Learning from our enemies: How dialogue transforms conflict into understanding

Key topics:Dialogue with opponents reduces hate and breaks echo chambersCollaboration thrives by listening, adapting, and shifting fixed mindsetsStories of forgiveness show rivals can become partners in healing.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Debby Edelstein.Özlem Cekic’s email inbox began filling up with hate mail in 2007 when, as the first Muslim woman to do so, she won a seat in the Danish parliament. At first, she deleted the emails and dismissed them as the work of fanatics. But then a friend suggested that she reach out to the hate mail writers and invite them to meet for coffee. Hundreds of “dialogue coffee” meetings later, Cekic shares in her TED talk how face-to-face conversation can be a powerful force for defusing hatred. “Finding your tribe” is a popular refrain from the playground to the boardroom. In trying to find a community of people like us, we tend to look for those who support us, are loyal to us and agree with us.There’s nothing wrong with finding likeminded friends to hang out with. From sport to gardening clubs, looking for communities based on special interests is a sensible way to connect with others.But when we limit ourselves to spending time only with people like us, we risk living in an echo chamber with those who confirm our own worldviews and prejudices. And when it comes to how we engage with people whose views are diametrically opposed to our own, we are often clueless.We might be exposed to phrases like tolerance and inclusion, and accept that they are aspirational in how we relate to each other. But at school, the way learners are taught about listening and critical thinking is purely through debate – a form of engagement that trains us to listen for the weaknesses in our opponent’s arguments rather than identifying and building on what we might have in common.Adam Kahane has spent his working life helping groups around the world negotiate seemingly irreconcilable differences. In his book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with people you don’t Agree with or like or trust, he explains how to work with those you’d rather avoid while you achieve your goals, and maybe even make peace at the same time.He explains that successful collaboration never calls on a mind-set of us versus them, friends versus enemies, heroes versus villains, good versus bad, or innocent versus guilty.As someone who grew up in South Africa, Kahane uses the example of how political enemies President F.W. de Klerk and political activist Nelson Mandela collaborated successfully to end apartheid and transform South Africa into a democracy. Some of the key takeaways from the book are:Learn to adapt to circumstances you can’t influence.Experimentation can’t work unless you listen to your opponents’ ideas.Don’t try to change other people. Change yourself instead.Most significantly, you may need to make radical mental and behavioural changes. Stop thinking, “It must be this way”. Start thinking, “It could be this way”. Kahane explains.The risks of collaborating with rivals might seem daunting, but a study by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute finds that the benefits of doing so are significant. Collaborative competition when managed properly had more than a 50% chance of mutually reducing company costs.“Nowadays, the best partner might be your direct competitor,” says Paavo Ritala, a professor of Strategy and Innovation at LUT University of Technology in Finland.Beyond competition in business, stories of war can give us poignant examples of how mortal enemies become friends in a way which makes us interrogate the human ability to forgive unthinkable pain and cruelty.One such example is featured in the 2013 movie Railway Man. It’s based on the true story of British officer Eric Lomax who was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway.Decades later, still suffering from the psychological trauma of the torture he suffered in a Japanese POW camp, Lomax learns that one of his captors, Japanese secret police officer, Takashi Nagase, escaped prosecution for his war crimes and is working as a tourist guide in the same camp where he and his men once tortured British POWs. Lomax travels to Thailand and returns to the scene of his torture to confront Nagase ‘in an attempt to let go of a lifetime of bitterness and hate’. Nagase claims that the Japanese were brainwashed into thinking the war would be a victorious one for them, and that he never knew the extent of the devastation that would be caused. Lomax finally frees Nagase, throws his knife into the nearby river and returns to Britain.But after receiving a heartfelt letter of apology from Nagase, Lomax returns once more to Thailand. The two embrace and the epilogue relates that Nagase and Lomax remained friends until Nagase’s death in 2011. Another example is that of Rwandan genocide survivor Alice Makarurinda who lost her infant daughter and was stabbed and maimed at the hands of a man named Emmanuel Ndayisaba during the genocide in 1994. In 1997, Ndayisaba turned himself in for killing over a dozen people. He was released six years later as part of a government program to pardon Hutus who acknowledged their crimes.Ndayisaba mustered up the courage to kneel before Mukarurinda and beg for her forgiveness. She meditated on her decision for two weeks and ended up absolving him. Over time, the two not only became friends, but partners. By the genocide’s 20th anniversary, Mukarurinda and Ndayisaba were working side by side as treasurer and vice president of an organization that constructs houses for the survivors.These stories and many others display a remarkable human ability to forgive. But the danger of focusing on such extreme examples of both cruelty and forgiveness is that they lull us into thinking that these shifts are only available to unusual individuals in extreme circumstances.We all have enemies and rivals however prosaic the context. And we can all learn to listen better and to collaborate better whether it’s at work, in our communities or on the PTA.One of the lessons Cekic learned from her process of dialogue coffees was that everyone seems to think that other people are to blame for hatred and for the generalisation of other groups. They all believe that others are responsible for the demonizing.But when asked, “What about you? What can you do?”, the reply was usually, “What can I do? I have no influence. I have no power.”The flipside of understanding that our enemies have things to teach us, is the acceptance that we might be wrong ourselves. When we enter conflict and conversations with curiosity, rather than certainty, we open ourselves to learning and to having our own views challenged.Cekic recommends a simple approach. Don’t judge, focus on what you have in common and bring food.“If you want to prevent hate and violence, we have to talk to as many people as possible for as long as possible while being as open as possible. That can only be achieved through debate, critical conversation and insisting on dialogue that doesn’t demonize people.” she saysThere might very well be surprising gifts to be gained from rivals, haters and others who actively dislike us. Rather than avoiding the people we like least, sometimes there are lessons to be learned from them when we allow them to challenge our worldview – even if we have to dig deep to find them.

Learning from our enemies: How dialogue transforms conflict into understanding

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