From Conflict to Convergence

I  go to a lot of launch events and other talks based on books by friends and colleagues. So, I was surprised and delighted by how much I enjoyed—and, more importantly, learned from—the hour I spent last week listening to Rob Fersh and Mariah Levison discuss their new book, From Conflict to Convergence.

The session and the book had a huge impact on me for two reasons. First, while I was at Search for Common Ground in the early 2000s, I worked with Rob while he led the effort to the create a United States Consensus Council (USCC). We weren’t quite able to pull it off, it was the single most important peacebuilding project I’ve ever worked on. Second and more importantly for where we find ourselves today, the work that Rob, Mariah, and their colleagues have done at Convergence gave me new insights into the kind of constructive work peacebuilders can do with policy makers however polarized our political may seem to be.

The United States Consensus Council

I’m going to start with the back story even though I’m drawn to Convergence because of what it does now and how it could help our country get out of the political mess it finds itself in.

The history of the USCC is important because we might have avoided some of the toxicity and gridlock we face today had things broken just a little bit differently twenty years ago.

In 2000, I had just gone to work with a college classmate (and political opponent back in the day) who had been hired to create an office at Search for Common Ground that would focus on conflicts here in the United States. Roger Conner had heard that I had done some work training young Palestinians in East Jerusalem and asked me to join him because he wanted to do work with the Jewish and Muslim communities here in the United States—remember that this was before 9/11. We ended up doing other things because friends of mine were already doing great grass roots work with American Muslims and Jews.

So, we were focusing on other projects involving racial reconciliation, abortion, and more when Rob joined our staff with a mandate to create the USCC in the aftermath of that year’s bruising presidential election. Soon, former Montana Governor Marc Racicot who was close to President Bush (and would chair his reelection campaign four years later) and former Congressman Dan Glickman agreed to chair the effort. The two were friends and both were committed to making policy in a new and better way.

We got enough funding to launch a task force that the two of them chaired and recruited a bipartisan team of national leaders and consensus building experts. We explored what state level consensus councils had done—including one in Montana that was created while Racicot was governor. We drafted legislation that would have created an autonomous federal agency that would follow the kind of methodology discussed in the next section that brought the key stakeholders together on a given issue and helped them work out a solution that satisfied as many of their needs as possible. After the Council finished its work, the proposal would go to Congress where it would have a good chance of passing because the key interest groups had all been involved in drafting it.

We came very close to having the bill enacted into law. It was not a high priority item on anyone’s legislative agenda (other than ours of course). If I remember right, it was attached to a broader bill in the House of Representatives where it passed. When it got to the Senate, however, one member put a “hold” on the bill, effectively killing it.

It is hard to tell what the council could have accomplished or if it could have stemmed any of the polarization that has shaken the country since then. Thus, it is hard to imagine how it could have done much to avoid the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party, or prevent COVID!

Still, I spend a fair amount of time wondering what would have happened if that Senator had allowed the bill to come up for a vote….

Convergence

Rob went on to incubate some policy consensus building projects at Search after I left to join the board at AfP and my loosely defined job as its Senior Fellow for Innovation in the mid-2000s. He then realized that his work needed a stand alone organization which led him to form Convergence a couple of years later.

As a result, we didn’t see each other much in the 2010s. We began working on separate things. He then retired from full-time leadership of the organization in 2020 when, of course, the pandemic hit and all of our work turned virtual and I found myself working almost exclusively from home even though our offices (which neither of us went to very often) are only a few blocks apart.

I watched Rob’s work from afar and always enjoyed it when I ran into Convergence staff members at Bridge Alliance events. Then, as the book’s publication date neared and my own work focused exclusively on US domestic politics (though not always in public policy terms), I realized that I had to reconnect with Rob and get to know Mariah who became Convergence’s CEO two years ago.

It only took a few minutes on their web site and reading a few pages of their book the morning before the launch event to realize that I had made a huge mistake in letting myself (unintentionally) drift away from Rob.

He and Convergence have done really cool work despite flying in to the stiff political headwinds of the last two decades.

That starts with the word convergence itself. Rob, Mariah, and their team know that they are not going to fully resolve any intractable conflict or completely solve any complex policy problem. What they can do is to help the parties to those disputes converge on steps that would make major dents in addressing the underlying problems, dents that could be built on to make even more progress later on.

The book is a delight to read because it constantly flips back and forth between three guiding principles that underlie Convergence’s work and what it has learned in applying them over the last twenty years in both institutional settings. Early in it, they refer to what might be seen as their philosophy:

Something was missing from our capacities as a nation to take on issues of consequence: the ability to skillfully integrate the wisdom and experience of people with differing backgrounds and vantage points (p. 21)\

No two Convergence or other policy consensus building projects are alike, but they all work through the five phases in this diagram from their web site.

• Select the issue. Not all issues are “ripe” for this kind of process. It does help if there is what they refer to as a “disarming frame” in which a significant number of people who care about the issue realize that it is possible for partisans to stop just talking past each other.

• Convene the key players. This can be tricky. Ideally, you want all of the key groups that are trying to shape public policy on the issue, including those that are diametrically opposed to each other. At the same time, the group can’t be too big. It should avoid “spoilers” who are more committed to blocking a solution they disagree with than taking incremental steps toward a solution. But, on issue after issue, Convergence has done a terrific job of getting most key stakeholders around the table for extended projects in a wide variety of policy areas as you can see on its web site.

• Facilitate sessions with the stakeholders through the use of a staff consisting of policy experts and conflict resolution professionals (who actually run the sessions). Convergence holds a number (usually between six and twelve) formal sessions over a number of months that serve two purposes. First, the stakeholders spend the time exploring and inching toward convergent solutions. Second and just as importantly, the facilitation team helps them learn to trust—and in many cases—even enjoy working with each other as the staff tries to foster a new mindset in which the stakeholders see their policy problem as something that they share together and address through dialogue rather than debate.

• Generate creative and constructive proposals after the group figures out that its members actually agree on certain core principles around which they can find specific policy proposals. Skeptics are always surprised that the Convergence team can get there, including on issues like government support for faith based social service agencies, expanding health care coverage, or helping citizens returning from incarceration rebuild their lives.

• Deliver the results in ways that other policy making elites actually see and hear what happens. As you no doubt know, lots of presidential commissions and other bodies issue reports that go nowhere. Convergence does all it can to use its own networks and those of its participants to make certain that the proposals get on the agenda of the bodies that can turn them into policy.

For a concrete example, check out this video of work it did a few years ago health care for children.

Next Steps

As regular readers know, I am helping create AfP’s Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative which makes my failure to think of convergence more than a bit embarrassing. Actually, I don’t feel too bad about this because our plans are to focus on locally based initiatives.

That said, AfP does more than its share of this kind of work on foreign policy issues but we could easily work on some of them with Convergence in the not so distant future.

More importantly, given Mariah’s background in Minnesota and the Consensus Council’s back story in Montana, South Dakota, Delaware, and beyond, I assume that there will be locally based projects that could benefit from Convergence-like processes at the state and local level.

Here are some quick off-the-top-of-my-head examples. One of the foundations that funded the US Consensus Council is based in Waco TX and dedicates a third of its resources to the city and its county. What could be done there? Or in Portland OR where my wife and I have been sitting in on meetings of a group of senior Rotarians who are trying to address that city’s long-standing  racial tensions? How could local Convergence-like projects include other stakeholders like the National Association for Community Mediation or ProSocial World?

In short, it’s time to reconnect with Rob, Mariah, and their staff!

Next time: Building online communities for constructive political action

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.