331 - Wicked Problems - Martin Carcasson

You can go to kitted.shop and use the code SMART50, S-M-A-R-T-5-0 at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 331. Welcome to the show. I'm David McCraney. Before we get the show rolling, there's a game we're going to discuss later in the show. It's a workshop exercise that you can try yourself and it's super simple. Also, if you support the show over on Patreon, I would love to see your answers to this exercise in the comments under the episode. And here's what you do. simply rank the following values, the ones I'm about to list in order of most important to you to least important to you. And these values are community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security. Here they are again, community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security. Now, number those from one to nine, one being the most important and nine being the least. Then ask yourself, why did you put the one you put up top as number one? then can you define what that value means to you next ask yourself why did you put the one you put at the bottom as least important and then try to define what does that value mean to you if you can do this in a group or just with another person it's way way better also ask yourself if you can imagine a situation where your top value dominates too much? Are there situations in which you can have too much of it? And next, can you make the case for the importance of your bottom value? People who care about that value, who might put it way up top, why do you think they would do that? Now, looking at your top three values, do you see any tensions between them? Does focusing on one make it harder to honor the others. And after doing all that, re-rank your values a second time and see if anything seems as if it should go up or down the list. Again, doing this in a group, it's amazing. It's a really great exercise. And you just take turns with the questions and then take turns re-ranking everything at the end and try to agree. See if you can all agree on how the ranking should go. Okay, have fun with that. Share your answers wherever you do social stuff with this podcast, Facebook, Spotify, Patreon. I would love to see your answers. I'd love to see what happens if you did this in a group. Let me know about it. Okay, on with the show. I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level, and actually we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn't work, right? That is the voice of Dr. Martin Carcasson, and he is the director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. As part of his work, he trains people to facilitate deliberation. He and his students and staff at the Center for Public Deliberation, they hold events where people in a community, in an institution, a municipality, a county, and so on, they get these people together and help them discuss how to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. They've held about 600 of these events and in so doing, they've developed a process, a procedure, a framework that works extremely well. And it's based on science. It is based on what we know about how people work when they get together and disagree, when they share an uncertainty about how to proceed. Dr. Carcasson's work and these events, they are informed by the science, the evidence collected over the last 100 years or so on how to avoid the conditions that lead people to talk past each other, to derail their own efforts through poor conversations, poor communication, outright arguing, and everything that is not deliberating. As he puts it, his job is to, quote, spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best. I am a communication professor, so my research now, what, almost 24, 25 years, has always been how do we have the conversations we need to have for democracy to work? My initial academic training was in argumentation, the subfield of communication studies that takes argument seriously. How do we analyze arguments? How do we try to make distinctions between a strong argument and a weak argument? And early on, all my research was more national, focused a lot on the American president, how American presidents talked about complex issues. And I grew more and more frustrated because it was pretty clear that the national system is not a system that rewards good argument. And so Dr. Martin Carcasson spent decades researching, studying, refining, and outright creating new ways for people to get together and talk, to discuss issues, then make plans based on those discussions that work for everyone. In other words, he refined deliberation, and he did so through a scientific lens. I was doing well publishing, but all my papers were about how badly we talked about complex issues. So that's what led to my work when I got the job at CSU about 22 years ago. I shifted from national to local, and I shifted from being a critic. I was trained as a rhetorical critic, analyzing other people's communication, to become much more a practitioner. And it was basically learning the kind of conversations we need to have and how do we kind of understand each other across difference and those type of things. And just realizing most of our processes weren't leading to that. The incentives were kind of the opposite direction. So I started experimenting in my classes first of, okay, how do we design some things to hopefully spark better conversations? And then the CBD, which I started 20 years ago now, was kind of the next step of that. OK, hey, the stuff that works in classrooms, might it work in the community? So we started experimenting. I trained students as facilitators, and we've run over 600 meetings now in the community. We get hired now by the city, by the county, by the school district, community organizations to design and run events that help people have very different conversations so we can kind of come together and address our shared problems a little bit more productively. The Center for Public Deliberation, it has a unique way of doing all of this. And we will get into all of that in a moment, especially how it deals with values, the scientific concept, the psychological phenomenon of values as a thing that brains generate. And we will deep dive into all of that. And we will deep dive into something I think is incredibly useful to understand called wicked problems, which is the thing that his system really addresses. But before we do that, I want you to know that there are a lot of organizations working on this issue right now. There's a website you can visit, listenfirstproject.org, listenfirstproject.org, where they've collected more than 500 organizations, many of them formed in the last decade, some in the last five years, all devoted to bringing Americans together across divides in this highly polarized time. And most of them are experimenting with variations of deliberative systems. Just as you must create banking systems or highway systems or airport systems, you must create deliberation systems in which humans can coordinate. Otherwise, if the problem is very complex and there's lots of uncertainty and there are multiple groups with different value structures, we don't do a great job working on problems together. We need something to help us coordinate. Also, before we get into Carcassonne's work, it's important to note the difference here between deliberation, argumentation, and debate, scientifically speaking. Deliberation is a collaborative decision-making process under conditions of uncertainty. So, for example, just a couple of people trying to decide where to have dinner, or a group of people on a road trip trying to decide which road to take, where to stop, when to eat, when to leave, where to park, stuff like that. Deliberation is a collective cognitive process aimed at figuring out what to do next, what the plan should be. It is future focused and it involves weighing options, entertaining counterfactuals, forecasting consequences, and as you will soon learn, taking everyone's values