A NUANCED YEAR'S RESOLUTION

A few months into my retirement I started to slow down and think; what is important, what could I do in the next phase of life? This wasn’t all about work fulfillment and new projects, but about life and people.

In my leadership role I had always tried to give people my time, and had tried to listen rather than speak. I wondered if I could develop this now that I had nowhere to be and no overwhelming work pressure.

I had joined a local football team and had met many new mates. After playing we would sit in the bar, having a drink and a chat. I have always been interested in other people and I took the time to mix with new people and ask about them and their lives, and enjoyed the sense of not needing to say anything about me.

I have often found that people like to be listened to and understood and appreciated – we probably all do to some degree, but frequently just wait for a pause in the other person’s words to launch into our next vitally important sentence. I think people feel better about themselves and gain self-respect when they are heard. The fact that someone bothers to listen is a high impact behaviour that pays off in many ways and helps forge meaningful relationships.

So this has become the basis of my new task: to listen to people and to really try to understand their life, their perspective and why they think and feel the way they do. Like many others in recent times, I have tended to cling to my own views and to assert them at every opportunity.

I am however struck by the examples across the world of people who reach across divides to try to mend rifts and age-old schisms.

In Ireland, Palestine, South Africa and many other places people have tried to set aside differences and to seek out what they have in common, often after heart-breaking personal loss.

There are also moving stories of relatives of victims reaching out to the assailants to try to build a relationship and to understand why this could happen and to help save another life.

In the UK the issue of Brexit has served to divide the nation more than any other and it has been hard not to retreat to the team bunker. The recent examples in the US have taken this to a whole new level and it is hard to see how such differences can be healed.

On this theme, a Radio 4 programme entitled “the death of nuance” was broadcast during early January 2021. Oliver Burkeman, the presenter identified in himself the same traits where he was losing sight of the other point of view. We have arrived at the belief that if the other person has ideas that differ from our own then they must be a bad person.

I have tried to rationalise this with my own political opinion – how can someone who seems like a good person support that abhorrent view? The nuances exhibited by our human condition are numerous and we all claim to be complex creatures – “I like that, but I wouldn’t dream of doing so and so”.

It turns out that we are hard-wired to behave in certain ways. In our evolution, nuance was no use to us at all. To survive we needed quick responses and definite actions. Is that rustling in a bush the wind or a man-eating beast?

To aid this we developed three key abilities: fight or flight, us versus them (friend or foe) and a moral sense (is this right or wrong).

As we have developed we have been able to place more reliance on the third aspect which is about judgement. We learn judgement as we grow up and experience different situations in life, aided by teachings from parents and others. We learn nuance; shades of meaning, tones of voice and self versus others. However, this ability has, it appears, been waning in recent years and our grasp of nuance and civility has declined.

Have you observed how radio and TV interviews and debates are staged as a spectacle with people taking the opposite view or provoking the interviewee to answer in a certain way that will sustain the interrogation? I have been increasingly frustrated by John Humphrys and his radio 4 colleagues when interviewees are grilled to the extent that I learn precious little about their experience or point of view.

In their new book, How to Disagree: Negotiate difference in a divided world, Philosophers Darren Chetty and Adam Ferner attempt to provoke thought on the current state of dialogue and to offer some constructive suggestions.

Many of us pick up our cues from parliamentary debate which confirms a side, a point of view and right and wrong. We can sometimes therefore resort to a performance, using persuasion, rhetoric or caricature to beat our “opponent”. The debate is more of a spectacle and little understanding is shared or gained.

In contrast, the dialogue can present a learning experience and, in Darrens Chetty’s words, the conversion is more satisfying when we are dancing on the borders of our ignorance and we are informed and helped to explore our own views.

He goes further and says that it is imperative that we engage in debate to make sense of ourselves and explore what we can or cannot change. We mustn’t become passive receptacles of whatever view is trotted out on social media.

Dialogue reveals new understandings. In my own world I have often been conscious, on hearing my own voice and the trotting out of my beliefs, that I have had the same view for some time. This has caused me to wonder whether I was talking sense or non-sense, and whether some new information was out there that would cause me to think again. I therefore rejoiced when someone challenged a long-held view and at least made me reconsider. This is why we need diversity of thought in the workplace to maximise creativity and solve the big questions of the modern age.

In the book, Darren and Adam suggest a few pointers for engaging in useful dialogue. Be conscious of who you are addressing and why; are you just talking to fill in the gaps, what role are you taking (devil’s advocate, trying to win)? It is helpful to summarise the other person’s argument to ensure honest understanding and to build logically on the points made. It is best not to assert a position and to try to suspend judgement. Try to be open to a vision of future possibilities. Phrases such as - tell me more about that - show you are interested, curious and behaving as a generous interlocutor. 

A recent radio programme on radio 4 highlighted stories from people around the world. I was taken with how little I knew about the places and what lives there were like. I was however heartened by the similarities we share in trying to make the best of our lives.  

My quest for the coming years is to give people time, to listen to their stories, views and beliefs and to try to understand and find some new meaning or truth.