World Voices in a Polarized World: Application of “Voice Dialogue” Principles to Polarized Teams, Organizations, and World Affairs

By Ozlem Sarioglu

What do you do when a loved one does not hear you? How do you become a team with people who do not share your values? How do you handle a power game, when you do not want to play that game? What do you do to change the dynamics of a relationship with someone whose interest is vested on conflict rather than collaboration?

Today we are living in a world where polarization is more complex than ever. It is not only in the political sphere but also on the social, environmental, organizational and even on family level where we face conflict and polarization. In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, our disagreements in the workplace, within the family, among citizens or loved ones easily become polarized. Therefore, our past know-how on dealing with conflict is obsolete. We need to start approaching conflict and polarization with a new perspective.

The Voice Dialogue technique, which has been used in personal development and couple's therapy since 1980s, has the potential to offer this fresh perspective to the area of conflict resolution of complex systems. Ozlem Sarioglu guides us through the steps of applying this powerful technique to overcome polarization in teams, organizations, and world affairs.

Ozlem Sarioglu's book provides guidance on the following:

• Role of vulnerability at the face of inner and outer conflict

• Rethinking your anger and judgements to redesign your responses

• How to cut the fuel of polarization and change the dynamic of your relationships

• Tools and techniques applicable to team coaching and conflict resolution based on Voice Dialogue methodology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Redwood Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Oct 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947341593

Book preview

Preface

In late May 2013, what started as an environmentalist protest in Istanbul turned into a large-scale political uprising against the government throughout Turkey. Occupy Gezi lasted for a whole month and confused most politicians. The uprising did not have a particular leader, but the young people were at the front. Elder generations were surprised, saying, We thought these young people were apolitical. And an academic survey held among the protestors showed that in fact the protestors still considered themselves apolitical, not belonging to a particular political movement. Therefore, the reactions of the protestors kept on surprising and confusing everyone, as they did not fit into any political tradition.

I studied international relations in the university, yet never worked in that field. I began my professional life in the corporate world before transitioning into professional coaching seven years later. Now, I mostly work with corporate professionals to improve their business performance and their relations with their team members. Voice Dialogue is a transformational tool I was trained in, to use in individual sessions. I use the principles of the Psychology of Selves as a lens to understand the relationship issues of my clients. I have always been curious about how to apply these principles to more complex systems, like teams and organizations. But it was Occupy Gezi that made me think deeply about applying these principles not only to teams and organizations but also to politics and world issues.

The basic principle we learned in my university graduate classes about political science was that politics is a power game. Every effort to read what was going on in world affairs was translated into who was more powerful than the other and how there could be a balance of powers. However, the apolitical protestors of Occupy Gezi were not playing a power game. It was not your power versus my power. Instead they were protesting the limitation of their rights one by one: the right to have some green space, the right to kiss their lover in public, the right to have a few drinks after a certain hour, and, of course, the right to oppose something they don’t like. The protest was more like a teenager rebelling against a very strict and overly controlling father, so it felt more like a psychological issue than a political one. Yes, the protestors were calling on the government to resign, but they were not demanding to become the government themselves. The more politicians tried to react with their political spectacles on, the more unsolvable the crisis got.

Watching the events, I got a certain sense of what was happening, not based on my political science background, but instead based on my understanding of the Psychology of Selves. Yet I felt like a toddler: I kind of understood what was going on, but I didn’t have the words to describe it yet. So I started thinking, reading, and experimenting about it. This book came about as a product of that effort of trying on another language to understand the dynamics of polarization and its resolution.

It would be fair to say that when I started working as a professional in the corporate world and later began to coach professionals myself, I recognized that this power game assumption was not limited to politics. The power game was everywhere: within teams, among different teams in organizations, among different organizations. Some of these power games got so polarized that things got into a deadlock, where you could spend all your energy playing your power part in the game, rather than focusing on the work at hand and being creative and productive.

Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves bring a fresh new perspective to the assumption of a power game. Most relational coaching and conflict resolution techniques try to resolve issues on the level of polarity between the parties. Meanwhile, the Voice Dialogue literature suggests there is another dimension: "the polarity within each party. We not only take the power selves" of each party into consideration, but we also consider the whole dance from power to vulnerability and vice versa within and between the parties.

