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Martha Williams:
Dear culture shifters. Thank you for joining us today at the culture shift podcast. I'm Martha Williams, your host. We are showcasing culture shifting businesses, organizations, artists, projects, individuals and engaging with these thinkers in critical creative conversations about moving towards a more healthy, balanced and vibrant society. Our guest today is Susan Coleman, a conflict resolution facilitator and the creator of the peace building podcast. When I asked Susan, what would make a more peaceful, balanced world? She said reduction in the military, industrial complex and an elevation in the status of women, but she also said a changing process. Susan considers herself a process activist and says, if we want a more peaceful world, we need to learn how to relate in better ways and create better containers for communication. And here at Culture Shift Agency, we define culture shift as exactly that, shifts in how humans relate to self, others in planet.

Martha Williams:
With this, we welcome Susan Coleman, so welcome.

Susan Coleman:
Thank you. And congratulations to you for launching.

Martha Williams
Yes, and you are our first guest ever. Susan Coleman.

Susan Coleman:
I'm so honored.

Martha Williams
I invited Susan because Susan is very interested in elevating the female. She's really in the conversation of conflict and conflict will be and is central to climbing the mountain of gender inequality. And Susan has worked all over the world. She's worked with the UN and NASA and you can tell us a little bit more about that and some of the stories that you've encountered with that, we want to hear that. I just want to start by first of all, thanking you for being here. Susan has her own podcast. And you can see the sign behind her head. You want to just point to it.

Susan Coleman
I have the peacebuilding podcast from conflict to common ground, you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Martha Williams
Excellent. And, so I just want, just start by, you know, just tell us a little bit about your journey and why you think gender equality is so central to peace.

Susan Coleman
The reason I'm focused on gender equality is because fundamentally I'm about building a more collaborative world, a more peaceful world. The tagline of my business is collaborative intelligence. My business name is Susan Coleman dot global. I was a child of the Vietnam era. I grew up with a father who I love very much, but coming from kind of the heart of the capitalist world, he was working at a very prestigious law firm, on wall street. And he would come home and he would get into his chair and drink his scotch and we'd turn on, you know, Walter Cronkite and, watch things like the My Lai Massacre.

Martha Williams
You know, lots of us have opinions about what's happening in the world. It's very unique to take what you see in the world and then to build a whole career around fighting for something.

Susan Coleman
Well, hopefully I don't even like using the language of fighting for something because I don't really see myself. I mean, I am an activist. I'm a process activist, but I really am a big advocate for process change. But I will say, just to continue with your question, the other thing that was very influential, and I didn't realize it really until much, much later on, but, I grew up in a very patriarchal home. Really. I was pretty much stripped of my power at birth. I just, you know, I just was, the way things were, I mean men were more important, more powerful, more valuable then women who is being trained to serve them from very early on. And I, you know, I don't say that to demonize anybody cause I think the, you know, the boys were being acculturated just as much as the girls were. That was the way it was. And it's taken me a whole long journey too. Actually really, really get in my bones, my own value, the power of my voice, why it's important. And also now with the podcast and other thing and, and my women in negotiation and power initiative to, really increase the voices of women, globally. So, tell me a little bit about what you do. Like what is the work that you do? I started, my first real professional life was as a litigator in a wall street litigator and I was pretty clear that wasn't going to be my thing. I did that for a while. And then I went back to graduate school and I got connected to the program on negotiation. That was really the ground floor, the whole get what I call them, getting to yes, movement at Harvard. And I can't, I came out of that and you know, I, at the time I said to the folks at Harvard, I said, I'm going to do intercultural negotiation. And they said, there is no such thing. And I said, I think there is. And I started, I came to New York and I met this incredible woman who'd been doing quote unquote intercultural negotiation skills training for a long time. And she and I became business partners. And so I started teaching people negotiation skills all over the world. And then I was able to start the UN's internal program on collaborative negotiation skills and mediation. And then I did the same thing at Columbia university. My job is intervening in complex systems and most of the time it's about intervening in complex systems to build common ground. So I just came back from, working with, UN groups all throughout Latin America that were, increasing variability to collaborate more effectively together to deliver, as one. And I have worked with worrying factions and I've worked inside organizations just like for instance,

Martha Williams
You've worked with warring factions? What warring factions have you worked with?