into account. Just addressing the fact that everyone does have values. Argumentation, on the other hand, is a communicative practice focused on supporting or challenging claims using reasons and evidence and justifications and rationalizations. And debate is a formal, if done well, it is a formal adversarial interaction where two sides of an issue take opposing positions and attempt to persuade the other side or an audience to agree that their argument is superior to their opponents. So deliberation will include some argumentation and some debate, but it isn't those things. It's a framework. It's an architecture, a system, a constructed mechanism designed to help people not yell at each other and to prevent a joint decision-making process devolving into throwing lamps and lecterns or fists. And as Martine Carcasson mentioned earlier, we know how to do this, how to do this well, how to make such structures, how to create such systems. So he, his organization, and more than 500 organizations like his are all quite optimistic that we can, with science, evolve our institutions to survive the rapidly changing information ecosystem in which our democracy and democracies across the world are struggling to adapt. Part of my optimism is hard it is to be optimistic these days. I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level. And actually, we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn't work, right? And this is where I connected with your work a long time ago with the You Are Not Smart book as I was doing this deep dive into psychology and brain science and just like trying to understand how our brains work. And how I typically explain my work now is like I try to create processes that are specifically designed to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best of human nature. And there is a lot of good stuff, right? You know, we know how to do this stuff. It's not natural. and unfortunately i think the negative aspects of human nature are easier to trigger i mean one way you framed it one of your books is like we're preloaded with all these biases right so we're preloaded with all these biases and then we have a lot of you know bad faith actors and conflict puppeteers one of the new terms that you know are taking advantage of those and you know purposely kind of doing the opposite of what i try to do purposely trying to bring out the worst in us whether that's to win elections or to draw eyeballs or to you know raise money or whatever so our goal and part of lots of different organizations doing this is okay now how do we try to do the counter movement here how do we use the social science in a pro-social way and start giving people an alternative to what we're getting at the national level that that divides us so much yeah i feel this so much i mean i've used all sorts of metaphors over the years human body brain and like visual system and all of our other sensory modalities it didn't evolve in an environment that had like jets. And so the pilot getting you from point A to point B is having to work with the system they were born with. And we had to build an infrastructure around that to make it possible for us to sit there and fall asleep on the way to Pittsburgh. That didn't just happen. We had to make it. And we had to contend with all manner of things. Like, what about people have to poop on airplanes? Like, what about pilots could be having a problem in their family right now and not press all the buttons they need to press. Like, what do you do to create a system that works? I think about it just dealing with traffic going from one place to another and all the interlocking systems on the highway inside a city and going out of a city onto another highway. An enormous amount of work had to be done to make it as safe as it currently is. I think about some of the stuff you've written, like we're not looking for democracy or civil discourse to be perfect, we're not looking for a utopia. We're looking for a way to how do we muddle through this in a form that doesn't come crashing down and does the best possible thing it can do. And you have to contend with the brain that comes preloaded with a bunch of weird stuff to do that. I see that all throughout your work and I really dig that. Yeah, I appreciate that. We've been doing a lot more work lately with the notion of, I like to look at my local community where my work is focused and then trying to help other people build similar things in their community as a deliberative system. So using systems thinking, design thinking, kind of like what you're just talking about, right? So if I look at, say, the city of Fort Collins as a deliberative system, I'm really looking at, okay, what are the different institutions, organizations, individuals, groups that are elevating the quality of public discourse that are making it easier for us to have these kinds of conversations and engagements, and which are the ones that are kind of undermining it? And my job, you know, being the center, the director of the center. Yes, we're running events, which are part of the system. But we kind of changed our thinking about 10 years ago, like, no, I want to kind of step back in how do we kind of build the capacity of my community overall, that led me to working a lot more, say, with the local library, with the local community foundation, with the local newspaper, with, you know, K12, like, how do we kind of help build the capacity in our community for these different kinds of conversations and to show people an alternative, you know, so similar way You're saying like, let's look at this system. And we've got, unfortunately, so many pieces of our political system, much more nationally, but still all the way down tend to reward things that reduce the quality of public discussion right People don want these good conversations So that the exciting thing of how much work there is going on You know you look at something like the Listen First Coalition if you go to that website, you know, there's probably 600, 700 organizations there. I think most of them probably started in the last four or five years of people realizing we have to change things, like we have to have a different kind of conversation. So I work with, you know, Braver Angels, a Better Together America, and all these kind of new organizations, a lot of them, like me, focus on bottom up, right? We have to change. The more and more we change individual local communities, I think eventually that starts kind of changing broader things. Changing our national system is going to be tough, though some smart people are working on that. After this commercial break, wicked problems, how to solve them, and how the smart people at the Center for Public Deliberation that Colorado State are working on how to improve deliberative systems across the United States and across the world. All that after this. Okay, that thing I said I would talk about in the middle of the show. It's not quite the middle of the show, but here's the thing. So curiosity is this unusually common trait of people who listen to this podcast. You may have noticed that about yourself. And if you're the kind of person who wants to understand how minds work and sometimes don't work, which is clearly who you are because you listen to the show, you are probably super interested in critical thinking. If you are the kind of person who is right now listening to this podcast, then you might also be curious to find out about the higher order thinking skills course that I am co-presenting at the Executive Thinking Academy. The Executive Thinking Academy. It's about executive thinking, like the executive centers of your brain, but also executive thinking too, if that's what you want to do with it. It's a four-week course to level up your strategic, creative, critical, and executive thinking skills. But it's a bit different because first, it's not a passive exercise in watching a video and then filling out some multiple choice questions. Instead, you will be actively