The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace, and World

By Arnold Mindell

Most of us are terrified of conflict, says Arnold Mindell, PhD, author of fifteen books and internationally recognized for his innovative synthesis of Jungian therapy, dreams, and bodywork. But we needn't be. His burning passion is to create groups and organizations where everyone looks forward to group processes instead of fearing them. He calls this the deep democracy of open forums, where all voices, thoughts, and feelings are aired freely, especially the ones nobody wants to hear.

Since 1992, one of Mindell's prime interests has been the bringing of deeper awareness to group conflicts. Conflict work without reference to altered states of consciousness is like a flu shot for someone in a manic or depressed state of consciousness. Most group and social problems cannot be well facilitated or resolved without access to the dreamlike and mystical atmosphere in the background. The key is becoming aware of it.

Mindell introduces a new paradigm for working in groups, from 3 to 3,000, based on awareness of the flow of signals and events. You can take the subtlest of signals indicating the onset of emotions such as fear, anger, hopelessness, and other altered states, and use them to transform seemingly impossible problems into uplifting community experiences.

As Mindell explains, "I share how everyone--people in schools and organizations, communities and governments--can use inner experiences, dreaming, and mysticism, in conjunction with real methods of conflict management, to produce lively, more sustainable, conscious communities."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781612831503

Book preview

Preface

Democracy insists only that every person be represented. On the other hand, when we extend democracy with the idea of deep democracy to organize our interactions, networks, and the well-being of our communities and nations, each of us—not only the leaders or facilitators—deals with outer facts and problems, and also the subtlest feelings and dreams of everyone concerned (Mindell 1992, 1997).

For organizations, communities, and nations to succeed today and survive tomorrow, they must be deeply democratic—that is, everyone and every feeling must be represented. Deep democracy is awareness of the diversity of people, roles, and feelings, and a guesthouse attitude toward whatever comes to the door of one's attention. Positive organizational changes based on democracy's facts and figures do not work for long if we ignore our deepest feelings about the issues. In my earlier books on deep democracy, (or DD), I claim that future governments can only succeed with awareness of feelings and dreams. When we are asked to become aware of and value our deepest inner experiences, almost any group or world situation becomes immediately different, and manageable. Deep democracy is a crucial concept that can help shape the future.

While completing this book, I was pleasantly surprised to find articles in the U.S. news using the term and the ideas of deep democracy as I described in my 1992 book, Leader as Martial Artist: An Introduction to Deep Democracy. Little did I think, in 1992, that the DD concept would catch on so quickly or that U.S. Vice President A1 Gore, first lady Hillary Clinton, or presidential candidate Ralph Nader, and others would consider deep democracy as part of their visions for the future.

However, visions of how to run organizations are far from being facts. To realize the vision of deep democracy, with its insistence on making inner experience an organizational issue, we must learn the details about how to use deep democracy to resolve organizational and government issues. Therefore, in this book, I look forward to sharing with you and describing

How to recognize and explore conflict, instead of conflicting with conflict and repressing it

Ways to enjoy and know your deepest self during group meetings

How to use inner experience in organizations

How to put deep democracy into practice when complex feelings and diversity issues are at stake

How to apply deep democracy to create preventative medicine in organization meetings such as Open Forums, in all sorts of communities, at any time, and especially during crisis periods

How to work with the surface issues that trouble our organizations, and explore the deepest feelings, dreams, and stories that create communities

How the mysterious background that hovers around each of us and our organizations contains the power of change

My burning passion in writing this book is to create groups and organizations where everyone looks forward to group processes, instead of fearing them. My personal agenda is that everyone in organizations will make a transition from being either a participant or a facilitator to what I call a participant-facilitator. I would like all of us to enjoy playing the single role we have in the larger body, and in addition, I want us each to become one of its wise elders, in the role of the facilitator making group life easier for all. Anyone, in any position, be it low or high, is potentially such an elder!

Furthermore, it is my hope that organizations will get to know the mystical background that moves them. In fact, awareness of this background is a central organizational and social issue. I feel that social and practical problems cannot be well facilitated without access to the dreamlike atmosphere in the background.

