The Tools You Need For Building Better Groups

Transcript

PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.

Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao. Conflict resolution facilitator Priya Parker has spent decades thinking about what makes groups work. And she says keeping people together requires skills most of us never learned.

Priya Parker
Our culture is awash in self-help. But we are almost illiterate when it comes to the life of the group.

Anita Rao
Today... how to get better at being in community. And why learning to fight well can keep your group ties strong.

Priya Parker
 When conflict arises, we either avoid and sort of hope it'll pass, or we escalate in ways that might damage the relationship, or we try to, sort of burn the house down. And part of the tool to help communities really deepen is what I call holding healthy heat.

Anita Rao
Sustaining group connection through both love and conflict, just ahead on Embodied.

Some of the greatest moments of my life have happened in community with other people. My wedding, my 30th birthday when my close friends threw me a slumber party, a recent weekend at the beach full of group dinners and belly laughs. But I've also been in group settings where the vibes were way off, and the gathering itself became a catalyst for strife.

A miscommunication in an all-staff meeting that eroded trust. Personality clashes at a barbecue that turned a summer evening sour Being in community takes intention, creativity, and some real problem-solving. So how do we get better at being in groups and learn to stay connected even when things get hard?

This is Embodied, our show about identity, relationships and health. I'm Anita Rao. We're gonna explore the many facets of group life today with Priya Parker. She's a conflict resolution facilitator who spent the past few decades helping teams and communities of all sizes around the world. She's also a writer. Her first book, The Art of Gathering, explored how to bring people together with purpose. Her new book, The Art of Fighting, goes one step further. It makes the case that keeping a group healthy over time requires us to confront something we often avoid, conflict. Priya's interest in group dynamics started early, long before she did this work professionally.

Priya Parker
My probably earliest memory of being part of a group was, uh, it was a very small group. It was a group of three . Uh-huh. Uh, but it was a group that broke. It was my family. My, my parents divorced when I was... They separated when I was in third grade, and they were divorced when I was in fourth grade. And within three years, they each had remarried other people, and they had joint custody. And I went from, as many children do, one group to two very different groups that were figuring out themselves how to be a group. And so I'm biracial, I'm bicultural, and then I was also part of these two very different families. And so as a, as a young person, I learned very early on that groups end and that they form anew, and I w- I had to be very attuned to how to become part of these new groups in my life.

Anita Rao
You grew up, as you were saying, at the intersection of a lot of really interesting difference. You have a, a Midwestern father. You have a mother who is from India. Um, when both of your parents divorced, they kind of got married to people more similar than they were, so your cultural kind of environment split even more. So tell me about kind of how that straddling shaped your personality and, and kind of what you became attuned to about how groups work.

Priya Parker
I was lucky. I, my parents had joint custody, and so what that meant in my case was that every other Friday afternoon, this was in Virginia, I would leave my mother and stepfather's home, and that, that, quote-unquote, group was an Indian, English, Buddhist, vegetarian, kind of incense-filled, progressive household. And I would travel 1.4 miles and enter a different universe, which was my father and stepmother's home, and it was a, and still is, a white American, evangelical Christian, conservative, church-going, meat-eating household. And I was a part of each of those groups, of those families, and I was also apart from each of those families. I mean, at some level, even temporally, every two weeks I was absent for, from one of them. And being biracial and being part of these two different groups, I think for a long time I learned to be a chameleon. My husband many years later observed that in one house, if somebody sneezed, I would say, "God bless you," and if, in the other house, if someone sneezed, I would just say, "Bless you."

Anita Rao
Oh,

Priya Parker
yeah. Like, you know, I've removed the God. And, and not even consciously, just, uh, you know, a- I guess attuning to the culture that you're in. My mother's Indian, and she would often take me every summer to live with my grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles for a couple of months. She's an anthropologist, and she would be conducting research, and I would spend many of my summers in Delhi with my cousins, and that was a different group. And we would play carrom, uh, you know, on the floor, and we would play cards in my grandparents' bed. You know, life in India often, in Indian homes often happens around the bed.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
Um, and then I would play softball in Vienna, Virginia, and I loved fast-pitch softball and learned the cheers and the jeers and the rules and, and I was always, as so many of us are, a part of many, many different groups. And so, so much of my life was being part of groups that had very, very different norms from each other, and learning kind of my way around them and in them and through them. But in each of those groups, I always did feel a really deep sense of connection and belonging, and really looked for a sense of belonging because my life was, was so fragmented.