participating in hands-on activities using templates and frameworks that you can use well beyond the course itself. It's a genuinely interactive experience that will help you to think in new ways. You also get the full set of kitted thinking tools with more than 200 beautifully designed physical cards in these fancy magnetic boxes that you can use to plan and facilitate workshops, elevate brainstorming sessions, supercharge strategy planning, and much more. These cards, they have digital versions. They have QR codes on them. They have a whole thing that you can use on a website to make them cool. the course is incredible and it shows you a bunch of ways to use those cards at your workplace or anywhere else. And you'll have the option to learn collaboratively with a small group of like-minded peers so that you're holding each other accountable and encouraging each other to push your thinking boundaries. Plus, you don't just get access to this one course. You get 12 months of membership to the Executive Thinking Academy itself. And that includes webinars in Q&A sessions with global thought leaders, with authors, with academics. It's a whole lot of stuff. And you get 50% off if you use the code SMART50 at checkout when you visit kitted.shop. Half off, SMART50, kitted.shop. If you are curious to learn more and to join me for next month's higher order thinking skills course, head over there right now, click on the link in the show notes and lock in your place. And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the You Are Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney. I am your host and our guest in this episode is Dr. Martine Carcasson. And I should mention, I met Dr. Martine Carcasson earlier this year at a conference at Northwestern University, where a group of experts devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements gathered to compare notes and trade ideas. That conference was held at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement, where the directors Eli Finkel and Norika Talley are right now building something truly amazing. And it's also where I will be spending a portion of April as a writer in residence doing lectures and teaching freshmen the things that I have learned over the years, both on this podcast and writing a book about these topics, including how minds change. Eli Finkel has already been a guest on the show, and so has Josh Green and Stephen Frankenary, all of whom attended that conference, spoke, traded things. And we will talk more about the center and all the projects people presented in upcoming episodes as the other guests join us to talk about what they're up to, what they're doing. And in this episode, that guest is Dr. Martin Carcasson. And one of the first things I asked him was, how did this become his life's work? Yeah, so it started like I mentioned earlier. I was trained as a rhetorical critic and argumentation scholar, looking at how presidents talked about complex issues, got more and more frustrated with it. One of the big changes, so I was in grad school during the Clinton administration. Beginning of his second term, he started a national conversation on race. Right. And, you know, so what I was doing back then was how do presidents talk about complex issues? So I was looking at his speeches and so forth and how he was framing that issue. Well, as part of that process, they created these discussion guides. So they worked with some people I know now in this kind of dialogue and deliberation field, you know, basically creating this how to how do you get people together in your local community to have a better conversation about this complex issue? In argumentation, I was trained in debate. I was never on a debate team or competitive debate, but I taught debate classes and had debates, you know, competitive debates in my class. All of a sudden, I'm introduced to dialogue and deliberation as these two other ways of talking. And I saw that as, oh, no, this is kind of what my students need, right? Now, part of it, the whole big project I'm working on now was making distinctions between those three words, debate, dialogue, deliberation. And for a while, like a lot of dialogue and deliberation people, I became pretty anti-debate. like debate is bad and this stuff is good. That's now changed about the last 10 years, realizing, well, no, like bad debates, bad, but good debate, really good. The problem is most of our debates bad, right? But I was kind of attacking a foil in a sense. So as we're looking now, toxic polarization is one of our huge issues, but just information disorder, information chaos, just, you know, misinformation, disinformation is also in debate done well, inherently elevates good arguments and exposes bad argument, right? So we need elements of debate. So we need all three. But that just kind of started this process of me learning these new tools that people were designing. And that also led me to like conflict resolution world and other kind of mediation and so forth, like realizing we need better ways of how to talk to each other. Through all that too, I started, my favorite class as an undergrad was a persuasion class, which is much more of a social science class. When I got to CSU, they're asking me, what other classes you want to teach? And I'm like, oh, I'd love to teach the persuasion class. And I started teaching that. And I used Calendini's book, Influence. I don't know if you're familiar with that. That was the first book that really kind of social psychology basically makes the argument that we've already been talking about, that human nature has these quirks, right? And then these marketers take advantage of those quirks to get you to do things, right? And that really started that process of me melding together this dialogue and deliberation world with a social psychology of like, okay, so bad faith actors are taking advantage of these quirks of human nature. How do I do the opposite? Which for me is a two-step process. One is doing things that doesn't trigger the bad stuff. But then also, and this is the, for the last year with national craziness going on, I've spent a lot more time focusing on what are the positive aspects of human nature we can trigger rather than just focusing on avoiding the negative, which is much better for your mental health, right? But there is a lot of good stuff. I think in the How You Change Minds book, you mentioned this, like the fact that we're able to change our minds is one of our superpowers. Right. Yeah. Like, now it's hard to change our minds and we're resistant to changing our minds, right? But once you figure that out, so that's where a lot of my work, I think humans are incredibly creative problem solvers when put in a good situation. Our political system doesn't put us in good situations, right? So how do we create different situations so we can tap into that? If you watch an episode of Mad Men and you marvel at how great Don Draper is at something, it's not like he went to school for it. It was a bunch of A-B testing in a marketplace that rewarded doing things that got you money. And then you just keep going in the direction of things that work out and you start to develop best practices. is that's true across the board in any information economy, right? And that's, we're getting to, we had social media just long enough that people who have A-B tested it pointedly so are starting to get the results they were looking for. Whether they have any like conscious understanding or could even articulate what it is that they're doing well, they're starting to do it well in several different directions. If you've been on autopilot, your democracy is like, pull up, pull up, pull up right now. I don't know why I have so many pilot metaphors, but that seems to be what's happening. So how does Carcasson approach this problem? How does his team at Colorado State, how do they get together and create deliberation facilitation systems? How do they work? Well, to answer that, we must first briefly attempt