had dreamed of: a dedicated team swarming a difficult conflict. But it was not just a simulation; there was a real-time emergency in the world. As we spoke with those in the know, from former diplomats to academic experts, we heard from three separate people:
“This situation is getting really dangerous. We’re glad someone is doing something about it.”
That concerned us. Our two-week simulation had been intended, after all, as a social experiment. None of us was an expert on North Korea. Given the enormous gravity and urgency of the situation, one might be forgiven for thinking that there would be real teams of knowledgeable specialists working single-mindedly, day and night, on how to practically avert a potentially imminent catastrophic war. To our dismay, however, none of the many Korea experts with whom we spoke could name even one.
A great deal of intellectual effort was focused on analyzing the danger but comparatively little on averting the danger. There was a lot of prediction but very little prevention.
So even though we had initially planned for only a two-week simulation, the team and I made a decision: We would find a way to keep it going. We would try to turn our simulated swarm into a real swarm.
BUILD YOUR ACT
Good ideas are vital but useless unless there is a way to get them in front of key decision makers for their consideration. For that, we need ACT: A for access, C for credibility, T for trust.
Access means a connection to the people in conflict. Credibility is believability based on competence and track record. It is rational and comes from the head. Trust is believability based on intent and integrity. It is emotional and comes from the heart.
Among the Kua, the family and friends of those in conflict work together to persuade the parties to sit down, listen to each other, and eventually reconcile. The community, in effect, pools its access, credibility, and trust to sway the minds of the parties in conflict.
ACT is the basic currency of the third side, enabling the community to influence the parties to stop fighting and start talking.
If we don’t have access, credibility, and trust, we need to either build them or work with others who have them. When I became concerned about the risk of war with North Korea, I reached out to one of the few people I knew who had actually been to North Korea, my old negotiation colleague Jonathan Powell. I remembered a dinner in Colombia with him during which he had explained to me that once a year, he traveled to North Korea as part of a regular European political exchange with that country. I called Jonathan for advice.
“I am getting worried about what’s going on with North Korea. With Trump and Kim in a showdown, where is the off-ramp?
“When are you going back to North Korea?”
“Soon. So far our talks haven’t really produced anything useful. We just get the party line, but this time might be different. As luck would have it, our new interlocutor for the exchange is Ri Su Yong. He was the North Korean ambassador to Switzerland in the 1990s, when Kim studied there at a boarding school under a cover name.”
“Sounds like an opportunity.”
“Let’s see,” said Jonathan. “Meanwhile, why don’t you speak with Glyn Ford, who goes with me? He’s an ex–Labour MP and former European parliamentarian who has been traveling to North Korea for twenty-five years. He has been there almost forty times.”
I called Glyn, who told me:
“Meeting Ri Su Yong offers a real opportunity. He’s the highest-ranking foreign policy official in North Korea. Word has it that he took care of Kim and his sister while they were in Switzerland and was a kind of surrogate father. My guess is that Kim listens closely to him, given their longtime relationship.”
I arranged for Jonathan and Glyn separately to speak by Zoom to the SWAT team in Colorado to offer their impressions and ideas for a negotiated off-ramp. I tasked the team with this assignment:
“Jonathan and Glyn have built some ACT—access, credibility, and trust—with the North Koreans that could be useful. But how best should they use it? In a few weeks, they will be in Pyongyang. Imagine they have only an hour of substantive conversation with Ri Su Yong, who is close to Kim. Without naming names, I want you to get our experts’ advice on what questions Jonathan and Glyn should ask and what main points they should convey. What can they say to Ri that could possibly help de-escalate the situation?”
From that beginning, a swarm effort began as Jonathan, Glyn, and I worked closely together, supported by a team of researchers and analysts. In the year that followed, we made twenty-one trips to Washington, DC, Seoul, and Pyongyang. As a US citizen, I could not go to North Korea, but as British citizens, they could and did. Thanks to pooling and building our access, we ended up having more than eighty-five meetings with key policy officials in the three capitals.