Anita Rao
You mentioned that your mom is an anthropologist. I know that in your book, The Art of Gathering, you talk about, um, all of the influences that she had on you, and especially how she influenced how you think about kind of what it means to bring people together and what it means to gather. And you share a story about how when you were 15, your mom offered to host this meetup in your basement with other girls- from school to help you all talk about identity and transformation. Can you talk to me a bit about that experience and your mom's influence on how you think about kind of what it means to gather with other people?

Priya Parker
If I remember correctly, I, I think I was in high school.

Anita Rao
Uh-huh.

Priya Parker
And she offered to create a six-week experience uh, where we could invite a group of young women, of girls of my age, and she would teach us how to meditate and teach us sort of the skills of how to navigate being a young, a young person, and she called it Circle of Friends. We invited maybe a dozen girls from my school, friends and, and acquaintances, and we would meet for an hour or nine minutes in our basement, and so we would learn a different skill. We would breathe together. We would learn how to be in our bodies. I mean, we would learn how to say what we needed. We would do all sorts of just little exercises, and then we would run upstairs and have snacks. And to this day, and I know some of the other women I'm still in touch with, it was a pretty amazing experience to have an older person pay attention to us, take our issues seriously, and teach us some very basic skills to navigate, you know, the waters of high school.

Anita Rao
Yeah.

Priya Parker
But there was another part that was really powerful about it, was that she didn't just teach me, her daughter, those skills. She taught my peers these skills, and part of the power of that was that these skills in a vacuum don't necessarily work. Skills are applicable when they're in a culture, and so when you have 12 kids in a gr- in a grade learning something together and normalizing it and, and having a sense of like, "Oh, we remember how to deal with these difficult moments," or, or, "We're all feeling nervous," it actually gave us, uh, almost like an armor a- and a sense of togetherness to navigate, you know, the choppy waters of adolescence.

Anita Rao
So as we'll learn kind of later in the conversation, obviously these two experiences, kind of having your, your parents be who they are, your mom being someone who kind of understands the importance of groups, your experience being a chameleon navigating these cultures, all of these kind of begin to build your foundation as someone who does the kind of work that you do today. You go on to college at the University of Virginia, and we've talked a lot on this show, I am also mixed race and bicultural and, and for me, this move away from home for the first time was, like, a, such a big time of identity- Mm-hmm ... renegotiation. I think it is- Mm-hmm ... for a lot of mixed kids. Like, people don't- Yes have context for you and- Yes ... where you come from, so you're kind of explaining yourself constantly to people.

Priya Parker
Yes.

Anita Rao
Um- Often for the first time. For the first time. It's like, "Well, who am I?" Exactly. "How do I answer this question?" Exactly, and getting that question all of the time of kind of who are you and, and where do you come from. How did this transition to college for you continue to shape your thoughts about who you were and, and where you fit in groups?

Priya Parker
When I went to the University of Virginia, one of the first questions people would ask me very casually was, "What are you?"

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
And, and in the beginning, I really, I didn't understand the question. I, you know, I'm, I'm a first year or I'm a woman. And I learned that they meant racially, and then even that, I learned that in that context, there was a right way to answer that, and I remember even negotiating what do I say? I used to say, "I'm half white, half Indian," and someone would say, "What do you mean white? White what?" And I'd say, "Oh, uh, white American." Right. Okay, so I'm half white American, and it's, it's exactly as you were saying. It's like, is this what I am? Like, I need an answer. And so I would, in the beginning I would say, "My father is white American from Iowa, and my mother is Indian." And then someone inevitably would say, "Well, what are you?" I may have had an, a m- an answer in the moment, but actually, the deeper question was one I continued to hold. But college was a time for me where, uh, because I went to the University of Virginia and they have a strong sense of what they call student self-governance, I had older students say to me, "If you have a problem with race here, do something about it."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
Like, "Don't just complain, do something about it." And I was like, "What do you mean do something about it?" And it was this kind of radical invitation that it was, that here, like, "Here are the keys. This is your community for four years." And I started researching about the history of race and the history of desegregation at the University of Virginia, and I learned about a process actually, through my mother, called Sustained Dialogue. And I met, I was able to meet the person who created Sustained Dialogue. His name was Hal Saunders. He was in his late 70s at the time. Uh, he was a former diplomat, helped write the David- Camp David Accords, and he was interested in working with young people to take the processes he had been using in post-Soviet states, uh, and in international peace processes, and apply them to college campuses. And so I asked him if he would come and train, you know, us, we little students- ... at the University of Virginia. Um, and to, you know, to kind of our collective shock, h- he said yes. And so he and his colleague, Randa Slim, came and trained us in this process called Sustained Dialogue. But it was this notion that if one wants to change a culture, groups help change culture. And we learned the very specific skills of how to moderate a conversation across race that none of us at the time knew how to hold. And those really fun, really great groups that last over a long time are, are groups in which people feel like they're meaningfully contributing and that the group is meaningfully contributing to them. And that, for me, was Sustained Dialogue.