to define what is a value. In the collection of psychological phenomena that come to the foreground when we have difficult conversations, things like beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on, what separates a value from those other things? What makes a value unique? In short, in terms of something that our brain generates, what is a value? So if you create a list of common values, you'll notice right away that they are difficult to define. That is, if you were to ask 50 people to define something like freedom, you might just get 50 different answers. Freedom, justice, equality, progress, tradition, diversity, personal responsibility, community. All of these, in a philosophical sense, are abstractions. That is, they're not concretes. You can't hold them in your hand like an apple. You can't put them under glass like a fossil. You can't pin them to a board like a butterfly. Cognitively, what does that mean? In the brain, what is an abstraction? Well, from a cognitive linguistics perspective, an abstraction like, say, the word intelligence, it has no platonic essence, no final definition. In language, abstractions are merely functional labels for the sake of coordination. And those labels can create a sort of illusory stability when, in fact, the concept, the category is in the brain, a network of associations. And because it's a network of associations, there's a fuzzy border to it. You can go just a little bit outside of it and you're still kind of talking about it. You can find examples that seem more like the abstraction, some that seem less, but in different contexts and different situations that can change. So even if you think about one particular abstraction a whole lot, it's just a habit of interpretation. The brain is noticing a recurring relational pattern. If you want to get super brain science nerdy about it, abstractions are learned, dynamically activated schema that allow the brain to group non-identical but kind of similar sensory, motor, and social experiences into buckets. buckets, categorical neurological buckets, patterns of activation. And they form sort of an equivalency, which we use for the purposes of communication, coordination, and when alone, prediction, inference, and action. So the sun is a concrete object. A sunrise is a concrete experience. But when we share through language how beautiful and awe-inspiring a sunrise can be, Beauty, awe, and inspiration are abstractions. And it just so happens, values tend to be pretty abstract. So with that in mind, what is a value? Well, when scientists who study the brain and social systems, when they talk about values, they're referring to stable, socially learned preference structures. and these preference structures guide judgment, attention, emotion, and behavior across contexts. You notice a lot of abstractions in that previous statement. That's just how this all works. Language, it's weird, it's messy. So yeah, preference structures. These are tied to what we consider good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. These particular preference structures are about what is more important and what is less important when it comes to how we spend time, money, resources, how we spend that which is expendable. For instance, where should our tax dollars go? To education or to aircraft carriers? That's a value judgment. You can imagine in a much earlier environment around a campfire near a cave, we would have similar discussions about what is more important, or at least similar intuitions about where we should be spending our time, where should we be spending our effort? And we might disagree, but we'd probably group up in a way that allowed us to cooperate and coordinate. There are two things, though, that make values truly unique. One is that they're usually deep. Psychologically speaking, they're usually unarticulated. They motivate our behaviors and drive our emotional reactions and responses, but we might not be consciously aware of them, or at least not aware of how important they are to us or not aware of how we're prioritizing them. And that's the other thing that makes them unique. The research suggests that we all tend to share most of the same values. The sort of a collection of values that we all agree upon are important for human beings doing stuff. We all care about tradition and progress, security and freedom. is just that tradition versus progress, security versus freedom. As individuals, we rank values like that differently. We consider some higher than others. And the differences in how we rank them can create friction when attempting to solve a shared problem or achieve a shared goal. But here's the thing. To solve the shared problem of how to better solve shared problems, humans have had to create all manner of institutions and systems for coordination and deliberation Science for example is one of these systems But when it comes to wicked problems systems that are great at sorting out facts and producing empirical data can get bogged down by issues that are inherently value And that's why we need systems like the one created by the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. Here's Dr. Martin Carcasson to explain. In argumentation, you know, you look at how people are making claims. Like an argument is I'm trying to convince you of something, right? So I'm making a claim, which I'm trying to convince you of, and I attach that to some sort of evidence, right, some reasons. Sometimes that's hard evidence and facts, and sometimes that's other reasons. So argumentation is to try to kind of understand how arguments work and kind of put it in its pieces. I use the Tuhlman model for that that some people might not know about. But one big distinction that they make, which I think is we really need to think more in our world about, is distinctions between a factual claim, a value claim, and a policy claim. So a factual claim is a claim about reality, right? I'm saying something that at some level of factual claim, you should be able to check it. There's a famous kind of thing in journalism education, like if one side's telling you it's raining and the other side is telling you it's not raining, the job of the journalist isn't to report, oh, there's different perspectives, is to go outside and see if it's effing raining. You know, so factual claims, if I'm a reporter, if I'm a conflict resolution person, and two sides are saying something that's factual, but have different perspectives, my job is to seek, hey, can I go figure out which one's right? So that's this whole world. Instead of making a distinction between fact and opinion, I think fact value and policy is much more helpful. So that's facts. It's something real you can check, and somehow some of those are easy. Some of them are much more complex because a lot of causal arguments like, hey, wearing a mask will reduce the spread of COVID. That's a factual claim, but a lot harder. Anytime you get into cause and effect, you have multiple variables and so forth. A value claim is a claim that something is good or bad or favorable or unfavorable. It's a reason why you're making an evaluation of something. And that's where if there's a value conflict, there isn't an outside source I can go to resolve it. Particularly if we believe we're a diverse society that believes in democracy, believes in freedom, and believes in pluralism. The reality of living in 21st century democracy is we're dealing with lots of different values and lots of different people rank those values differently. And then the problems we face inherently involve multiple of these values. It's just really messy. Our brains don't like messy. Our brains don't like nuance. We like simple stories. Right. So the way we talk about values is huge, because when we talk about values badly, it's one of the biggest sources of the false polarization and division and all this kind of stuff. When we learn how to talk about values better, all of a sudden it becomes this huge mechanism to shift from these