Leo & Randy On Divisiveness

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. We welcome everybody back to another episode of Peer Innovation Podcast. You can find us at peerinnovation.co. You can also go to leobattaglia.com, and that's who he is. My name is Randy Cantrell, coming to you from California and from Texas, and we're glad to have you with us. Leo wrote a piece in collaboration with Craig Weber, he of Conversational Capacity fame. Oh, one of our favorite guys and, and some really, really great stuff. And you wrote a piece on Medium, Leo, entitled I Love My Grandkids. Heart. I heart my grandkids with some fingerprints of, you know, little kids. So I don't know, it's a, it's a, it's a good conversation. And at the center of the conversation is divisiveness, which Who can't relate to that today?

Well, you know, in, in the piece, and actually the, the, the visual of the 'I love my grandkids' is kind of like what William Ury used to talk about with the third side, right? It's like, for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the country, for the sake of the grandkids or something, right? That when you've got two sides fighting, you've got to pause for a moment and think about can we call upon something larger than ourselves, which is usually that third side, you know, to recognize? And I think, you know, Craig and I were actually exchanging photos on text message of the grandkids, and it was kind of fun. And but we were having a conversation, as we do, and as he is all about conversational capacity, right, about the fact that people are not having conversations anymore. And it isn't just a function of what's happened over the last, you know, this current administration. It's— this goes back 20 years. Excuse me. And it's, you know, the echo chambers that have been created by MSNBC and by Fox News that allow people to just tune into their own worldview at the expense of any other thoughts, ideas, framework, facts, you know, all of it. And the more that that has come into play, the less people are able to really engage in conversations. Because it used to be— I grew up in the world of politics where people would argue issues all the time. Here's where I am on this. Here's where I am on that. It wasn't name-calling. It wasn't people are liars. It wasn't people. It was just an idea. That we all want what we believe is best for the country. You have a different way of getting there than I do. Let's talk about that and see if we can in fact come to some idea about what that might look like. But when you begin conversations today where someone expresses an opinion and usually it's loaded up, right? And then Everybody's a liar or a socialist or a racist or whatever -ist you want to put on somebody.

Some label.

I mean, it is just— and so as we're trading these grandchild photos, we said, can you only imagine that if this keeps going the way it's going, what the world will be like for them? And it's really a sobering conversation because when you consider how fast things have devolved in our society, it's already been— I mean, how many conversations have you had with people for years and years now about, OK, can't talk about politics at Thanksgiving, man, because forget it. And then that goes into the other family gathering you can think of where you've got to set up ground rules. It's just, it's beyond. I said, where did we lose our ability to engage one another as fellow human beings and just sometimes be able to agree to disagree, right? I'm not worried about, like, it's not about you got to convince me or I have to convince you or anything, but just to understand where someone's coming from, have an exchange about things. Oftentimes, as you know, I mean, many conversations we've been in in our lives where it will either— that conversation can either confirm my belief or it gets me thinking about another way of looking at something. But yeah, and of course I want to get your thoughts on that just in general, but I really want to get to the heart of why we wrote the piece because basically this divisiveness has actually found its way into an area that really kind of blew both of our hair back. But, um, you know, what do you— you know, what, what are you kind of seeing out there? Well, when I— friends, family, whatever, you know. When I—

you know, when I read the piece and, uh, and Leo and I were texting, he was texting me and I was in the middle of reading the piece. It was published on September 7th, 2020.

We'll put— and Craig Weber and I wrote that together. Yeah, I ended up being the one who posted But we've been sharing out on LinkedIn and a few other platforms.

So, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm reading it and I don't know, I hearken back and I went to journalism school in the '70s and this was the post-Watergate class of journalism. It's not why I went. I just liked language and words. I had no intentions of ever and never have used it. Except just in my own writing and stuff. But I was just naturally curious, and I remember having a lot of conversations with professors who had gone to Vietnam. And of course, Vietnam was a real— was a real— Vietnam and Watergate were both real polarizing subjects. So different time, different era, different kind of topics, but the media was, was really changing even then because we had countless formal meetings and informal meetings and dialogue about just accuracy in media and people being able to have these viewpoints and express these viewpoints and understand these viewpoints. And that's— I mean, I'm going back to the mid-'70s when American culture was really changing. And of course, as you pointed out, in the last 20 years it's really picked up picked up steam. Uh, I, I'm, I'm very curious. I've had conversations— you and I talked before we hit the record button— I've had conversations just today about things relating everything from politics to the pandemic that we're in, and I'm just puzzled. I'm just— I'm, I'm not judging, I'm just— I'm, I'm puzzled by How people have reached whatever conclusion they've reached. I'm puzzled enough that I would like to understand. I mean, I would like to understand, for instance, as I told you before, the hill that people want to die on when it comes to, I'm not going to wear a mask in public. I don't care. I don't care what anybody says. I had a conversation with somebody and they had gone to some food place where they went in with their laptop. A 25-year-old manager approaches them about, you know, wearing a mask, you know, and they kind of I'm like, why are you hard timing a 25-year-old young person who's probably never seen a $35,000 a year salary? You know, I don't, I don't understand that. Help me understand that. And of course, you know, I, we couldn't, you couldn't have the con— we couldn't have the conversation about that.

Right.

So, you know, and you're talking a 4-inch, 5-inch piece of cloth. Over your face. And for me, that's just symbolic of the divisiveness, of, you know, the fact that we can get so dug in to where we are in our position, whatever our position may be— right, wrong, or indifferent. But it's like, I think, at least take some time to explain why you are, why you've reached this conclusion. I'm— it's fine if that's what you you want to do. I just don't understand.

So interesting, because when you mentioned about post-Watergate, as you well know, Bob Woodward is still making news. Yeah, there'll be a lot more that we're gonna hear about that over the coming days. Yeah, it is, you know, Having a conversation about anything is nearly impossible. You know that after that article ran also, the guy who I take golf lessons from time to time, he's a PGA pro here in Southern California, I get a text immediately from him because apparently someone had what he believed, you know, put something on Facebook that was rather misleading He wanted to try to say, hey, in his mind, the most non-confrontational way possible to say, hey, by the way, that isn't quite how that goes. Here's how it is, blah, blah, blah. And he just gets ripped apart. Yeah.

I know the feeling.