Susan Coleman
The state department's initiative to bring two factions of Kurds together? They asked me to a "mediation training" and instead I, I did a large group facilitation, but I think it's really pivotal to how I think about things because the reality is I think we have a process problem going on in this country and in the world. And yeah, that's that. I think we can create very different types of containers, what I'd call a container than what we currently have, in a lot of settings.

Martha Williams
As I'm building Culture Shift Agency, one of the things I'm thinking about is how do you, how do you think about something? How do you approach something? Because if you're approaching something from a top down perspective, which is sort of the hierarchy that we live in, the win-lose perspective, that way of thinking is a process that's not going to create a lot of resolution or a lot of coming together.

Susan Coleman
It's going to create a compliance rather than commitment. And I mean, that's a cornerstone of the difference between competition and collaboration. And you know, there's plenty of circumstances where it is more efficient to just have a top down approach. But in general, as the world is flattening, as the internet has like, broadened, you know, people's ability to access information, I think a lot of the top down approach is dissipating at the same time that authoritarian regimes are rising up all over the place because, you know, we really are in a very big global battle about whether we're going to do things collaboratively or competitively.

Martha Williams
So where do you think we should focus to come to a more, a more collaborative world? Like for the everyday person? What does that look like?

Susan Coleman
I think that gender equality is right at the core. I just find it so interesting. I think, well first of all, I will say that there's a strong correlation between countries where the family model, tends to be more authoritarian and, the amount of militarization in that society. And conversely, a correlation between societies where, there's more, equality, gender equality in the home and not so much interest in militarization. So if a child grows up in a home and is seeing in front of them, that one parent is more important than the other. Like I did. I mean, I really got that message loud and clear. You know, it creates much more sort of one up, one down kind of thinking, more competitive type of thinking. And it also creates groups that are in groups like the white, like the more dominant groups at the time were tall, competitive white men. Then, other groups like women, white women, women of color, people of color, anybody that didn't fit into the dominant cultural norm. But what's really interesting to me is what's happening with the millennial generation. I mean I think this is happening really fast with the whole, with the millennial generation you know in the United States, and this is not happening globally. It's happening at some countries globally. But with trying to basically get rid of the binary model.

Martha Williams
How do you think we get to the authoritarian population? How do you think we, I have an agenda and I'm very clear about it. I would love a more collaborative society. That's the society I want to be working towards. It's what I want in my life on all levels. And I do think it's better. I think it's more loving. I think it's more in line with, just abundance. So what do you, what do we do to deal with this authoritarian rise? It's just endemic. How about in any of your negotiating, any of your, facilitations do you ever come across someone who's really on the domination side of the spectrum that you're not able to reach?

Susan Coleman
Of course. The thing that's super interesting about open space is that it completely flattens the control freaks. It flattens the hierarchy. What open space does is it provides the simplest guidelines. You can bring together huge groups of people up to a thousand up to 2000 and give them very simple guidelines or norms for how they're going to interact and then allow them to self organize. And they do an amazing job with a very, very light touch from the facilitators. So, you know, another, as somebody who's influenced me a lot, wrote a book called Don't Just Do Something, Stand There. You know, I think an awful lot of organizational models, a lot of managers, they just want, you know, government, everything wants to control things. And sometimes that's useful and sometimes it's just overdone and it gets in the way of people's ability to self organize and connect across difference.

Martha Williams
And actually isn't it an example of a collaborative, or a flattened approach?

Susan Coleman
Very much so. Very much saying.

Martha Williams
Modeling non-dominance.