really bad conversations to actually tapping into the good parts of human nature, like creative problem solvers. And that's the heart of this work. Our basic model is if I'm focusing on national security and you disagree with me, I'm just thinking they don't care about security. We love to define the people we disagree with by what they're against. Monica Guzman makes this a great point in her TED talk about curiosity will save us. That's our default on our brain is we've got the good values and the people we disagree with reject those good values or have negative motives. and that makes us feel good because that means we're right and they're wrong. And if we just believe, oh, they have bad values, not only are they wrong, they're not worth talking to. They're not listening. Like, why do I even bother paying attention, right? And that's what we're dealing with is we got half the country thinks the other half of the country has ridiculous values and there's no way to engage. So that's the value art. You know, a lot of the work that we do with these issues is analyze the discourse, people talking past each other, figuring out all the underlining values. and values are often underlining, values aren't often explicit, right? We don't think I care about freedom, therefore I have this position, right? So we have these strong positions and then the values are the underlining logic to them. So my job a lot is to talk to the different sides or to read the message boards or to kind of make sense of all this noise, identify all those underlining values and then put them on the table. So then the conversation starts with, hey, here are these 10 values that are relevant to this issue. Generally, we all have the same values. We just rank them differently, right? And we tend to be selective on what values we're focusing on, right? So my job is to kind of set up, you know, this is part of the role of discussion guides and a facilitator is identify those values, put them on the table, and then help people work through the tough issues of how do we figure out how to deal with the tension between these values? How do we negotiate them better? Policy claim is a claim about we should do X, right? And it uses the word policy, but it might not be policy. You know, policy is more of a government kind of word. But, you know, often when we're disagreeing, we're disagreeing on, hey, we should build a wall or we should take over Greenland or whatever we're doing, right? So we tend to focus on the policy claims the most. But my argument is any policy claim inherently involves fact and value claims. If you're saying we should do X because it leads to Y, does X actually lead to Y as a factual claim, right? If we do this, will this actually happen? And often, you know, some of the most interesting things about policy claims are the unintended consequences, right? So, you know, our brain tends to focus on the positive intended consequences of the policies we like and the negative unintended policy consequences of those that we don't like. And that's just another way we tend to talk past each other and get polarized, right? So, yeah, it's factual. It does actually lead to Y. And then if I'm saying we should do X is at least a Y. I'm making a value claim that Y is a good thing. Like we need Y. So, so much of our discussions are all about these policy claims. Part of the bringing from the world of argumentation is, okay, how do we break that up a little bit? So there's some factual stuff and how do you evaluate the quality of a factual claim is different. But so much of our conflict is based on value claims that are kind of hidden. Talking in terms of values and trying to solve issues that are value-laden leads to an examination of wicked problems and then ways to deal with them. So just to get started there, what is this terminology? What is a wicked problem? Yeah, so the actual, you know, the term's been around about 50 years. It was initially developed by like city planners, civic engineers. And the one story I read about it was, you know, these civil engineers got their degree and they went to go work for a city. and pretty quickly they realized that the kind of problems they were trained to solve and the kind of problems they were asked to solve were quite distinct so the initial article made the distinction between tame problems and wicked problems so a tame problem could be really really complex but there there is an answer to it it's like a technical right i i always go to uh apollo 13 right um of this notion of when that scene where they had to get the tube that had the round filter to fit in the one with a square filter on the two different spaceships, right? So you had all the equipment, this is all they have. And they had a group of engineers, experts, and said, we had to figure out how to get that to fit into the thing made for that using only this, right? That's a tame problem. Really, really complex, required a lot of smart people, but there was kind of a right answer. So you leave it to the experts. And really the only problem is how do we implement that correct technical solution as efficiently or cheap as possible? Well, the wicked problem, they explained, was, well, wicked problems that inherently involve multiple underlining values that don't fit together very well, right? So when you're trying to make a decision with a C, so not only does the problem itself involve multiple underlining values, but then as we've been talking about, different people rank those values differently. So it gets really complex. And part of the reality of a wicked problem is there is no right answer. Like you don't solve a wicked problem. We're never going to find the perfect way to educate people. We're never going to find the perfect way to deal with housing. Because all these things inherently involve lots of different things, individual responsibility and equality and efficiency and so forth, right? That the best we can do is have really tough conversations to find better ways of negotiating the tensions that come up with better ways of addressing it, that move the needle on the issue, that improve quality of life. But there's no stopping point is the way that kind of Riddle and Weber was the initial article that kind of there's no stalking point to wicked problems. So for me, there's a lot of literature and, you know, Harvard professor hyphens talks about type one, two and three problems. That's adaptive leadership that a lot of people might know. I use it a little bit differently instead of like a category or a type of problem. I like to use it more like a lens through which to see problems. So it's more like if I step back and say, hey, let's look at this as a wicked problem, which means I'm really looking at the underlining values and what do people care about and How do we kind of identify those and put them on the table? How does that change the conversation? And that's where, you know, informed so much about my deep dive into social psychology and brain science, framing something as a wicked problem really helps open up space for conversations, deeper conversations we need to have. We switch. Our brains want to blame wicked people. Our brains want to, you know, the reason we're in this problem is because there's bad people and we just need to kind of vanquish those people and the problem will go away, right? Well, when you shift from the problem being wicked people, bad people with bad values, and put the wickedness in the problem, that's part of that shift, right? So that's what we're trying to do is we see this as a problem that has multiple values. We all have the same values. We kind of rank them differently. We don't know which one should be most important here. That opens up space for having a very different conversation that, for me, tends to avoid bringing out the worst of human nature and tapping the best. Remember you're using an example like healthcare because you want it to be accessible, high quality, low cost. Wicked problem right