And so lesson number 1, in my mind, is don't engage in that on that platform. Especially, and I don't mean just Facebook, I mean any of the social media platforms where people feel very brave and very anonymous in their own way, or at least very disconnected from any reality of these things. But I think what has contributed to it in such a big way is, you know, we talked about it when we started, is that this world has gotten so incredibly complex. Imagine what, of course, families are doing right now, just struggling from whether they don't have a job or whether they're worried if they're going to keep a job, to elderly parents, to homeschooling their kids and all this other stuff. You have MSNBC and Fox doing what? Making you scared to death of what will happen if the other side wins. That's, that's the strategy. I mean, it doesn't get any more complicated than that. So with a lot of your own stuff to do in an incredibly complex world, it's easy to see how people start really getting caught up in, hey, what do I need to be afraid of? Because God knows I'm dealing with enough. What could make matters worse? And it's really troubling because that's why we get into these ad hominem attacks. And that's why we get into these positions which are so I mean, you know, most people out there are just doing the best they can to try to raise their family and make a living and do what they need to do. They're not rabid, you know, partisan political people. They're just not. But it is very easy to get caught up in what you might be afraid of. What will happen if, right? If this person gets elected, oh my God, this is going to happen, you know? And if this person gets elected, oh my God, it's going to be the end of the world. So this is the game we're in right now. And I hate to even call it that, but I mean, unfortunately, for those who are playing it, I think it's a very high-stakes game. And then what happens is you wonder that after you play a game at that level of intensity and that level of name-calling and vitriol, why in the world that after January 20th, no matter who gets elected president, why we can't all just go, OK, yeah, let's go. Let's work together and make things happen. On behalf of the American people. It's not going to happen. Right. You know, now getting away from kind of the political arena for a minute, and I like to think we stayed away from at least the partisan political arena, but just talked about the landscape, which I'm not sure is subject to a lot of debate. But what prompted Craig and I to write the article was, you know, both of us speak to various peer groups, the business leaders. And we were talking about his book Conversational Capacity. And what we basically said was oftentimes in a relationship— I don't care if it's a group. It could be 2 people. It could be 10, 12 people as part of a peer group or something. Sometimes when the compassion, as he puts it, or your want to keep the relationship good right? Keep things safe. Because God knows you get conflict everywhere. So if you've got something where people actually get along, you really want to preserve that. So you tend to walk on eggshells. Well, in a peer group situation, if you're doing that, you're being so careful around one another as to not get into any conversation, deep conversation about anything, you've now just taken the whole efficacy of that peer group and shrunk it dramatically. Right? I mean, you're just not going to be in an effective situation. Conversely, if your passion starts to override your compassion, where the relationship doesn't matter to you as much anymore and you start, you know, toughing up about, you know, then all of a sudden you get into the kind of crazy conflict that feeds into everywhere else. So what we basically said was that there are certain peer groups that we've seen— and this is members telling us this, by the way— that it's kind of like— this is why we refer to the article— the title of the article is "The Other Pandemic." And the other pandemic is this divisiveness that has now infected even groups like this, where this is supposed to be the safe place. This place you could go is kind of this inner sanctum where you could speak to one another and be real and have good conversations. And all of a sudden, the state of the world gets to such a point where people feel either too cautious or they feel like, hey, they can deal— work with people in that room the same way they happen to be doing it everywhere else. You've got a lot of issues. And you talked about there was one situation. We didn't refer to it in the article as this, but it was basically a fistfight. Can you imagine, right, that breaks out in a meeting like that? And like I said, conversely, you've got other folks who are like, oh no, everything's good and everybody's been content. And everyone forgets why they're there. You know? And so I think, you know, we talked about these 5 points at the end. And one of them, and it sounds trite, but going back to your why starts really being important. Why am I part of this group? What am I here to do? You know, and the why isn't to keep a relationship together if you're not going to be happy, if it's not going to be, you know, efficacious for you in some way, right? Um, nor is it to be there so you can bully people and be a know-it-all and, and be, you know, confrontational at the expense of getting anything productive done. So I think once we started talking about that, we said, man, if it's going into those arenas, then we should be scared to death for our kids and grandkids, where if this continues and we go another 5, 10, 20 years of this kind of stuff, I can only imagine. I don't think I can imagine how dramatically it could escalate.

No, and I agree. And The other thought, as I was first reading it, you know, and I've gone back over and looked at, looked it over and no, I, as a person who is not political at all, I didn't get any, it certainly doesn't have any partisan take on it. So for those of you that have read it, don't, don't be bashful. We want you to go read it. In fact, according to me, it's a 4-minute read. So this isn't going to take you, take you long to read, but I think if you're a slow reader, I think, yeah, I think it'll provoke a lot of, I think it can provoke a lot of positive of really positive thought. But the, you know, as I was— listen, America has survived, has survived an awful lot of thought, a lot of conversations, and a lot of disputes and conflicts. But I was thinking of some things that I had read a long time ago, and I need to go back and revisit it, of, was it Ben Franklin's, you know, hunt to group that he got. And some of those conversations are depicted in historical literature. And you think about the Founding Fathers and you think about the vigorous debating that went on to just try to establish the framework for what would be this, this new nation. And for whatever reason, probably I'm a little bit of a history buff, but as I was reading it and I was thinking about the title, I was thinking about, and I thought You know, what if these, what if these men at the time had not had the capacity, you know, to have that? I mean, now where would we be? So to your point, I don't know. I think we tend to think, well, everything's much bigger than us and I can't make a difference. And I'm not talking about voting necessarily. I'm just talking about your ability to have, make an impact with one another person so that you can push conversation forward. Forward. That and the other thought I had is what we learn. And all of us grew up, you know, we, we learned by observing what, what people were doing. I know, for instance, my parents, my grandparents grew up in a world that if the politician said it, gospel truth. Watergate changed all of that. And our generation, our generation went maybe too far the other extreme, but we absolutely went to the other end of the spectrum. Because Watergate had that kind of an impact on us. So yeah, I'm with you. I'm wondering what negative, and I'm also wondering what positive effects it can have, which I think the article addresses that. I think, I think you guys were trying to assert we can learn some things here. We can push the ball forward if we choose to and make things better, which hopefully more and more people will.