Susan Coleman
And an image comes to mind, which, I remember this one organization that I was working at using a process. And there was a guy who within the existing structure was really trying to control things and everybody hated him, but he had a certain amount of positional authority inside the system. And so he was getting away with it. Well, we did this open space process and the way open space works is without getting into all of it because it would take me a while to explain, it basically allows people...there's something called the law of two feet. In other words, you're supposed to use your two feet to go where you think you can contribute the best to the theme of the conference. And so you are supposed to get up and move around. No one is supposed be in a session if they are not contributing their full passion and responsibility to the process. And so this guy was trying to organize sessions and nobody was coming to his sessions and it completely shown sunlight big time on how much of a following he really didn't have and it busted through the kind of hierarchy. And you know, control thing that was going on in that system was causing a lot of conflict. You know, I think human beings are very, very good at self organizing if you let them. One of the cores of collaboration is looking for commitment rather than compliance because if you get people to buy in to things, they actually live by it.

Martha Williams
What would it look like to take these ideas of commitment versus compliance or focusing on an interest, to the popular culture of this country.

Susan Coleman
In the United States it is really the military industrial complex. Dwight D Eisenhower, the Republican president, was so right on the money when he said, we really have to fear the military industrial complex. And because we spend as a country more than the next seven to10 countries combined on the military and militarization. And I think that's a very low ball number because I think there's a lot of externalities that are not being included in that number. And, so in terms of a culture shift, Oh my God, getting that right and not, you know, we have boots on the ground in 80 countries. We are a nation that is that is at war and that is working to use our military to dominate societies largely where we want re, you know, corporations want resources. I just interviewed a woman in Pakistan, a young woman in Pakistan who's doing amazing work going into madrassas and convincing, convincing young kids not to join a jihad, but we don't support that kind of stuff. We've been supporting ,the United States has been supporting military solutions because there are a lot of people that are making a lot of money off of arms. And, that has been confirmed to me. I had a guest staying with me actually who did two tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and he was on the front page of time and he commented on how he had a hole preventative, approach to how he was gonna use his, forget the language. His patrol, his troop, his group of men.

Martha Williams
Platoon.

Susan Coleman
Platoon, thank you. He wasn't supported. It was, so the reality is our focus on our being the United States focused on militarization is not making the world safer and were that to shift. Not only would it release huge amounts of money, but it would also create a huge culture change. But the other thing, to answer your question is I do think that, you know, us women are really up to our eyeballs in codependency. What I mean by that and I think it's a global phenomenon somehow. You know, we still are looking to men for permission for them to provide for us, for them to protect us. And, it's something, I think it's time that we need to get over, because, and nevermind what men need to do around this. But I think women really need to, and women in this country, one of the things I really hope to see and contribute to is women stepping into their leadership and like, for instance, looking at the money issue, because I think the more that women take control over their own finances, over their own ability to support themselves, Mmm. The less dependent they are on men, the more they're able to be in true partnership with men.

Martha Williams
Right? So there's the military, which is doing its own thing, which we need to be on the lookout for. But you're saying independent of that, that if women kind of rise in their own power, that that might actually create a sea change of sorts,

Susan Coleman
Not kind of, if they do this,

Martha Williams
It was a bit of a leading question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just take something like the #metoo movement. So this is something that comes from the ground up with something physical happened and it's this rise of the female voice. So, you know, millions of women came out as being sexually assaulted through this movement. And the, so that kind of came up, we kind of came up the mountain and we had this public reckoning and, and there's this conflict.

Martha Williams
So this is conflicts that's happening in the air, in the media. How do your ideas around win-win or like what is your advice for the media around this? Like how they should be handling this, the issue of #metoo, how they should be talking about it to create win-win or collaboration or, you know, an ultimately a collaborative society. And how should women and men be talking about this?