Anita Rao
Just ahead, Priya explains why conflict is good for groups and shares what it looks like when a group fights well.

Priya Parker
We often think facing something is gonna pull us apart, but actually conflict is quite intimate, right? It requires saying, "Hey, you affect me." And so there's a core question of how do I fight with those I want to belong to?

Anita Rao
You're listening to Embodied from WUNC, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.

This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking about how to navigate group dynamics. We all float in and out of different circles throughout the day. A book club, a church choir, a team at work. But what does it take to keep these communities healthy through moments of change or friction? Priya Parker is a conflict resolution facilitator who has spent decades thinking and writing about what makes groups work. And at the core of her philosophy is a simple but transformative idea. A group of three or more people has its own distinct needs that our modern society has failed to acknowledge.

Priya Parker
Our culture is awash in self-help, the ways we can improve the self and the individual, and those are very helpful tools. I've benefited from many of those tools. But we are almost illiterate when it comes to the life of the group.

Anita Rao
Priya's first book, The Art of Gathering, looked at what it takes to bring people together in meaningful ways. Her new book, The Art of Fighting, tackles a different skill many of us never learned, how to navigate group conflict.

Priya Parker
Part of what I wanted to offer is in addition to individual communication skills, how when a group in your life, it can be your family, it can be your team, it can be your neighborhood, is wanting to be part of something meaningful and longer term. What are the actual skills to be able to hold and navigate the dynamics of a group? And part of what I learned in the art of fighting in this book, and in looking at dozens and dozens of groups from all walks of life, is that for a group to actually last for a long time and be relevant to people in it, you have to negotiate and often renegotiate, "What are we about? What are we doing here?" And often when we avoid that conversation, the group often just dissolves because groups can't actually form or last without a fight.

Anita Rao
I think what's so interesting about this moment that we're in, that I was thinking a lot about as I read your book, was that there is this sense that the boundaries between us have gotten more rigid and more defined. There's polarization. Yet at the same time, I feel like literally every think piece I read, every Substack I'm forwarded by my friends is about how people want community and want tools- Yes ... to build community, and, and feel really lonely and want more connection. So what do you think has kind of led us to this point where we are trapped both by how fractured we feel like we are and how little connection we feel like we have?

Priya Parker
We have endless choice-

Anita Rao
Uh-huh ...

Priya Parker
which also allows for freedom, and we are chronically online, which also can make us feel like we're connected, but is, is a little bit more like junk food than sort of, you know, deep and rich nutrients. We are busy. We are overworked. There are all sorts of reasons why our communities and groups are fracturing and fragmented. And by the way, in traditional communities, you almost can't avoid each other, right? Mm-hmm. You, you're gonna see each other at church every Sunday, or you're gonna see each other at, at synagogue or at the grocery store. And so in communities in which people are b- are born and live and pray to the same God and die on the same plot of earth, you don't need all of this choice or negotiation. You just kind of have a inherited way and you, and you do that. And in modern life, I think one of the reasons why our groups don't actually last is because we have taken a lot of friction out of daily life.

Anita Rao
Mm.

Priya Parker
And we're not good at conflict. And I see this in my own work as a conflict resolution facilitator. When conflict arises, which by the way, it arises in every relationship, in every group long-term, we either avoid and sort of hope it'll pass, or we escalate in ways that might damage the relationship, or we try to, we sort of burn the house down. And w- we, we sort of oscillate between what I call unhealthy peace and unhealthy conflict. And part of the tool to help communities really hold and get deep in is what I call holding healthy heat.