And, and we've always been So let's face it, you talk about the founding fathers. Well, it wasn't 70-ish years later that we were in civil war. Right. So it can go bad fairly quickly. And it also, I think when you start looking at— so I think since Watergate is really interesting because when you look at Nixon and you look at the aftermath of that and with Gerald Ford taking over for his presidency, obviously the next president there was Jimmy Carter. Like him, don't like him, or whatever, Jimmy Carter doesn't get elected to the White House at any other time in history other than that year, period, end of story. I mean, it's just— now you can say that of a lot of presidents, quite frankly. You know, it was Reagan's time in 1980 following, you know, Carter. It was Clinton's time following George H.W. Bush. There is such a fascinating thing about the moment of, you know, and as we as a society, you know, one minute, you know, we're, you know, we have a Democrat president, one minute, you know, we've got a Republican, we've gone back and forth, we've done it successfully, we've kind of stayed within the 20-yard line pretty much on either side of the field, right? I mean, in terms of where we are. In fact, I remember, you know, studying international politics, in college and you start realizing that, okay, the difference between— back in those times anyway, I'm dealing with like early 1980s— the difference between Republicans and Democrats in the scheme of things was they were that close versus you go to other countries and see what the political landscape looked like in the ramifications of one side versus the other side getting elected. And they were huge. By comparison. I mean, not even close to, you know, um, but, um, how much of this do you think is—

how much of this do you think could stem from just the adversarial system that we kind of live in? And that as a republic, which is basically what we are, that we have these checks and balances and we have this push-pull adversarial thing. Our court system absolutely adversarial, is built on it. How much of that do you think impacts just us as a culture in general?