Susan Coleman
You know, one of the things about the media is that if it bleeds, it leads and Roger Ailes, who is the founder of Fox news, you know, he basically has done more to polarize this country than anybody in terms of trying to create, you know, black and white thinking, which is really a problem. But, so was, let's see, to answer your question, I think that people need to look at things more systemically. Mmm. There are, you know, yes, there are victims and then it's easy. And what thing, what's been wonderful about #metoo is women coming to support other women and men coming to support a women and trying to move beyond, some of the ridiculous kinds of things that have happened and very, very harmful things like the Harvey Weinstein kind of stuff that's like horrible. But I was just talking to a friend this morning who, he and I went to this prep school, the headmaster at the time, Russell Mead, apparent. I don't have the facts here, I can't remember exactly what happened, but you know, boarding schools all over the place had all their issues around sexual, you know, like, like male, inappropriate things happening between the adults and the, and the kids. And Russell Mead, who I adored and my friend adored, basically, I think he had, and it's not, that's what I'm not clear about. I think he had ended up marrying or had an affair with a student, maybe an emotional affair while he was the headmaster of the school. And then it became a more official affair when he left. And again, I don't know if I have my facts right, but we were talking about how basically the school has decided to completely cut him out of any conversation, any mention whatsoever is as if he never existed. And I think that's crazy. I actually think it's ridiculous. I think it's kinda like this is a great teaching opportunity for everybody to understand about how systems are, how everybody's part of a system and a culture and how sometimes that creates real damage to people. But to understand that it's not so black and white. You can't just say that this person is an evil person because Russell need was not in, he was not an evil person. He did a bad thing. But you know, it's easy to vilify everything that people want to do is sexual harassment training, which I think is like, eh, it's not bad. But I think what would be way more interesting is to actually bring the men and the women, or the people that don't with either male or female, but bring everybody together, whatever their gender identity to have a conversation, around gender. And how it plays itself out and the organizational system and then move that. So to facilitate a dialogue process, which I do a lot of, and then move that into some specific organizational change, thinking together about how the system could change to make it a different kind of climate. I think that would be a way more sophisticated way of dealing with gender equality.

Martha Williams
So, I kind of want to wind down here. What issues in the, in the news that are right now, what's the kind of keeping you up at night?

Susan Coleman
The thing that I think that it's most distressing to me is climate change. And I, you know, I'm a fierce mom. I'm also a deep naturalist I thought and sometimes think the climate change is going to be the thing that really pushes us to our evolution quickly to really understand collaboration and to really understand gender equality. I mean, I think that's like in terms of this whole movement towards, moving beyond the binary system. I think that's all part of that. I mean, I have thought that authoritarianism is gonna. It's, it's going to fizzle out, but I don't know. I think we are really in the, you know, in, and this is, this is a big battle. Are we going to be, are we going to be in a world of dominator systems or are we going to be in a world of partnership and will the dominator systems, will they succeed in killing off nature, killing off people, making the world a very adversarial place.

Martha Williams
I think that all of us looking inside and doing what we can to support those changes is really important. Yeah. So I want to ask you one last question. So if you could scale your ideas in your work, you can make it bigger and reach more people, what would that look like?

Susan Coleman
When I release a podcast episode and I watch it go out around the world, I mean, just this morning, it's like all over the world. I just released it this morning and it's all over the world. People have opened my, you know, what I was saying and my interview with this Pakistan, this really beautiful young Pakistani woman who's been just so courageous in the most dangerous place to exist as a woman. That's one way I would scale it. It's just to keep trying to just to keep doing my piece to get that, that podcast out there. And then the other thing is, is I'm, I'm now initiating, I'm creating online programming for women in negotiation and power to, get our, you know, what together and get over to codependency, step into our leadership and you know, okay -- not ask for permission anymore. Right when I say that, I know globally it's really different for different people. The circumstances are different, but sometimes I think that women in the global South are, have, have more ovaries then women in the global North. Sometimes I think that the women in the global North are pretty damn soft and they, and they don't realize how much our money and our, our resources are going to situations that actually are oppressing, our sisters all over the planet in the global South. And I think that's something I think that I would like there to be way more consciousness about.

Martha Williams
Great. Well, thank you so much.

Susan Coleman
Thank you so much, Martha, for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Martha Williams
Thank you for listening, engaging and doing your part.