Episode 19: A NEW FORM OF CONSULTATION AS AN APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

In this episode we explore a particular form of consultation as an effective application of the principle of justice and a revolutionary tool of decision-making and problem-solving in the best interests of any given group. 

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we explore a particular form of consultation as an effective application of the principle of justice and a revolutionary tool of decision making and problem solving, resulting in the best interests of those impacted by the decision. This is the start of season two overall episode 19. Thank you for joining me. A few episodes ago, we talked about the reality that there are just as there are physical laws that govern our physical existence, like the law of gravity, which exists whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not. So too, there are certain laws that govern our social existence. And we talked about a couple of them. The one I want to focus on today and take it add a next step to it is the law of justice. As we said before we must take these laws into account when building our social institutions. Otherwise, they will fail and collapse, which is exactly what we're seeing in the world today with the collapse of the economy. So many of our systems, environmental, social, political, religious, financial, and so on, because in building these systems, we fail to take into account the law of oneness and the law of justice. In the last episode, episode 18, we examined one of the applications of this law of justice in life, the skill of independently assessing truth without preconceived prejudices and notions. Seeking to ferret out the truth and distinguish it from opinion. Now, there are other applications of the law of justice and I want to touch on a couple of them today and then focus on one. I want to start with the principle of inclusivity, or allyship, which is a wonderful new term that has come into being in the last few years. I know growing up, it was not a word that we discussed. And the concept is actively seeking diversity in representation and in decision making. Now, we know that our world is rich in diversity of many kinds. Race, gender, height, weight, education, culture, capacity, talent, experience, outlook, personality, and on and on we can go. And yet, when we look at our decision making mechanisms in our institutions, whether they're government or corporations or a workplace that is not a corporation, we notice that decision making tends to be concentrated in the hands of a few who represent a few of these buckets of diversity. For instance, we all talk about the famous glass ceiling that keeps women from getting to leadership positions, whether in corporations or government, or the racial bias that has historically kept people of color, and particularly blacks in the United States, out of positions of decision making. And yet, studies today show us that the more that we incorporate diversity of experience, background, viewpoint, and mentality into our decision making processes, the more we benefit from them. The studies show that decision making, even in the context of businesses incorporation, is faster. We make better decisions while making them faster that even improve the bottom line of companies. And the morale of those environments in which decisions are made is so much better, whether it's the family where you can get past the idea of having one domineering spouse make decisions for the family, while the other spouse and children are left to deal with decisions that are meted out to them, or whether it's the workspace in which employees want to participate and have a stake in the decisions that they then have to implement and live with. The principle of inclusivity and diversity is another application of the principle of justice. But seeking diversity of views and opinions can lead us into conflict very easily if we're not careful, rather than driving us towards solution. Unless we draw on a particular tool and technique that allows us to optimize the value of the diversity while avoiding conflict and allows us to fully capitalize on the benefits of decision making for the collective good. This is the tool of consultation. Consultation is itself another application of the principle of justice. Justice and independent investigation of truth was an application of the principle of justice, which we said was a social law that is a reality that we have to acknowledge in building social organizations and institutions. So too, consultation is a tool that is another application of the principle of justice. How so? Let's first look at the purpose and goal of consultation. The purpose of consultation, in short, is the investigation of truth. It's totally intertwined with the previous application of justice, which was the independent investigation of truth. Its purpose is also to arrive at a solution to a particular problem and to plumb the depths of that problem so that we've examined all the aspects that relate to the problem before we make a decision. Its purpose is also to help us to attain more clarity by expanding and broadening our understanding of truth far beyond the limited version of it that we can see, to see the larger picture of truth with a capital T that is not limited to or constrained by our own individual perceptions and understandings. As we've discussed many times over, it's limited by the filters through which we see that truth. The filters of our individual or group experiences, groups as a race or ethnicity or nationality or gender, the filter of our values as peoples or as individuals, the filter of our histories, the filter of our beliefs about who we are, how we got here, and who we ought to be and how the world is and what it should look like. Now, all of these filters act as veils or clouds that limit our vision. The purpose of consultation as a tool is to literally burn these veils away. An example that I think of is something that often comes to mind when I go to one of our favorite spots, which is the mountains of Bavaria in Germany. When you wake up in the mornings, I love doing this, you wake up and you see in front of you, a long field a lawn with beautiful flowers. And then you often just see clouds, like a wall of beautiful clouds. If you were to just look at that picture, you would have no concept that behind those clouds lay anything else. Then as the sun starts to rise, it starts to shed light and it burns off the first layer of clouds. As that first layer of clouds burns off, all of a sudden, almost like magic, you see the lower part of a mountain. It looks like a hill. A beautiful rocky hill. And you think, wow, that's beautiful. And then as time goes on and the sun shines even brighter, it starts to burn off more of the cloud and all of a sudden you start to see another whole layer of mountain behind the first. And this goes on and on until at some point during the day the sun has burnt off all the clouds and you see this magnificent, towering mountain in the alpine valleys, that you would never have imagined existed if these rays had not burnt off veil after veil of