Anita Rao
Tell me more about this idea of healthy heat and kind of how, how you want it to operate in modern life. 'Cause I'm thinking about, you know, so much, as you said, so much of my day-to-day interaction is mediated by a screen. You know, I'm on Slack with my coworkers. I'm on... And then I'm getting in and out of Zooms, and then I'm in group texts. And there's a sense that, like, heat can arise and, you know, catalyze very quickly. There's all of these, like, small fires that feel like they need to be put out. But I don't... That's not what you're talking about when you say healthy heat. So talk to me kind of about what you mean by that and differentiating healthy heat from just, like, a, a minor, like, trigger that might happen.

Priya Parker
In my 20 years as a facilitator, I have learned that healthy communities require love, and healthy communities also require conflict. And both of those things are really important. And whether you are holding or managing a team or a distributed association in some ways where you're navigating people not necessarily in person, the first element is the sort of a shared motivating force. Creating a, a culture, being in a place where people know each other, they hang out together-

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm

Priya Parker
they understand, like, different parts of themselves. One of the reasons I say you should start your virtual meetings, the first 5% of it, with, with a magical question, the question that everybody would be interested in answering and everyone would be interested in hearing each other's answers, just literally in the little Zoom chat, you ask something like, "What's the first concert you went to and who took you?" All of a sudden, you see all these answers, like, in the chat, and it's like, "Oh, wow, Toni Braxton. Huh, Michael Jackson. Bob Dylan. Wow, I didn't know they were that old." Right? "New Kids on the Block. Oh my gosh, they're my generation." Part of the reason why your job to sort of cultivate connection across, uh, within a group is, is because you wanna grow the love, is 'cause you want to have a resilience, is because you want, you need to create a group that really deeply wants to be there and understands what they're about. And in order to really understand what you're about and negotiate change, opportunity, uh, decline, like, whatever's happening in your group, people need to be able to disagree. People need to be able to have what I call worthy grapples. And often, we're conflict-averse, in part because our relationships aren't strong enough. And so I'm not saying start by, you know, start every meeting with a fight. You actually first need to build relationships and find ways for people to sort of know a lot about each other. And so the first thing, even before getting to healthy heat, healthy heat is possible when people deeply feel like they're, they're respected, that they understand the project, and then simultaneously, particularly for longer term stable groups where people really understand their role and wanna be part of it, you gotta get through the, the heat. And so healthy heat is the ability to hold discomfort, disagreement with care long enough for it to be generative-

Anita Rao
Hmm ...

Priya Parker
to reveal the next best step.

Anita Rao
So you're a conflict resolution facilitator, professional, but you do not agree that every conflict is worth solving. I, correct. So I'd love for you to kind of give us some examples of questions we can ask ourselves early on in a conflict situation to determine whether this is something we want to give our time and attention to. Like, what group conflicts are worth solving?

Priya Parker
Not every group conflict should be faced. And part of discernment and skill is navigating which ones, which ones to face and which ones to avoid. And so the first element of the art of fighting is that not all fights are worth facing. In fact, there are practitioners call it strategic conflict avoidance, which doesn't mean that you're conflict averse. It means there are certain conflicts that are actually okay. They're- they're sort of creative tensions. But here are some questions to ask yourself. The first is, can I continue to engage meaningfully without facing?

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
Do I care enough about this group to take this on? Is this conflict touching on a core value of mine? Does the group need to reflect those values for me to be a part of it? Knowing conflict arises in every group, are these the people I want to be in a mess with? Is the conflict making the group worse? Can I imagine vibrancy in this group in a different formation? Are the component parts still good and just need some sorting out? Do I think that by saying something I could alter the situation? Will I regret not trying? And counterintuitively, do I wanna be closer to this person?

Anita Rao
Yeah.

Priya Parker
We often think fighting or f- or facing something is gonna pull us apart, but actually, conflict is quite intimate. It requires saying, "Hey, you affect me. I was hurt by this." And so counterintuitively, it's actually inviting and, and one of the central concepts of the art of fighting is that this book is about not about how do you fight with everybody. It's not about how do you scream o- with stran- like, at strangers online. There's a core question of this book, which is how do I fight with those I want to belong to?