So I think there's a lot of things that impact it, and I think it's beyond politics. I think it's sports, I think it's movies, I think it's everything. It's about winning, number one, right? It's, you know, I mean, You know, every once in a while we'll be flipping channels, right? And you'll see like, like The Bachelor will be on or The Bachelorette or whatever. It's not about, it's not about the man or woman, you know, and hooking up with them and about getting married. It's about winning. It's like, I'm one of a dozen women or I'm one of a dozen guys depending on when you're in the show and these people want to win. And that becomes, you know, kind of what it's all about. So I think, you know, winning is a huge part of it. There's definitely a big part of it is winning at whatever it takes to make that happen, whether that may be fair, unfair, whatever. And so I think there's a lot of divisiveness around that, around this idea that it is a bit of a zero-sum game. There's winners and losers. Certainly that's what ratings are all about. Ratings are about winners and losers. Ratings are about— there are issues that are debated. I mean, and I mentioned this before, there's a lot of controversial issues out there that if you actually brought both sides to the table and said, let's attack this together and let's make a difference, they could come to some resolution on some things and they could make huge strides forward. What they don't— the reason they don't is because, I hate to say it, there's no money in it. The money is about stoking your base, whoever they are, to make sure that you can contribute or whatever and that you can continue the fight. As long as we are bent on continuing the fight instead of actually getting things done, my hope is that we get exhausted with that at some point in time. That there'll be a time where it won't just be about changing presidents, it'll be about throwing everybody out because we need people who are actually serious about doing this. I think we've talked before about times where I went to— you go to like the Milken Conference, right? Or you go to Aspen Institute or World Economic Forum, places like that. It's remarkable when you see really smart people who represent what you think are the poll— the polls on a lot of these issues, and they can come together. And I've seen panels where someone will ask the question, look, if we locked you guys in a room for, you know, a couple days, could you guys come up with— and I use guys and men and women, obviously, in the panel— and could you, could you come up with a solution to pick our healthcare or prison system or whatever? Sure. No question about that. In the light of day, with all of the inherent pressures and with everything that kind of comes along with doing that, not so much. And yeah, we're not good at celebrating compromise. We're looking at who won, who lost, who caved, who broke down, who stood on the hill and put the stake down. I mean, Yeah, so I think once we start being— once we start, and this may be— I think when you think about Craig's point on this, once we remind ourselves about what our why is, right? And I think for us in that article, our why is how can we make even the smallest difference, whether it's writing a piece like that or kind of just engage others in the way we do, using, by the way, Craig's work on conversational capacity where our candor has gotten way out of control and our curiosity is like so not even non-existent right now that we just need, you know, balance there. And I think for that article, you know, you talk about the end of pandemic, you talk about devices, you talk about state of politics and family and all that, but in the end your why has to be about leaving a better world for, you know, kids and grandkids where they might actually be able to work together and get things done. And yeah, so I mean, I think that's really in many ways what it was all about. Yeah.

And the great thing, and I want you to, I want you to dive just a little bit deeper in these 5, these 5 questions that you and Craig came up with, because for our audience, for those of you that are operating teams, and you may be sitting there thinking, well, You know, my team and I don't— we don't operate that way. I would say tap the brakes and challenge that. I mean, I had some meetings with clients this morning and talking about some of their meetings and whatnot, and leaders are often surprised by feedback that they get from some of their team members and things that they didn't know people were sitting on. To your point in the article, you and Craig both, the going from caution, tiptoeing around, not wanting to really speak up and speak your mind. So in the context of teams, and not even a peer group, but just teams, you've got some questions that I think are applicable. And it begins with that why. You know why?

Yeah. And so you refer to this, so the outline of the article pretty much is We talk about the other pandemic, right? We talk about what we can do to slow the spread, but we also talk about getting to a diagnosis. And obviously to get to a diagnosis, you have to ask questions. And the 5 questions that we came up with was, and we actually applied it to both groups and teams. What is the why for your group and team? What are you really here to do? And, you know, under even normal circumstances, you know, we talk about the fact that when people get to know one another really, really well, and they do become almost too careful with one another because they're there to preserve the relationship instead of tapping back into why they are there. Why they are there is so that they can help themselves and their organizations get better and that they can do that for other people also. To do that sometimes can be hard work. Sometimes people challenge one another, you know, and I think in healthy ways, but it's still, you know, it's why they're there, right? The second question was, under what circumstances do you see the group become less candid, right, to maintain the peace at the expense of your why? All right, so they don't want to overstep. All of a sudden, the relationship starts to be paramount. And does— under what circumstances, what happens in your mind that makes you do that, right? Because we know that it compromises the effectiveness of the group. Conversely, under what circumstances do you see the group become less curious and begin to butt heads and quarrel at the expense of your why? And so I think digging into these questions a little bit and helping a group or team find some balance and kind of get their bearings in that way is helpful. We also Questions 4 and 5 were basically on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the group's overall psychological safety? If you were to just look at it and say, how does this environment feel for us? And then on a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you personally leverage that psychological safety to benefit yourself and others? So it's one thing to have a safe environment. It's another thing to actually be able to access it and use it. And we've talked many times about the idea of going to a spa. You don't have one of these at home. You go there and you see this incredible pool of water and the steam gently rising off it. And you're thinking, wow, you know, if you get in it, it would be the most amazing restorative experience in the whole world. Consider that, that perfectly safe environment that you've got access to, but yet somehow, instead of immersing yourself in it, You will sit next to it and read a magazine, or you'll dangle your feet in the water. And it's kind of how do we take ourselves out of our comfort zone knowing that we trust? If we truly trust the psychological safety environment, how can we take ourselves out of our comfort zone? And to do that is kind of, again, it gets back to your why. Because if I do that, I know it will be helpful to me and to others. I recognize it for the act of generosity and courage that it really is, knowing that it's going to benefit all of us if I'm willing to do that and set the example for others to do the same. So yeah, so, you know, so we get into that. And so I think in terms of groups and teams today, especially in the incredibly charged, you know, environment we live in. I think sometimes even if we're not the leader of the team, we can be a leader in the team. And if things start to go off the rails like that, or, you know, somebody starts calling, name-calling, or someone's doing this, someone's doing this, like, you get it. That's the kind of stuff you need to shut down just for, you know, not to preserve the relationship, but to make sure that that candor doesn't overpower curiosity to the point where it's damaging to the group. And conversely, where curiosity doesn't— is so pervasive that people aren't speaking their mind, because we want that also.