As Voice Dialogue practitioners, we have so far used this concept to understand and resolve polarizations in only two-person relationships, mostly couples. I truly believe the world needs this perspective not only for couples but also for teams, organizations, politics, and world affairs. Therefore, this book is a product of that effort of adopting Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves principles in the area of complex systems with multiple players.

When I shared the draft manuscript of the book with friends, they asked which of my selves and vulnerabilities were active when I decided to write this book. My analytical self, which wanted to map what’s going on in the world, was the leading force. I must admit that there also was a magical child, who wanted to use her magic wand and make things better. And there was a responsible self, who as a citizen of the world wanted to make her own contribution. The shared vulnerability of these forces is the sadness of seeing young people—physically or spiritually—dying, polar bears suffering, and Mother Earth losing her abundance and beauty. Among all the other selves in me, I’m choosing a silent, earthly self who believes in planting seeds and then letting the universe do whatever it needs to do. This book is one of those seeds.

Chapter 1

POLARIZATION

POLARIZATION IN TODAY’S WORLD

We have been living in a world of polarity for ages. We don’t need to go back centuries to remember that during the First and Second World Wars, countries of the world were divided into two. In the Cold War years, the world was polarized as capitalists versus communists. These polarizations were happening on political and ideological levels, and although being fabricated to some extent through print or broadcast media, it still was a bipolar world.

However, today we are living in a more complex polarization. Take the U.S. presidential election of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump in 2016. Trump became the president by a slight edge. Take the UK referendum for Brexit: leave was chosen by just 51% of the voters. Consider the Turkish referendum to change the constitution toward a presidential system in 2017. Although the results were controversial, yes to change was again 51%. The Colombian peace plebiscite to ratify the final agreement on the termination of the Colombian conflict failed, with 50.2% voting against it. You may be able to add to other examples of slight edges. There is no question that the world is split into two. But the question is: who are the two sides? What do Donald Trump supporters have to do with Colombians who voted against peace? What do Turkish people who voted against a constitutional change have to do with UK citizens wanting to remain in the European Union? The fact that there is obvious polarity in our current world doesn’t mean that there are two obvious poles at this time. We have a multipolar world, where polarization is among common people, but not necessarily among countries or ideals.

What is different today is—unlike in earlier times—we, as people, all have direct and immediate access to information about whatever is happening on the other side of the world, thanks to the internet and social media. Although information on social media may be fabricated, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal suggested, we also have access to Wikileaks and even an amateur video shot by a victim of some attack somewhere in the world. The amateur video might also have been fabricated, but it nevertheless forms opinions of the common people and shapes their awareness of world issues.

The current polarization does not necessarily seem to be between nationalities and races. Samuel Huntington suggested in his Clash of Civilizations¹ theory that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War era, and we saw that happening to some extent with the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Syria. Today this clash is much more diverse and complex. It is not based on any identity—not nationality, race, religion, or culture. You cannot determine who might be on which side of the issue by looking at their ID card. In fact, even people in the same household might be divided into two, or three, or more positions. The current polarization is more between levels of awareness of the people, or as Prof. Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan write in Spiral Dynamics,² between different memes.* Let me note that there are eight levels of awareness defined so far by the Spiral Dynamics theorists (we’ll explore these further in Chapter 6), and these levels coexist; so we have at least eight poles that we are polarized on in the sphere of world issues. How do we tackle this equation with multiple variables?

POLARIZATION AND CONFLICT

In a world where no one is a hundred percent like anyone else, conflict is inevitable. It is not only inevitable but necessary.

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman suggests in his article Developmental Sequence in Small Groups³ that team formation occurs in four stages:

·Forming—people gather to form a team and they start functioning together.

·Storming—they start having conflicts.

·Norming—team members, having identified who is sensitive to what, start resolving their differences, appreciating each other’s strengths and different forms of contribution, and figuring out the norms of the team.

·Performing—each team member contributes to the team through their own strengths, and the team performs without friction.

Although Tuckman suggested these stages for the formation of teams, you may extend the notion to families, friendships, organizations, countries, or any other relationships. We need the storming phase (i.e., the conflict) to find out our differences and to figure out the norms of our relationship to perform better in the future.

It is this quality of the conflict that helps us perform and makes us achieve things we thought impossible, like having a video phone call with a friend on the other side of the world, getting a man on the moon, or landing a car on Mars.

If there’s no storm, we fall into a false harmony and pretend that everyone is just the same. (But we don’t call it harmony; we call it dictatorship.) Without the storm, there is no sustainable performance, no