Anita Rao
So to have a, a good conflict and, and to set yourself up well, you say that you really need to know what the need of the group is in the moment, and you really need to kind of dig and keep digging to get underneath what appears to be the need to what the need actually is. So could you kind of walk me through an example of how you've helped a group figure out what the need itself might be? 'Cause I think a lot of us, uh, me included, are tempted to just be like, "Okay, there's tension, everyone. Like, let's get on a Zoom in 10 minutes. Let's talk it out." Yeah. And, uh, that's often not the right approach.

Priya Parker
To state the obvious, a group is more complex than a one-on-one relationship, and in a group, there are multiple needs. One of the things as a, as a facilitator when I get on the phone is I ask... I, I, I just listen and I ask a ton of questions, and I ask what I call dumb questions, obvious questions, not smart questions. What do you think is happening here? Why is this happening? If you had a magical wand and you could sort of miraculously fix this, what would be different? And the first way to begin to help a group is to, is to ask over and over again, what do we think is the actual need in this moment? Not what are they fighting about. What is the actual need? I'll give a simple example. A woman that I know, she's part of a multi-generational family, Nigerian, uh, diasporic family. One sibling is in London, one sibling is in, uh, two siblings in the US, a few are in Lagos. They, for the last 30 years, have shared care for their elderly parents. The father passes away maybe a decade ago, and a few years ago, the mother passes away, and the siblings basically start fighting, and it's not actually about inheritance or money. It's like they're being really, really short with each other. Hmm. And she starts noticing this, and there's, "Oh, well, it'd be really nice if your daughter might call me once in a while," or, "Well, when do you think I'm actually gonna see you?" Or, "Well, she never comes to Nigeria anymore," and she, and, and she was sort of looking at this and saying, "Why are we fighting? Like, why is this so tense? Isn't this sh- this should be the moment where we're, like, holding onto each other." What she realized was that what made the infrastructure for decades, the way they saw each other, the, the contact that they had each other, was through the shared question of, how do we take care of our parents? And through answering that, they had the specific form of a relationship with each other. They'd see each other. They'd coordinate health schedules. They'd fly in. They'd fly out. Sometimes they'd spend an extra day when people would take over care for different parents, and now their shared infrastructure, which is the care of their parents, is gone.

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
And so the need and the core grapple is, how do we now want to sibling? How do we now want to family? Where, what does this look like now, and what do we want it to look like? Which is when I say it's a negotiation.

Anita Rao
Yeah. So once we kind of identify the need of a group in conflict, we get underneath the, the noise to get clear about what the central need is, then we kind of need a way to grapple with that conflict. And you argue that we have a real dearth of tools for dealing with conflict in modern Western- Yes ... life. We have court.

Priya Parker
Yes.

Anita Rao
An extremely blunt tool that nobody wants- Yes ... to take their conflicts to. Um, so, so talk to me about that and, and some of the digging that you did into other communities and societies that kind of give a sense of w- what we've lost in terms of the ability to have these rituals that help us handle and, and move through conflict.

Priya Parker
We have very few conflict rituals, and it's Killing us.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
And so one of the things I did with The Art of Fighting is I went back and I looked at the types of conflict rituals ancient and traditional communities held. Because basically in traditional groups, and when I say traditional, I basically mean groups in which the same people are part of the same group for often generations, all over the world. I looked at Western African traditions, the Minianka tradition of where and how when, when something comes up in the community, um, do they hold different rituals? I- one of them, this is in the book The Healing Drum, one of my favorite examples is when, when all kind of rational processes were not- no longer serving, in order to avoid violence, they bring out the drums.

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
And there's a very specific dance, it's called the Danuba dance, and everyone in the village understood the use of that drum and that beat, and it was only ever used on that c- occasion, and the, uh, villagers would come out and dance very, very specific steps to let out pent-up aggression. And this is actually a deep, deep...There's deep wisdom in a process like this because conflict and fighting and hurt is actually also, it's very emotional. Mm-hmm. And so, uh, many different communities have ways to actually release that in community. In Hawaii, in the Ho'oponopono communities and circles, there were very specific rituals that when there's conflict, the community comes together. And, and I looked at a number of these different rituals, and they had many things in common. Like, one was they always started by embracing and reminding people of the lineage that they are a part of. So many of these rituals across different communities would often be held near the graveyard-

Anita Rao
Hmm ...