these clouds that limited your vision. To me, this is exactly what consultation is. And the more diversity we have in consultation, the more rays of light we have coming from different directions, the more of these clouds we burn off, and the more we see of what actually lies behind, the reality of what exists. The final purpose of consultation is to find a truth that benefits the world, all of us rather than one person or a small group of people, and do so in a manner, and this is critical, in a way that allows for divergent and conflicting views to be expressed without tipping us into conflict. How do we do this? How does this idea, this tool that we've called consultation, which is an application of justice, how does it work? What are the main features? The first feature for it to work well is the frank, unfettered, and authentic expression of views by each person in a group that consults, regardless of whether it's within the context of the family or two or three friends or in the workplace or in government. It really doesn't matter. I'd like to unpack this a little. What does this mean to say frank unfettered and authentic consultation? It means saying what is truly on our hearts and in our minds without holding back. One of the things that I've observed over decades is that many of us in the process of having a consultation to arrive, especially at a solution to something, hold back what we really think and feel because of fears about how the other person will react. Consequently, we try to control the situation by attempting to predict in advance what the other person wants to hear, as well as their reactions. And then we tailor what we say in accordance with what we're thinking through our own filters. We're projecting on the other person. Now, what this actually means we're doing is that we're treating the other person, not as an adult ,but we're infantilizing them, essentially. It's actually a very arrogant thing to do, I think. And we often then try to soften and sugarcoat things. As a consequence, the problems that are there, we don't get to take a real look at them and they end up festering. We tend to shove them under the carpet because we're uncomfortable and we say we don't want to make others uncomfortable and because of all these fears. And the unfortunate consequence of doing all of this is that usually everybody ends up unhappy. The problem is still there. Nobody wants to talk about it and it doesn't get resolved. Now, examples of how this happens. Things that I've seen happen in the workplace. Somebody underperforms and when we do a review for them, a work review, we fail to give them comments that might lead to their improvement. Why? Because they're a minority of some kind. It's a woman, or a person of color, and we fear that somehow our remarks are going to offend them. We therefore end up depriving that person of the benefit of the pointers that we could give them, of how they could improve and fulfill their potential. Because we've decided what they can tolerate and what they can't. Another example that I've seen play out many times, meetings between parents and school administrators in which parents hold back and fail to raise concerns about the way teachers or the administration are conducting their activities or even the moral education of their children because the parents are afraid that they will rock the boat and somehow there will be a backlash and their children's grades or their opportunities to get into college will suffer. We also see this when parents talk to their children. Very often children are engaging in behaviors that are not in their best interest. Let's say they're experimenting with drugs or they're in the wrong company of friends and the parents are afraid to say anything because they're afraid that they'll won't be loved anymore by their kids or they'll be unpopular with them. We see this with politicians, who do this all the time. Failure to speak the truth and to tell people the reality of what's going on and bring them along in ways that they may not want to be brought along because they're afraid that they won't get the next vote because they'll be unpopular. Okay. Frank, unfettered, and authentic consultation. But it's not sufficient to be frank and unfettered in what we say. It has to be tempered and coupled with these qualities that I've put up here: with respect, courtesy, dignity for oneself and for others as a human being, care, kindness, moderation, and above all, love for the other human beings with whom we're consulting. What this boils down to is that the intention and energy and motivation behind the words, the frank words that we utter, those intentions are driven by a desire to arrive at the truth rather than coming from a space of anger or fear or a desire to dominate and control or by prejudice and preconceived biases. In other words, we're offering these frank and unfettered views from a place of trying to find a win win solution for everybody so we can all collectively improve and enhance. Now one of the skills that we also need to cultivate in order for this to work, this consultation, is that the people within the consultation who are hearing the views also have to cultivate the skill of not being hurt or offended. We're very quick often to take umbrage at what somebody says and then our hackles go up and we immediately impute all kinds of motives to people. It takes a lot of work on ourselves, because we all have buttons inside us. Instead of immediately reacting, it's very helpful to stop, take a deep breath and ask ourselves, "Wow, that was a button that got pushed. Interesting. I wonder what that button is. What did I take that comment to mean when the other person said this? And how true is that?" And then ask ourselves this really important next question: "What else could have been going on? What else could this person have meant?" As soon as we recognize that there could be several different meanings or even more than one meaning to what the person is doing, the sting, that sense of, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you said this to me. You had this motive against me or against my people or against my group," that dissipates and allows us to remain open and receptive. The next element of this tool of consultation is that it must be conducted in the spirit of collaboration as opposed to competition, understanding that we achieve more this way. The best recent example I can think of is what scientists during the coronavirus have done around the world. They came together and they acted in the spirit of collaboration in order to resolve this problem that affects all of humanity and they did it with the purpose of arriving at the collective good. The flip is the example of vaccine nationalism during COVID, where we made decisions as governments and peoples based on a sense of, "We got to get vaccine for our people first." In other words, a sense of competition rather than trusting that by collaborating and working together, we could find a solution that benefited our people and the people of every other country as well. The next factor of this tool of consultation that works is that it has to be based on a belief and