Our organizations, communities, and world can be amazing places to live and work if each of us knows about the responsibility of using our own awareness as a participant-facilitator, acts as one who cares for the system's process, and sees its real and imaginary dimensions. Knowing these dimensions gives each of us more power than we realize; as participant-facilitators anyone can influence even the most intractable organization. Far from being disempowered individuals in the hands of powerful people and massive world machines, each of us has the ability to stop the cycles of history in which power moves from tyrants to the tyranny of the oppressed. In the terms of Carlos Castaneda's shaman teacher, Don Juan Matus, each of us has the power to stop the world (Castaneda 1972).

Process work is a wide-spectrum approach to working with human problems, based on awareness of signals and events occurring in the moment. Process workers attempt to follow inner experience and outer situations. Process-oriented is the attitude that the solutions to problems can be found in the process, that is, the flow of events and signals.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of process-oriented organizational work, and its application to group meetings such as Open Forums, is the special combination of inner and outer awareness work. Process-oriented facilitation works with our inner lives and dreams, as well as with group life, and its dreams and stories. Process-work organizations around the world have tested and applied the DD methods I describe in this book in all sorts of organizations and Open Forums to improve the overall living and working atmosphere in communities, as well as in severe conflict zones in the world.

The methods described here are based on more than thirty years of experience with internationally diverse groups of people in the midst of multicultural, local, and international conflicts—in families, businesses, inner-city streets, and war zones. There are applications of this work to organizational development in small and large businesses, schools, churches, labor unions, military groups, and city problems including ethnic-conflict situations, mediation programs, community centers, neighborhood associations, and cooperative projects between associations. We recently used the methods of this book to deal with issues concerning an old concentration camp.

The histories of each organization, its life-and-death struggles, are abbreviated forms of world history. In and around our groups, subtle conflicts create and annihilate organizations. World history provides us with the outer, observable facts of conflict, which are the natural consequences of the behavior of small organizations. I don't like or completely trust statistics, but I do wish to consider one historical fact: Twenty-five million people have been killed while fighting in wars between 1945 and the present. In other words, an average of a half million a year, that is, more than a thousand people a day, die in war every day of the year.

It seems obvious that war is one of our most severe global problems and that democracy has not reduced the number of conflicts. In fact, although pyramidal structures of authority are breaking down worldwide, and self-organizing, cooperative networks of horizontal relationships are emerging, the resulting tensions have not diminished as a whole. In fact, they often seem to be accentuated.

The same holds true for organizations on a smaller level. People are hurt or killed, so to speak, every day. As a consultant to organizations, I often observe that destructive conflicts could be avoided if people noticed them and dealt with group tension. However, the opposite is true: Most people avoid group tensions. In fact, the greatest world war may well be conflict with conflict. Why? In a way, it's simple.

Most of us are terrified of conflict. Although there are fewer political dictators and more democracy in the world today, tyrannical leaders still flourish everywhere, and most go unseen in every corner of even the nicest organizations. Such dictators can be found terrifying people in the most democratic organizations. Few of us seem to realize that while these tyrants might be the boss, they might also be just about anyone else in the organization—including ourselves. In fact, we or someone else can become terrifying, even while we are trying to save the day by insisting others be more egalitarian and conscious. Often such well-meaning, group consciousness bringers are unaware of how they push others about. Any one of us can unwittingly hurt others simply by being unaware of the powers we have and how we use them. If we are not careful, the very attempt to raise consciousness can simply recycle the very abusive behavior we hope to correct.

The book's chapters show how to notice signals, become aware of the roles we play in a given moment, and become fluid in communicating and dealing with role switching and in what I call community dreaming. Without such awareness, we are likely to ignore our own behavior and the signals of others, thereby inadvertently supporting the abuse of power. Without awareness, we usually gossip about troublesome people instead of noticing and learning how to deal with organizational trouble. Perhaps we are afraid or don't really know what to tell them or how to advise them in improving their interpersonal skills. Or we run, shrinking our potential ability to change the situation, and are satisfied with retreating into the identity of a powerless participant who is the victim of her organization, dreaming of some heroic facilitator who will one day appear on her horse to save the situation.

Organizations often seem to be like families in which one or two nasty individuals dominate everyone else, while others watch in fear or look the other way. Since no one stops such unwittingly abusive individuals, they grow in strength, until the whole organization, or even society, must deal with them by imposing rules, laws, and worse.