Priya Parker
to be near their ancestors, to remind them that they are part of a long tradition. They would often end in a shared meal. They wouldn't just end with the agreement and tersely, you know, shaking hands. They would then come back together and break bread together and, and, again, reify that they are part of a long tradition. And, and one of the things I did is I looked in modern culture and says, "Where do we have these conflict rituals? Where, wh- it doesn't have to look like that, but what is our modern version of this?" And one of the most surprising places I found it was in the Real Housewives reunions.

Anita Rao
Okay, I literally laughed out loud at this part of the book- ... because my experience of that show and of so much reality TV that I do enjoy is that it is just manufactured chaos and drama. And like- Yes ... we're just working to, like, escalate things, to build tension all the time. But you present it, it's so funny in the book, so you present it kind of next to these examples of these, like, beautiful ancient rituals and you're like, "Actually, the Real Housewives reunion is really sophisticated." So walk me through-like, what are they doing right when it comes to a conflict ritual?

Priya Parker
Yeah, this is, this is my hot take. There is wisdom and sophistication in The Real Housewives reunions.

Anita Rao
Your subway hot take right there.

Priya Parker
Yeah, exactly. You're ready. So part of what I was looking at across these different cultures, and I started- what I was looking for is what are the patterns? Where is there deep collective intelligence in all of these different communities that we might be able to pull forward to figure out what is our version of this? And as I looked at what they had in common, they open in a very specific way. They have it in a ritualistic space that's different from everyday life. They often wear different costumes or dress to signal that we're gonna create a space that is, that is dangerous but that we can hold together as a community. There is structure, there is rules, there is space f- for s- heat, and there's an elder kind of holding the space. They close in song. There are rituals. And I realized that the place I could most see this front and center was The Real Housewives reunions. And whether or not you watch The Real Housewives- ... basically at the end of every season, the housewives, it's part of their contract, have to come together at the end of the season to basically debrief the season together. And if you, if you've ever seen it, they come out in boas and ball gowns and tiaras and, and really deeply costumed. And so I, I had this instinct, and I got in touch with the executive producers of the show And I put forward my thesis to them, that I think that they are actually hosting a, a deeply ancient uh, conflict ritual. And they heard me out and they said, "I agree with you. What you are saying rhymes with what we are doing." And what, what, what one of the executive producers said to me, this is in The Art of Fighting, she said, "It is very ritualistic." And the reunion actually, she said the women are, are terrified of it. They don't wanna do it often. It's, it's actually scary. But part of what they do is, the, the executive producers, they engage in what's called the pre-conflict resolution. So they work with all of the housewives ahead of time to prepare them, to have them re- the season, to think about what do they most want to get off their chest, to bring about what, what are the receipts that they want? And yes, it is for ratings. Yes, it is manufactured at some level. I'm not saying this is perfect. I'm not saying that this is, you know, you should host a Real Housewives reunion. Ne- uh, but, but I think we can deeply learn from what they're doing, which is it's a radical act to have these people who have been fighting with each other all season come together to face each other about their relationship and what's happening to them as a group. And actually, infrastructurally, and the executive producers told me this, they're also all watching. They're deciding themselves, the producers are deciding who should be part of the next season.

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
After the fight, I talk about, uh, asking yourself for the three gut checks. How do you know if you still wanna be part of this? And each of those women are asking those gut checks. Do I still have energy for this? Is this, are these questions still my questions? Is this how s- how I wanna spend my time? Or has this done what it's gonna do and I'm, I'm on my way out?

Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll talk with Priya about how to physically and emotionally prepare for a group fight and handle the big feelings that may come up after. As always, you can hear the podcast version of this show by following Embodied on your platform of choice. Please stay with us.

This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Building a strong community is hard. Keeping it together even when things get messy, even harder. We're exploring the art and science of group dynamics today with Priya Parker. She's a conflict resolution facilitator whose latest book makes the case that healthy groups need both love and conflict. It's called The Art of Fighting. The book lays out a step-by-step process of how to fight well. First, you've gotta understand what the conflict is really about and what the group needs to heal. Pro tip: it is rarely a hastily organized Zoom meeting Then once you have that clarity, you've gotta be intentional about how you enter the conflict itself.