off the bat. How would you get all three of those? How would you ever get those three things to happen at the same time with our current level of technology, with our current level of how economies work? If you don't have a Star Trek replicator, how do you make healthcare accessible, high quality, low cost? If you get together and try to solve that and just solve it, you will run into some weird deliberation. And most conversations will just pick one of those, right? I care about being low cost. I care about accessible. And you can make a case and you can get people that agree with you fired up, right? But the reality is, oh, we're trying to deal with all these same time, right? So what happens in a polarized environment is one side picks some value, another side picks the other value, and they just talk past each other. And the tensions, the heart of a wicked problem is dealing with these tensions. The tensions are either just missed because we're not talking about them or sometimes strategically, they're designed by people to avoid them, right? So that's a lot of my work is how do we identify those tensions and then help people deal with them? Because I think good decisions, high quality collaborative decisions require us to engage those tensions. Whereas most of our political top is designed to avoid people ever recognizing that they're there. There's no tension because it's good versus evil. The way you introduced this to myself and others, and I've told so many people about it, was this interesting card workshop thing. I would like to talk about that just for a second because it's something that I'd like. What you actually did was hand out a bunch of pieces of paper and said, here are things that are values and just put them in order. Stack them. Most important at the top, least important at the bottom of these values that you probably care about all of them, but just rank them. If you could, what is this game workshop thing? How does it work? What are the steps? What are you accomplishing here? And how do people tend to respond to it? Yeah. Yeah. That's something that has been part of our training for our facilitators, because so much of the training that's doing facilitators is to bring out underlining values, right? When people have a strong position, often a policy position, we should do X, right? Their job as a facilitator is to say, why is that important to you? This is like Fisher and Urie getting the yes talks about this a lot, right? Moving from positions to interest, right? So get those underlining interests. You know, we use a collection of nine values. So you print it out on cardstock and cut them out. So it's like a business card size that just has the name of values. I think we have community, individual responsibility, equality, security, and we have a set of questions that we ask people. So the first one, as you said, is like, hey, just organize these from most important to you, least important to you. And we tell them like, you know, if we asked you to define these, we would get 30 different definitions, right? That's part of the academic literature on values. You know, there are these essentially contested terms, or they're called God terms, right? There's these powerful words that we use all the time, but we don't ever really define them, right? Because we don't want, we want people to kind of fill in their blanks, right? Like, oh, he's talking about freedom, right? I care about freedom. Once we actually start defining what we mean, they kind of lose their power in a way, right? So that's part of what we want to do is whatever they mean to you, organize them. And we're doing this in a small group. So then we have a set of questions. Okay, look at your neighbors, right? How did they rank them? Looking at your top value, like why did you put that number one and what does that value mean to you? And then for your bottom value, like what did you put on the bottom and why does that mean to you? And you start realizing that most, again, we all agree with most of these values. We define them a little bit differently, and sometimes the values on the bottom is because someone else has weaponized that value and used it against your side, right? So you see it as a negative thing. But just having those conversations, you realize that you might have a value really low that your neighbor has really high. But then when they're talking about what that value means to them, they're like, well, yeah, if that's what it means, I would have it high too, right? So you just start realizing, wait a second, we agree on this, right? And then the later questions are even better because one of my favorite questions is looking back at your top value, can that value dominate too much? and that causes huge aha moments because almost i'll make the case that yeah every value can dominate too much we'd like to take values one at a time right so if the question is and i always kind of make a joke when i ask people to rank them like if we did these one at a time like if i asked you all show of hands how many of y'all prefer justice to injustice right everyone prefers justice right if we don't have to define it right uh what the heart of the difficulty of living in a diverse democracy is we don't get to take values one at a time. These issues we deal with inherently involve all these values. So asking people, can your top value dominate too much? They often realize, well, yeah, yeah, you can, can't, you can almost add toxic to any value, right? And that's when, okay, we're so focused on that value that it clearly shows how we're not like, we're, we're undermining other values, right? And then the same thing, we ask them, hey, look at your bottom value, can a reasonable person have that in their top three? And almost always they can answer yes, right? Yeah, I can see how they can kind of focus on that. So it just kind of opens up this perspective to get people to think about these often unstated values that are so critical to any, when we talk about policy claims dominating, anytime we say something's a problem, anytime we're saying something's a goal, anytime we're saying we should do something, inherently all those things have values tied to them. They're just kind of hidden. So that process of learning how to deal with people we disagree with is I need to figure out what values I'm talking about that are kind of not clearly in my head, but also understand their values and get away from that easy assumption that we always go to of just defining people by what they're against. And just that step changes things so much in how we talk to each other. It was such an incredible exercise. Everyone in my group, we did this for all of us when we were doing the thing at the opening of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement. And in my group, every single person had a, ah, every single person. I had it, they had it. And we generally thought we were very like-minded and we became astonished when we saw that we had a slightly different rankings. and then when we asked each other what was going on with it, we had multiple ahas in there of like, well, I could see that. And then when it came to just seeing like you have like community, community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, security. I've got it in front of me. I didn't memorize it. And you can pick out any three of these and think of it and realize, okay, community, freedom, individual responsibility. These things, if you, clearly I care about all three of those things. Almost everyone cares about those things. One, they are vast abstractions. This is something that is very difficult to concretize and say, here is what that word means. Easy to feel hard to define and we going to have different perspectives on that Then I can come up with a million ways that community and freedom could somehow become and go into conflict with one another Individual responsibility and freedom individual responsibility and community All of these things, I can imagine