On moving beyond the goal of consensus

Watching The Black National Convention in August 2020, in a segment about The Highlander Center in Tennessee, Executive Director Ash-Lee W. Henderson described the center’s work this way:

“We have been bringing people together under the methodology of popular education to learn new knowledge that can only exist if these people came and sat together to learn with and from each other and then take that new knowledge back home with them to change the material conditions of their people.”

This approach to organizing reminds of the change work I was trained in by leaders like Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Kelly McGowan, Nancy Fritsche Eagan, Tim Merry, Aerin Dunford, Yeyo Beltran, and Rich Rivera in the Art of Hosting community of practice. I am grateful to the Black National Convention for reminding me that spaces like this exist because one of the most difficult things about change work is how even in the most well-meaning teams, teams that may believe they are collaborative and equitable, power dynamics often get in the way of getting real work done.

I often notice that this is not even about power; it’s just about living with difference. The most useful passage I’ve read about just letting there be room for difference (so that people can get good work done together) is by Tuesday Ryan-Hart of The Outside. In a blog she wrote in 2013 or 2014, she says (and I share this with her permission):

“In wildly diverse groups of people, insisting that we must share a perspective or vision at the outset is often a recipe for group deterioration and/or getting stuck. Forcing common analysis or shared aspiration at these times is not only counterproductive, it is false, and it undermines our work. The work is over before it even begins…

We must resist the idea of resolution of difference; we must instead focus on what we are going to do next. What is our shared work here? Sometimes that means that all we can do is simply see the very next step together and agree to take it.”

These are the ways I’ve seen work get stuck (as Tuesday describes):

• I’ve had too many conversations with fellow white folks who say they care about racial justice when it actually seems like in any given moment, they just want Black people to just share their view, particularly Black women.
• I’ve had too many interactions with older leaders, most often white, who seem to need younger women to share their view.
• I’ve seen too many people attempt to force common analysis and/or shared aspiration about too many things not even related to issues of equity and justice, just because they want other people to think or approach work the way they do. Most teams need practical help to do more work around shared power and decision making (using hierarchy where it actually makes sense and letting it go elsewhere). Samantha Slade’s Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time can help on this front.
• I’ve behaved in ways that communicate that I believe in forcing common analysis. I am continually learning how to use my voice as a queer woman while balancing backing up and just listening, especially as a white person who is committed to equity, but who also has much to learn, not to mention becoming more actively anti-racist.

These patterns, for me, are particularly tough to watch when they happen between and among womxn. I want womxn to be better at collective leadership (and wrongly assume we’re good at it!) because I think everyone knows how terrible hyper-individualist, competition-based leadership is. But I don’t know that this is true.

In another blog, Tuesday Ryan-Hart wrote:

“For too long we have said that we want to host processes where we hold difference well, when what we really mean is that we want people to transcend difference, resolve it, or get through it (hopefully quickly) so that we can get to work… When we move into the world of deep differences, we know that the goal is not to come to consensus in the way of viewing the problem or seeing the world but to feel our discomfort and edginess together and only then come to an agreement about what’s the next step to meet all of our futures.”

These sentences do a ton of work. They acknowledge a) the discomfort of letting differences just be and b) how intentional collective work needs to be for people to work together. I read this and think, Yes, that’s what I remember from participatory leadership trainings when they were done well! That is what I want to keep practicing… Just creating space. Letting someone disagree with you and not taking it personally or trying to change their view… Taking work (that clearly no one person/team owns) step by step without anyone trying to control the outcome. Indeed, work becomes so much easier when we forget our desire for consensus and invite in difference (which may mean making space for more miscommunication, too).

As I’ve worked to bring participatory leadership into organizations and teams, what have I learned about why people struggle to make this kind of space for difference? Mostly, people not only seem to want to transcend, resolve, or get through difference, as Tuesday says, but because trying to do can offer a (false) feeling of connection. Sometimes it’s about power and ego, which sucks (and it happens all of the time), but mostly, I sense that the impulse to try to get someone to share your view is about desire for connection. I have fallen into this trap myself when I have been lonely in my work. But “hosting” difference, as my teachers have taught me, means foregoing false feelings of connection so as to create space for the kind of connection that allows for difference.

As I work to use these kinds of participatory leadership practices, I am reminded that I cannot do this work alone. It takes showing up to practice with a brilliant team that may or may not know how to do collective work. And it takes working with at least a couple of other people who do know how to design for collective leadership. When it works, it’s wonderful. When it doesn’t, I’ve learned that it is necessary to:

• Keep speaking up when I see others impacted by racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or ageist messages or behavior and when I am on the receiving end of sexist, homophobic, classist, or ageist messages and/or behavior.
• Be called in about one’s own sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, and/or ageist messages and behavior, even when it’s painful.
• Leave organizations that do not hold their leaders to the same standards of behavior they hold for staff, even when it’s painful.
• Challenge (and call in) leaders who may have tremendous knowledge and excellent values on one issue, but do not know how to take a learner’s stance on another issue. Mary Catherine Bateson said it better when she wrote, “I defer to authorities not only on the basis of coercion but because I trust their confidence, not just what they already know or the degrees they have but also because I observe that they continue to be willing to learn. It’s a mistake to pin one’s trust or obedience on someone who’s not willing to learn.”

And when leaders do create enough space for each other and for teams to do good work together while honoring deep points of difference, it’s a beautiful thing… which reminds me of Elaine Scarry’s words in a 2011 talk she gave at Harvard, “Beauty as a Call to Justice”:

“What is deeply and abidingly extraordinary about beautiful things is… they put us in a state of bliss at the very moment that they make us feel marginal or secondary… None of us is the center of the world, but each of us can get into the mistake of believing that we are the center of our own world. Beauty relieves us of this. It not only puts us on the sidelines, but makes us acutely happy to be there on the sidelines. Becoming capable of experiencing bliss in one’s own lateralness may not be itself a state of justice, but it certainly prepares us for doing such work in the world.”

As a white person, I’m learning how to stop thinking of myself as the center of my own world when this happens and be happy on the sidelines as Black leaders and folks of color, so many of them womxn, lead us to a better world for all (and actively support these leaders). As a queer woman, I’m committed to sharing new ways of doing power and decision-making so that collective leadership can actually happen. Here’s creating room for the new knowledge that we can only create together.