Yeah, and the other thought that I had as I read and reread the article was it's ironic to me that the more selfish we behave, the more we lose. We may think that we're winning, to your point, But it's like the harder that we push to kind of get what we think we want in the moment, as far as our behavior, certainly within the context of a group or a team, or as you point out in the article, a family, a family that has to have rules and regulations for Thanksgiving dinner so that they don't kill each other.

It's kind of like what we've talked about with regard to control. We control very little in this world, and we put ourselves and we get ourselves in the mindset we think we do control something, and we actually take actions that put us in more control, so to speak, it usually goes sideways. I mean, it's just, it's a false construct, the idea of that. It really is in so many respects about the kind of balances. And I think in our show notes too, because I think it would be a really good reference point, in addition to the article that we did on Medium, I think having a link to the podcast that Craig did with us just a few months ago. I think it would be outstanding so that people can— because he certainly explains conversational capacity much better than I do. It is very much his life's work, and he brings some extraordinary examples to the table, which I think would get other people to think about their why and what they can do. And the fact is that just because someone else, you know, people often ask, well, if I'm bringing all the conversational capacity skills to the, in the world, and then someone else comes into the conversation and they don't know the rules, you know, but it's, it's, I think people who are really skilled at it and who continue to be skilled at it or work at being skilled at it, I should say. Craig talks about all the time. It's a, It's a real ongoing discipline. It's not like you got this. But yeah.

It was a good piece. I was proud of you both for it. And again, to our audience, a really short piece, but maybe a piece that you can share with your group, with your team, with your family. Maybe have a conversation about the article. That's a, it's a, it's a great way to start. Our website, as we said, is pearinnovation.co. You can go over there and find all kinds of ways to subscribe and all the previous podcasts. We'll put a list of that show with Craig, just some terrific interviews all along the way and conversations with various people. And if you can figure out anything that Leo or I can do for you and your group or your team, we, we encourage you to reach out. With that too. We enjoy your feedback. You can find us on all the social media platforms, and those are available over at the website as well. We appreciate you listening. I'm going to give you the last words, Leo.

Um, no, um, I just love everything you said, particularly all the things that, um, I think people can start thinking about for themselves, whether it's for their team or their families. Definitely have a look at the article. I think particularly listen to the podcast that we did with Craig, because if you haven't heard that, I think it is really going to allow you to crawl inside the fact that every one of us can make this possible. We always talk about the power of "we begins with me." Well, this is, this is where we do it. This is how we can make a difference, each and every one of us. So, with that, have a great week and we will see you next week.

Thank you for joining us. To subscribe to the podcast and learn more about how you can engage peer innovation for your organization, contact us on the website at peerinnovation.co. Till next week, remember, the power of we begins with you.