scenarios where they could come into conflict if one vastly was over-prioritized. Or I can imagine a terrible situation in a culture that didn't care about one of these hardly at all, and the other two they did. the complexity of it, just revealing that to people, just letting that come to the surface and accepting the fact that, oh, things are a bit more complicated than they seemed at first. Just getting that feeling seemed epiphanous to me. It seemed huge, even among people who thought that this is what we care about and talk about all the time. There's a huge value to this game. And I'm actually working right now with National Shoes Forum that does a lot of cool national work. they're putting together some stuff for the 250th to try to kind of hopefully, you know, not have the 250th be another thing that divides us, which obviously that's the direction it's going to know, let's use this 250th to bring us together and to kind of think about the American creed and so forth. So I'm adapting that exercise. I'm adding like democracy and patriotism and a couple other values, but then basically like packaging it up like a meeting in a box. and I'll have some videos tied to it. So then hopefully other organizations, whether this is college classrooms or I'll be farming it out to like Braver Angels chapters and so forth and saying, hey, here's this. If you got two hours, bring people together and kind of show them how to do that. So hopefully we can kind of provide a link on yours to that once we get that done. Oh, for sure. Did you say you've done like 600 of these things? Yeah, we probably over the 20 years, if you kind of count up, most of our stuff is off campus. Some is on, we'll go into different classes, But I think when we added it up, it's probably over 600 different individual meetings that we've done. And you've done, but you've done things in municipalities, in counties. You've done things that actually have taken place in local governments. So you've seen it work when it works. And I'm wondering, like, OK, all that stuff is cool. Help me understand paraphrasing you. Like democracy requires high quality communication. And we don't do that naturally. that we have to create high-quality conversations at scale if we want anything to happen. And we should be using all of the things we've learned scientifically about how people actually work, how brains actually make sense of things, and how conversation and argumentation and communication and persuasion work, and roll all that into something that can help us get to the next level of whatever it is we're trying to do on this planet. I'm wondering, what does it look like in one of these things? Like when you're trying to actually help people deliberate or solve a problem together or work together on something where there's conflict, how does it typically roll for you when you're doing one of the things that's informed by all of your work? I mean, one thing about deliberation is it's not quick, right? It takes a lot of time. So we'll start a project. I have to spend some time kind of making, like I said, making sense of the noise. The city, if we're doing something for the city, they'll send me all the emails I got on an issue. And I can watch video of what it's had on the microphone, which is like horrible people talking past each other but if you know what you're looking for right if you're trying to get a sense of different sides then we often have to do some fact checking right so we make a distinction between the fact claims and value claims and okay you know let's learn about the factual stuff but obviously a lot of the work is trying to understand the underlining values put them on table then we'll create we often create some sort of discussion guide that's one of the kind of key aspects of deliberation and i've used these discussion guides for 20 years i was trained initially from national issues forum which creates these national discussion guides and it wasn't until about eight, 10 years ago when I started really doing that deep dive into social psychology and brain science of realizing why those discussion guides are so important. Because when you have this piece of paper at the middle of the table that is informed by all these different perspectives and it's fact-checked and hopefully people see their voice in there because we often create those discussion guides from people's comments. When people are RSVP for our events, we'll ask them some additional questions. So their voice is in there, but it fairly lays out different perspectives. Right. Because if you don't have a discussion guide, if we're getting together to talk about a controversial issue and you have a really strong opinion, you express your opinion and I disagree with you, that means I either have to say, no, you're wrong to your face, where humans are most humans avoid conflict. Right. Some humans love conflict. So then, yeah, me calling you out, you're an idiot, you know, but that's not great either. Right. So these discussion guides help kind of provide multiple perspectives, which, as you've done in your books, our brains are not good at thinking of alternative perspectives. Right. We're really good at all the reasons we're right and all the reasons they're wrong. So this lays it out, lays it out from a wicked problems perspective in a sense that there isn't a right answer. Any of these actions that we might take inherently have tradeoffs. And the hard work of living together in democracy is kind of figuring out which tradeoffs are we willing to work with and so forth and hopefully get creative to minimize those tradeoffs as much as possible. And then, you know, we have a small group. We have a facilitator who's trained to kind of walk people through that. We tend to avoid yes, no questions because when the question is yes, no, should we do this or not? Right. And obviously in local government and school boards, most of the time they're asking yes, no questions because some kind of problem came up. The city staff came up with a potential solution, comes up with an ordinance and then they're debating yes, no on an ordinance. So they're typically debating yes, no to one specific solution to a complex problem. If things are framed as yes, no, when people walk in the door, almost everyone has already answered yes or no. so their brains are off, right? They're not there to think. They're not there to learn. They're not there to ask questions. They're, you know, they're there to kind of defend their perspective. Plus we know from like negativity bias, much more likely if you think, no, you'll show up. If you read something that the city's doing and you think it's a good idea, you're like, that's great. And you go on with your day. If you think it's a horrible idea, you're like, hell no, I'm going to show up. Right? So you completely oversample the no's, right? That's why most people hate public engagement because 90% of the people are there to say, this is a stupid idea, right? Well, then the city council is left with two really bad choices. They can vote yes, even though everyone that talked to them said no, right? And it looks like they're, you know, dismissing democracy. Or they can say no. Well, saying no, all that does is, okay, that solution is not working. It does nothing for the problem, right? So a deliberative process is stepping back instead of saying, hey, should we do this one thing? It's more the overarching question of deliberation is, what should we do about X? The we ideally being the community, the we is not government. Government is one tool of the community, but a lot of our work is to spark, hey, what's the role of nonprofits? What's the role of faith institution? What's the role of individuals? And then X is, for me, a wicked problem. Most of these discussion guides often always at least have like three approaches. Like here's three paths we can take to address this problem because we want to get away from the yes, no. We want to get away from yours on one side or the other. And