the gift of conflict – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers, best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. I am your host Reverend Jim Latimer and today we have the privilege of having with us Reverend Pegi Ridout. Pegi is a long-experienced – like four decades or more – Intentional Interim Transitional Specialist. She makes her home in the United Church of Canada, and lives in Ontario. She is also a long-time Interim Ministry Network (IMN) faculty member, which is where I first got to know her. She was my teacher in a recent class. I learned a lot from her! And she knows a lot about conflict. She’s one of the few people I know who, if there’s conflict, moves toward it. I have the opposite response! So, her inclination has a lot of value for us interims, and so, I wanted her to speak to that. So, Pegi, welcome. And if you could speak a little bit about the gift of conflict – to use your words.
Pegi Ridout
Thank you, Jim. So, I tell people that I love conflict. And that’s probably not exactly true, if you’re going to take me literally. But what I love is the potential that conflict has for opening up a system to creative possibilities. So, that sounds like a lot of lovely language, but how do we actually get there?
Well, I want to start with saying a word about the absence of conflict. What would that be like? And maybe you’re thinking, Oh, that would be heaven on earth! But let me tell you about a congregation that I first served as an interim. There was no conflict. Eventually, I learned that 40 years prior to my being there – 40 years prior to my being there! – there had been a very divisive fight between the minister and the music director, which led to a third of the congregation leaving. So, they learned their lesson. And even though there was no one on the board who’d been in that congregation longer than 25 years, and there was only one person in the entire congregation who knew the full gory details, the congregation still was reacting to that fight from 40 years prior. And what that meant was not peace, but inertia. The meetings were tedious and boring. The worship was rigid and lackluster. There was no energy. So as a conflict avoider, have I convinced you that maybe perhaps, there might just be a little bit of value in having maybe just a little tiny bit of conflict? Maybe that would be okay?
Jim Latimer
Yes, I’m tracking your preacher. Come on! Preach it! It’s good. It’s good.
Pegi Ridout
So, I would claim that the difficulty with conflict isn’t that we have it, it’s that we don’t know how to do it well. We’re so afraid of it, and the damage that it causes, that we avoid it until we put ourselves into a situation where the conflict explodes. And then we’re dealing with the very issues that we had sought to avoid by avoiding the conflict.
So, how do we treat conflict as a gift, rather than something to be avoided at all costs? How do we get there? And I’m going to say that how we get there is by practice. Practice! Practice! So, the first thing, even before we really get into the practicing, is we have to set up a structure where conflict is a safe thing to have. And that happens by introducing or developing meeting norms. So, something like the respectful communication guidelines developed by Eric Law at the Kaleidoscope Institute are one tool and the congregation that I serve, we actually just came up with four words that we use – trust, respect, listen, then speak. So, first thing in dealing with well with conflict is to set up those norms and to name them at every single meeting.
And you know, you’ve gotten there when you hear the comment that I heard not very long ago: I am so sick of those four words! When you get there, you know that the system has taken those to heart. And you still keep using them at every single meeting!
Jim Latimer
And there’s a flow to them, right? There’s an order to them: trust first, then respect and listen. Generally, there’s a flow, right? A priority.
Pegi Ridout
Yes. Each system can figure out their own four words that they want to use, or their own meeting norms that they want to use, or they can find one that someone else has. There are lots of them available out on the Internet.
And then the second step is to make space for disagreement. You can even do that by formalizing. So, pick an upcoming decision that needs to be made about which most people are in agreement, and then assign two or three people to prepare ahead of time some points of disagreement. And at the meeting, everyone should be clear that these speakers have been given a particular rule to be the disagreers. They might even wear hats so that everybody remembers that they’re taking on this role. And the system then gets a chance to practice listening to opposing points of view. So that’s the second step.
Jim Latimer
So, they live into that tension. They practice feeling that tension between points of view.
Pegi Ridout
Yes, they get a chance to practice that. And yet, no one is at fault for that, or pinpointed on that, because they’ve been assigned a particular role. So, they get to practice it in a very formal and structured way.
And then the third baby step is to pick a decision on which there’s a range of opinions, and make sure that all of those opinions get voiced. So, the easiest way to do that is to just go around the circle in the room. And before you do that set up parameters that this isn’t a time to discuss or argue with one another. This is a time for each person to state their own position independent of everyone else’s comments or thoughts about it. And what this does, is it gives everybody a chance to speak. So, that becomes a norm, because often in congregational systems, there are a few voices that are heard and others that are never heard. This gives a chance for everyone to speak. And it creates space for differences to be okay. And then after you’ve gone around the circle, then you can have the usual discussion, but by then you’ve created a different expectation, a different climate, in terms of what the opinions are that are out there and who gets to voice their opinion. And then you practice and keep on practicing in safe controlled environments, so that people build their conflict muscles. And as they build those muscles, then they’re able to lift heavier weights.
And why would we go through all this? What’s the benefit of good conflict? What it means is that every voice is heard. So, you get more wisdom. You get more creativity. You get more energy. You have more openness to the flow of the Spirit through this system. Conflict is a gift. I invite you, conflict avoiders, to screw up your courage and lean into it!
Jim Latimer
Wow, Pegi! That was a tour de force right there! I loved it, and how you spoke specifically to the fact that this is something we have to practice. We’re not born with this. Personalities have inclinations, but most of us need to practice to do this well, so that there can be more wisdom, more energy, more openness to the flow of spirit in all that we do, right? And we practice by, you said, three things, Have meeting norms, and create safe space for disagreement, and then pick a topic with lots of different opinions and make sure everybody has a chance to say what their opinion is, so you get it all out on the table.
Pegi Ridout
Yes. That practice builds people’s confidence and muscle, and then they’re more able then to deal with more complex and more difficult conflicts and disagreements.
Jim Latimer
Which are surely there.
Pegi Ridout
They surely are, but there’s room then, for people to listen to each other and to the spirit in that space.
Jim Latimer
Creating room for us to listen to each other in a deeper, more holy way, for the sake of our ministry. Wow. That’s beautiful. Thank you, Pegi, for that. That was really rich. And I look forward to our next podcast which will be coming up shortly. Thank you.
More Bits Of Wisdom from Rev. Pegi Ridout
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