Priya Parker
Fights and groups need infrastructure.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
And again, part of... If you're thinking, "Why is this all this work?" In part, 'cause groups are complex. And when the stakes are higher, you actually do wanna think about where should we do this? What time of day? Who should be there? Who should be part of this conversation? Are our heads in the same place about what the right conversation is? One of the things, I had a mentor in conflict resolution called Randa Slim, and she would say, "90% of the success of what happens in the room happens before anyone arrives."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
And so part of what I want to sort of offer is that conflict resolution facilitators, like 10% of our time is actually what happens in the room. 90% of the time is before and after. But that's still part of... I wanna expand your notion of where and how you think you're intervening. And so very simply, I have this example, I mean, in my own life. I had a friend that w- I was very close with, and one day... We lived in different cities, and we were sort of, I think, like many people, our relationship was primarily, like, digital except when we saw each other every now and again. The... And we'd, we'd text all the time or send each other memes or joke. And one day, I just sort of like, she stopped responding. And for a few days, I just thought, "Maybe she's busy." And then I, then was then really worried, and then I started texting, and stopped responding. And I checked in with other friends, like, "Is she all right?" And she is all right. Anyway, long story short, like six or eight months later, I get a text from her, and it's sort of a chirpy text like, "Hey, we should catch up." And I'm thinking, "Catch up?" Catch up? Catch up?

Anita Rao
You ghosted me.

Priya Parker
We are not gonna catch up. Right? But, but again, as we just think about the process like, huh, the pre-negotiation. My need is not a catch-up.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
I could say, "Yeah, let's catch up," and then we meet, and we have different mental models about what we're doing there. And so I pause and I thought, and again, you know, this is also, I have a interlude in the book s- called Preparing Your Body. You know, I, I'm conflict adverse. I should also say that. I'm a conf- I'm still conflict adverse. I, I'm, I learn these skills so that I can have c- healthy connection in my life, but I hate conflict.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
Even, even I, as my hands are sweating, my heart's palpitating, I'm mad. I take some deep breaths, and I write back something like, "I don't know about you, but I've experienced a big shift in our relationship. I, I don't know if what we need is a catch-up. I would love..." I think I maybe have used the word, like, a clearing.

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
And I was really nervous. Again, it's vulnerable to fight. It's vulnerable to say... I could have just said, like, "It's fine." Like, "Let me just catch up. I'm just gonna pretend this whole period didn't happen." And I had to go through my own gut checks, right? Those same questions like, "Is there longing here? Do I have the energy to do this? Is this a person that's important to me? Is this worth the facing?" And I decided it was, but, but, but the move was just simply a change of language and it, over a text. And then she said, "Thank you for the good language."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
"I agree. Let's have a clearing." Now, that is a lot of work that was just done to kinda sort us out so that when we, we did meet, we were coming in and, like, we're in the same universe of what conversation we needed to have. And, and by the way, a lot of times, like, fights or, or disagreement happens in every group, in part because there is change. There's change in the outside world. There's change within us. One of my favorite examples in the book is a woman I know who was part of a gourmand group for 40 years. I th- apparently, I think in the '70s or '80s, there was this trend in, uh, where it was in a magazine where you invite a group of people together, and you come, and you, like, learn a recipe together from a cookbook, and you rotate houses. So this is a woman, she lives in Colorado, and she and her husband started a gourmand group, and it lasted for 40 years. And she said, "You know, I've l- I've loved this group. It's so beautiful. It's been so meaningful to me, and, um, lately it's gotten kinda awkward. Like, people aren't responding to emails anymore, as much. Like, it's almost like we're avoiding each other. It's kind of breaking my heart." L- And I thought and I said, "Well, you know, you've been doing this for 40 years." And she's like, "I know." And I said, "What if you hosted, suggested a Last Supper? You know, like the, the painting of The Last Supper- ... Jesus and all his disciples?" And she said, "What a beautiful idea." And everyone bring their favorite recipe over the last 40 years and talk about what this group has meant to it and close with a bang. So I called her up. She was so excited. I called her up a few months later. I said, "How'd it go? How did the supper go?" And she said, "Well, the m- the most interesting thing happened. I suggested that we have a Last Supper, and everyone responded within 40 minutes," like response, response, "Absolutely not."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
"This is our... This group is so precious to us, we can't end it." But what had happened was it allowed for this opening conversation, and people said, "But I am kinda getting tired. It is a lot to cook in our own home. Could we consider moving our gourmand group to meeting in a restaurant once a month?" And they did. But part of what happened was the needs of the individuals changed. And it, and when we don't really know or have the language to talk about it, we can end up avoiding one another rather than saying, "Hey, what now should we be, and how do we change this?" And changing the structure of a group is actually a difficult thing.