then the discussion guide does inherently, again, mention the trade-offs and the underlying value, the opponent arguments. So that discussion, the whole meeting is reacting to this discussion guide and it's just a tool to help us have so many different conversations. We ask people, we tell them, this discussion guide isn't perfect. It's designed to spark a better conversation. And the art of creating a document that the purpose of the document is not to persuade someone, not even just to inform someone, but it's to spark good conversation. That is an art we need a lot more because most loudest voices are pushing for a side. They're reacting that and they're telling, hey, what do you like here? What do you not like here? What's missing here? And it just creates a completely different environment of what we're trying to do. You know, in two hours, I can go back to screaming at each other, but we're just going to try something for the next two hours. Let's do something a little bit different. And just people realize that, you know, this is a better way of doing things. I think I may be directly quoting you or paraphrasing it, but you said something like, the aim is to win the conversation, not win the argument. To elevate the conversation. And that was something that was initially our training thing. Like the job of the student, like my students, when they're a facilitator, they don't have an opinion, right? Their whole job, their brain is just to help other people have conversations and ask the follow-ups and help people kind of engage each other. So we kind of explained it to them as like, yeah, your job is to elevate the conversation, not win the argument. But then we realize the more people that walk in the room with that, right? That's the problem is too often when we engage people, they've already decided. And if they already decided because our brains are wired confirmation bias and my side bias and all that other stuff, right? To defend our perspective. But if you ask a more interesting question, if you frame it differently, then instead of tapping in kind of people's adversarial brain, you're tapping into their collaborative brain. That's exactly what you want. We want to engage people as problem solvers, right? Not as advocates of one perspective. Is there cause for optimism in this difficult time in world democracy and especially United States democracy? and if so, what sort of conversations should we be striving toward right now? The optimism is we do know how to do it, right? People that do this work in lots of different fields, and this is international. There's a lot of, you know, across the globe, this growing, Democracy Next is one of these big organizations. I was just on a webinar this morning with them doing lots of kind of cool stuff in other countries. So we've got the tools. We know from the social psychology and brain science and from both the practitioner, abroad practitioner world, but also academics how to do this. So that's the base of the optimism. Now, obviously, there's lots of reason for pessimism. Like we're getting further and further away of doing this, right? That we're so divided. We're dealing with three challenges. One is toxic polarization. That in some ways our number one issue, because when we're polarized to the level we are, we just can't think, right? Facts don't work. We see everything through this lens. Most of that polarization isn't real. It's exaggerated, right? We don't disagree nearly as much as we think. But unfortunately, the perception of polarization is much more important than the reality. And if we think we're this polarized, we get it, right? The second one, I'm using the term now information disorder. And that's just the reality that our ability to create and share information has just exponentially exploded. Our ability to make sense of that information and particularly to make distinctions between good information and bad information, the heart of argumentation where I started, has really fallen back. We don't trust journalism anymore. We don't trust experts anymore. So the gatekeepers are gone. So how do we kind of figure that out? And then the third big challenge is conflict profiteers. There are people that are profiting from this, right? The, you know, conflict, the outrage industrial complex, right? Our political system, media system, most tech platforms are all designed to divide us, right? There's really interesting efforts for all three of those. The challenge we have is those three are intertwined. So if you just focus on toxic polarization and you just focus on bringing people together and understand each other, you might reduce polarization. But in an environment that rewards conflict profiteers and has information overload, you're not going to move much. So that's the work that I'm doing is I think the more we build up capacity for quality deliberation and debate and dialogue as well in our communities, it can take on all three of those. Right. Often when I'm towards the end of my basic talk, I kind of have a summary slide that talks about these the four shifts that we're trying to do with deliberative engagement. And the first one is moving from the simple assumption of wicked people to the nuanced assumption of wicked problems. And I normally stop there and I say, I'm not saying that there's not wicked people. Clearly, over time, there has. I am saying like half the country isn't evil. Right. And I also and I think you'll agree with this. Very few people self-identify as wicked. humans are wired to like i've got good reasons for what i believe and we're really good at rationalizing and coming up with good reason right so i kind of tell people that you know even if you think the problem is caused by wicked people telling people that don't think that they're wicked that you think they're wicked is very unlikely to make them less wicked it's going to backfire it's just going to end the conversation right so for deliberate a lot of my topics are true wicked problems, real reasonable people on different sides. And we're trying to kind of find a better way for them to engage each other. And particularly local, that works pretty well. But I also, a lot of my work, I'm a pragmatist at most, right? I'm trying to figure out better ways of coming together. If the issue truly is bad faith actors, bad people, powerful people trying to hold people down, oppressors trying to oppress everybody. Well, first, I think they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter, right? This polar environment is great for them, right? So part of it is, hey, the more we elevate our conversations, the more we understand each other, the harder it's going to be for those people to kind of dominate. The best way to kind of move forward is to do that, right? You know, so instead of attacking, and this is part of the, if we overemphasize on conflict profiteers, if we overemphasize, you know, we have to beat the other side in a two-party system to move forward, that's kind of playing this bad game. And that often strengthens, right? If someone's trying to be an authoritarian and wants everything us versus them. If we're attacking them, we're just playing the role of them, right? We're playing their narrative. So that's the better we change our conversations, the harder it's going to be for the conflict profiteers, for the people that are purposely dividing us for their own personal gain. And again, from the bottom up, I think that's going to be our best path forward. That is it for this episode of the You're Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about and a little bit more, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmcraney.com and there's links to all of that in the show notes as well. On that website, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts who are featured in the book. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, and hire me to come give a lecture wherever you are at. 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