My point is that considering the dictators or the system to be the problem is superficial. The deeper problem lies with the manner in which all of us do or do not use our awareness of the roles and ghosts (that is, third parties who are spoken about but not directly represented) in community. Each time we ignore our own hurtful signals and the signals of others, each time we ignore ghosts, we co-create a terrifying world, and destroy our own organizations.

Until now, most conflict work has been based on essentially logical procedures, good ideas, and above all, on our ordinary states of consciousness, where people are usually expected to be pleasant. That is why such conflict work is rarely successful in dealing with tension. Namely, we are rarely in ordinary states of consciousness when accusations and retaliation occur. Fear and anger abound. Heightened discipline and stronger enforcement of rules will never be enough to deal with the problems of our world. Conflict work without reference to altered states of consciousness is like a flu shot for someone in a manic or depressed state of consciousness.

In this book, I use a new paradigm for working in large groups, one based on awareness of the flow of signals and events. By focusing on the subtlest signals indicating the onset of emotions such as fear, anger, hopelessness, and other altered states of consciousness, even apparently impossible problems transform into enriching community experiences. I will share how everyone—people in schools and organizations, communities and governments—can use inner experiences, dreaming, and mysticism in conjunction with real methods of conflict management to produce lively, more sustainable, conscious communities.

I am thankful to those teenagers (who want to remain anonymous) and their parents who inadvertently got me started on this book. I am especially grateful to the Native American, Aboriginal Australian, African, African American, Asian, Hispanic, European, gay, and straight groups with whom I have worked and tested the ideas in this book. I am indebted to the process-work communities around the world for having tested many of the practices recommended in this book. I am also grateful to the small and large business organizations around the world for helping me apply this work to change such organizations into communities.

I want to thank Susan Kocen for transcribing the original notes from my class on the Open Forum at the Process Work Center in Portland, Oregon. For her support in editing this manuscript, thanks go to Margaret Ryan. I am also thankful to the following readers who greatly improved this work by giving me their insightful comments. (They are not responsible for its errors!) Thanks to Lane Arye, Tom Atlee, Midi Berry, Daniel Bowling, Jim Chamberlin, Hanna Chung, Julie Diamond, Ela Dieda, Jan Dworkin, Joe Goodbread, Kate Jobe, John Johnson, David Jones, Gene Hanson, J. J. Hendricks, Peter Irving, Robert King, Lukas Hohler, Ursula Hohler, Mary McAuley, Dawn Menken, Carl Mindell, Pearl Mindell, Ingrid Rose, Martha Sandbower, Heike Spoddeck, Wilma Jean Tucker, and Lily Vassiliou. Special thanks go to my editor at Hampton Roads, Richard Leviton.

My teammate in all community work, Amy Mindell, suffered, played, and helped me sit in the fire and work with more than one hundred thousand people worldwide, engaged in hundreds of community processes, organizational procedures, and disputes. This manuscript could not have been created without her. By joining me in this work, Amy has eased the pain of my search for a better world.

PART I

Conducting an Open Forum

CHAPTER 1

Beyond the Rules of Order

We cannot dismantle one system without having another in its place.

—Mahatma Gandhi (Sharp 1973)

To understand yourself, you need to explore your inner experiences. Likewise, if multileveled organizations want to know themselves, they need to explore Open Forums to understand their various parts. Open Forums in my definition are structured, person-to-person or cyberspace, democratic meetings, in which everyone feels represented. Furthermore, they are facilitated in a deeply democratic manner, which means the deepest feelings and dreams can also be expressed. In other words, the Open Forum is to a corporation or city as innerwork is to an individual. The analogy between the innerwork of an individual and an organization's Open Forum goes even further. Just as your personal learning depends on how open you are to your various parts, feelings, and dream figures, an organization's self-discovery process depends on openness to the diversity of its individual members, and the diversity of their inner and outer worlds.

Diversity awareness is multileveled: It is a matter of noticing cultures, ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, religions, economic backgrounds, jobs, abilities, and worldviews and dreams. Process-oriented work with organizations is based on awareness of and bringing forth the richness of our total diversity and complexity.

It is said of Gandhi that he didn't want to win battles; he wanted to win hearts and minds (Atlee; Bondurant 1965). The methods of the process-oriented Open Forum aim at doing exactly that. By fostering awareness of the deepest feelings and communication signals of everyone in the community, we can create nonviolent yet direct exchanges. The new procedures presented in the following chapters are adapted to working with organizations not as mechanical entities, but as living systems, be they schools, businesses, or cities.

