The Promise That Changes Everything by Nancy Kline

Author:Nancy Kline [Kline, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241988169
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

We all probably need to read that once a week.

I do see progress.

I admit that embracing the promise of no interruption in a setting of extreme disagreement is a challenge. But it is worth the skill, the commitment, the discipline. Most of all the discipline, because if generative attention is anything, it is the reiterative decision to stay disciplined. Discipline produces freedom, nearly always. And this act of attention does exactly that. It restores respect where derision had moved in and begun to rot the premises. It liberates.

Could something so simple, so elegant, so perfectly ours, accomplish a big thing like outwitting polarization? Such a big, anciently elusive, incorrigible thing? Could human attention so catalytic it changes cells, this focus of insatiable wondering, of hunger fully to understand, expose the ruse of deep difference, dry up its tubers and let us think again?

Yes. I think so.

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.

We want to do it.

We can do it.

And, blissfully, this promise is up to the job.

And I am confident that supple security in our own identity grounded in the recognition that ‘core difference’ does not exist, added to our promise not to interrupt, will over time effect the changes all of us want. We will generate ideas we have not thought of yet. And nimbly.

I am confident because I have watched the promise work when the threads of respect frayed. I have seen reconnection repair and regenerate relationship. Most impressively, I have seen fresh thought flow where rage before had ravaged reason.

And this change can happen anywhere.

At work, for example, people navigate this interruptive road to polarization most days. Nick, one of my clients, despaired about this and then solved it:

‘My office is full of bright, energetic “millennials”. I am “Gen X”. Translate those annoying labels to mean that ageism reigns. It almost certainly always has. But now because of these identity “tags”, we can see the ageist culture wars for what they are. Translate that to mean that polarization sits tight in our office.

‘Last week I asked Ruth, the head of marketing, to stop texting her colleagues about issues and go talk to them instead. She hated that. She argued that it would take more time. She could not see what benefit it could possibly achieve.

‘I said it matters that people be in each other’s presence, look into each other’s eyes, read each other’s shifts of feeling and mood during the conversation and really listen to each other, not just react.

‘She sighed. She shut up. She said she would do it next time.

‘Later, I saw her get up from her desk and walk across the room to her colleague’s desk. But she walked in that “for god’s sake” way.

‘“She just doesn’t get it,” I thought.

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