understanding that we're all channels with access to the same universal source of truth. This is such a deep and important point. At any given time, any one of us could be most unclogged as a channel and open to receiving the fountains of wisdom from a deeper source, universal intelligence if you like. When we're consulting, we don't know at any given time, cause we're not inside another person and we don't have access to this information, which person in that group at any given moment will be most unclogged and receptive to receiving wisdom. Therefore we have to be open and alert and put aside preconceived prejudices, because let's say you have a person in the group who is a janitor, supposedly lowly because they're not earning as much and they do work that many don't want to do, versus say a CEO of a fortune 500 company. To make the assumption that the CEO will have pearls of wisdom flowing from their mouth is to do ourselves a great disservice because we don't know whose channel in that moment is most unclogged and out of whose mouth the gems of wisdom and truth are flowing. Now, this next group of features of consultation all have to do with the idea of reigning in our egos. The first feature is that the understanding and acceptance that we are not the sole sources of truth and we're therefore not always right. In other words, approaching consultation in a spirit of humility. The quality of humility is one that we absolutely have to cultivate for consultation to work well. The second thing we have to recognize is that truth has many facets. We have to be willing to don each other's glasses with all our filters. So don the glasses of the person who's got a red lens and the person has a blue lens and a yellow lens. In order to see reality through different eyes and thereby enhance our collective understanding of reality. The best analogy is that of a multifaceted gem. Several of us consulting together can be looking at this gem, and one person, because of where they're standing and the angle of light hitting it, may see a blue light, the other may see red light, the other yellow. If they were to argue with each other and be stubborn about saying, "No. It's absolutely blue and nothing else," they'd all be wrong. But if they're willing to entertain the idea that this gem, this truth actually has different facets, then all of a sudden their collective capacity is enhanced. Another feature of the tool of consultation that has to do with reigning in the ego is this idea that once we share our thought, express our view in the context of a consultation, that idea no longer is ours and becomes part of the group. This is a magical, powerful approach and technique because it allows us to detach from our egos and helps us prevent conflict because it's once we get entrenched in the idea that I'm right and this is my view and I'm going to stick to it, that conflict starts to arise. It also stops us from repeating over and over again our opinions and insisting that my opinion is right and that everyone must accept my way. We see this in political negotiations all the time. All it does is it leads to impasse, to conflict, and ill feeling. It also has the effect of shutting others down when we insist on our way. And it interrupts this flow of inspiration and creativity from Universal Intelligent. It actually ends up clogging the very channels that we're trying to open up. And ultimately, doing that stops us from seeing better solutions, because we're so focused on what we want, that the most amazing solution may present itself over here, but we're focused in this direction, and we're not seeing what's available. Now the almost last important feature of consultation that works is the understanding that the clash of various viewpoints and ideas is intensely creative process and is likely to give birth to a solution, a path that no one who entered into the consultation had thought of in advance. So we need to be detached and open to seeing this clash and then recognizing the spark when it comes. I remember hearing this beautiful example given by a wonderful human being who has since passed on, who participated in a very high level consultative group. He said that over the years, he had noticed that when this group of people who consulted with each other year in, year out came together, they would consult on the topic. He said, as each of us consulted on the topic, we would arrive at a conclusion and vote in favor of that conclusion based on reasons that each of us had in our own minds. One person may have reason X for voting yes. Another person had reason Y, another person reason A, B, and so on. But the decision would be a good one, because they consulted openly and fleshed out all aspects of the problem and arrived at a decision that they all then abided by. He said the amazing thing that he'd seen over and over again was that over the years, the true wisdom of that decision taken through consultation and the unity that it brought, the true wisdom manifested itself and often that wisdom was not similar to any of the reasons that any of the members of that institution, when they had made those decisions, had even thought of. Because circumstances had changed, new things had come to light, but the decision was correct. The decision was the best decision because of the application of this principle of consultation. So we have to be open to the fact that we don't know everything and that as long as we trust the process and trust the application of this principle of justice with all the correct intentions, it will yield wonderful results. Lastly the final feature that we need to have present for this tool of consultation to work as it should in the best possible fashion is the willingness to listen generously and without preconceived prejudice. And the willingness to listen at least as much as we talk. Most of us, and I include myself in this, have a tendency to speak more than we listen. It's one of those things that each of us can ask ourselves in any given situation. Am I listening more than I'm speaking or vice versa? And maybe I can hold back and truly open myself up. In summation, this tool of consultation, which is an application of the principle of justice. Is a worthy tool that we should liberally use and employ in all circumstances, whether it's in consultation about our personal affairs, whether it's about consultation within the context of the family, whether it's consultation at work, whether it's in the context of government or any other situation. I hope you have enjoyed these ideas. If you have any comments, I'd be delighted to hear them. I also want to remind you that we have a treasure trove of 18 episodes so far. This is the 19th episode of this series. So if you've missed any and want to catch up on some of the past programs, please feel free to jump on our YouTube channel to which you can subscribe for free at CPGG Center for Peace and Global Governance. I will now look at the comments and see what we have here. Thank you, Hilary. Wonderful to have you here. All right. I don't see any more comments, so I will leave you and hope you have a wonderful week. Take care. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.