It often seems to me as if the very people we have made responsible for leadership and global change are not always the best for the job. Most organizational and world leaders, activists, and politicians have little training in understanding people or helping groups to change. Yet most of us who are supposed to know most about personal transformation—namely, those in the helping professions—usually avoid organizational tasks and the problems of social transformation. The lack of conscious leadership is why troubled organizations turn against their troubles, and conflict with conflict. They assume that existing conflict is wrong.

Process ideas are different. Instead of thinking in terms of the paradigm that condemns what's going on in a given conflict situation and implementing programs, methods, and procedures that implicitly look down on the people involved, process-oriented organizational work discovers the missing power of transformation in the tension itself and in people's behavior. In the new paradigm, conflict itself is the fastest way to community. Conflict is its own healing.

Democratic methods, rules, and laws alone do not create a sense of community. Rules and laws may govern mechanical systems, but not people. The new paradigm, which I describe in the following chapters, acknowledges that organizations are partially mechanical beings needing behavior change. However, in the new paradigm, organizations are also living organisms whose lifeblood is composed of feelings, beliefs, and dreams. Ignoring the flow of this blood, that is, moment-to-moment experiences, disregards emotions and represses what I call the dreaming background to the everyday life of schools, businesses, and cities. Ignoring the dreaming background eventually depresses us. When facts become more important than feelings and dreams, we get bored, don't vote, won't go to meetings, avoid relationship problems, and become disinterested in public life. Disinterested participants erode organizations, precipitating their collapse as if they were empty, paper buildings.

In today's world, good ideas don't work without communication awareness. One side cannot truly win in a battle. In addition, one method alone cannot deal with human issues for long. In fact, our organizations are no longer localized in one spot; cyberspace changed all that! There are no longer simple localities in our second-millennium world. We are rather a planet of interconnections.

Therefore, creating deep democracy deals with community members not only as separate, local entities but also as sensitive, nonlocal interconnecting spirits of the times, which are constantly changing. In other words, each of our viewpoints has something global and eternal about it, for even if we are not around, there is always someone else who seems to fill in for us. In fact, any viewpoint is more like a ghost than a fact. Even when no single person represents that viewpoint, it sort of spooks us. We have all witnessed at one time or another how roles such as the rebel or the unconscious leader hover like spirits around groups.

Even in serious situations, process-oriented Open Forums can bring out the spirits in the background in a playful manner to reveal the community as a global, dreaming being in the midst of self-discovery. By taking the group's process as a teacher, everyone becomes a learner and leader, including young children and longtime gang leaders. According to William Ury in his excellent 1999 book, Getting to Peace, In 10,000 schools in this country, kids as young as six or seven are learning peer mediation. He tells us that in the cities of the United States gang leaders often become the best mediators, they command respect for the transformation they've gone through. The awareness methods of process-oriented Open Forums work in face-to-face interactions and on the Internet.

Using awareness in groups allows us to discover ourselves, the way we are. With awareness, we have access not only to our emotions, but also to detachment. Anyone who uses her awareness to enter the heart of conflict knows from personal experience that the emotions that arise are not always predictable. For example, I know from my own experience that the feelings involved in tense situations touch me deeply. Sometimes people scare me; they make me feel sad, or even removed from situations. If I use my awareness, I notice that sometimes my body shakes, as if I were in the presence of a huge monster, although the person I am facing seems to be acting timidly. Using awareness connects me to the excitement, the wildness and love in any given moment. Using awareness is a very different paradigm from using rules and power, because with awareness, the next step is not always predictable. Even monsters can be present.

Taoism: Ancient Chinese Paradigm for Process Work

To get along with change and survive the stress of conflict, we need some paradigm that is beyond those of danger and safety, war and peace, violence and nonviolence. These viewpoints are either for or against what is actually happening. If for any reason, you are against either conflict or peace, you tend to ignore anger and/or quietness in groups. Process-oriented facilitators do not use peace paradigms, which wage war against conflict. Process work is based on an ancient Chinese belief in nature called Taoism, which includes all possible states of mind such as conflict and peace, stagnation and breakthrough. The philosophy of Taoism is expressed in eighty-one sayings of the Tao Teh Ching. The various states of consciousness Taoism encompasses can be seen in the sixty-four chapter headings of