Anita Rao
Yeah.

Priya Parker
It needs to be done with care.

Anita Rao
And I, I think what you, what that example points to that I found so powerful in the book is this idea that, like, even if the form changes, the group needs to have a shared sense of what makes us us, and how does that-

Priya Parker
Yes

Anita Rao
transcend these different iterations. So what makes us us is not that we host things at our house, it's that we have a shared love and connection for food, and we really wanna be with each other. And, like, having a- Yes ... clear and cohesive sense of us-ness can help groups kind of make those transitions.

Priya Parker
Yes. And ironically, we often only get to renew our vows through a fight.

Anita Rao
So we've talked a lot about kind of setting yourself up well, ways to handle the, the moment of the conflict itself, but the other hugely important piece is what happens after. Grievances have been aired, emotions have been released. There is a first attempt at clearing the air, getting to that clearing that you're talking about. Um, so now what do we do? And especially, like, whose, whose responsibility is it to, to handle the aftermath? Like, if you don't have a hired professional conflict- Yeah ... resolution facilitator, who's taking on that labor?

Priya Parker
So after the, the fight, after the facing, there's often a period of, I, I call it the aftermath. There's often a vacuum. It's sort of like, uh, in natural disasters, there's a, there's a, um, anthropologists call it a liminal, there's a liminal moment where all the rules are kind of temporarily on pause. And in groups, that's true also. Like, we've had the fight, we've had the facing. Okay, we've decided to be a, an open and affirming church in the 1990s that allows gay marriage. Okay, we've decided that. What needs to ha- actually happen-

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm ...

Priya Parker
for that to become true? And so in that liminal moment, a couple of things. First, often people freak out. Like, those first few hours or few days- ... people have sort of like a conflict hangover.

Anita Rao
Yes.

Priya Parker
And so part of it is to know that that's normal, and to actually help hold what I call the meaning making. Re- remind, like, this is normal. Often, whether it's a group of friends, whether it's an organization, whether it's a church, there will alm- almost someone be like, "Oh my gosh," like, "Should we have done that?" Right? And like, part of it is like, yes, we... Like, to frame it how brave we were. This is like, I'm so proud of us. What a resilient group we are. Like, yeah, it's scary, but I'm really proud of us. So part of it is also helping people through. The story is up for grabs. I worked with an organization where a lot of the problems was that power was sort of informal and in the shadows, and as they grew and grew and grew and grew, it became a huge problem for the organization. And one, it was a simple example, but there was a group within the organization that was on a WhatsApp thread because they were all part of, like, a random meeting years ago. And even though-- And it started as a joke, but that WhatsApp thread actually became a real source of power because it was a forum of informal communication. And afterwards, some of the leaders on that WhatsApp thread came to me and they're like, "This is so messed up." Like, "We're not even sure if we can text on our thread anymore." And I said to them, "Congratulations."

Anita Rao
Mm.

Priya Parker
That's progress.

Anita Rao
Yeah.

Priya Parker
Right? And so first is meaning-making, rallying the troops. One of the, um, one of the organizations I worked with that went through a real reckoning, as many have in this country over the last many years, we did a three-day Zoom, sort of had it all out with deep care, and afterwards, there was a lot of metaphorical bruises. People were tired. It, this, it takes a lot of work. And someone, someone in the organization who was not the leader but had, had a lot of sort of social capital, a lot of love, like wrote this long email to the full organization and basically said the equivalent of, "I am so proud of us. I'm so proud of us." When I go through hard times, I look at studies. He's like, "I'm a total nerd," and so I've been s- really studying all of this, organizations that really try to go through cultural change, and I found this study that said that the organizations that are able to actually go through change treat it like an architectural renovation. And then, and then he quotes the study and says, "And we- I'm so proud of us that we are renovating our beloved house."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
And what he was doing is he was rallying the troops. So part of this is also the meaning-making around it, helping people sort of come through it. But the second is what I call water the garden. So people can't be in conflict forever. It's exhausting. It takes a lot of energy. It's almost like when you're in a fight with your spouse or partner, and you come out, and it's like you just need a date night.

Anita Rao
Yes.

Priya Parker
Like- Yes ... you need to remember you like each other. And so wh- I knew a group of friends who, like, they'd gone through this really difficult moment together. They've been friends for decades. They, they sort of have thought in different ways that each other had changed, their values had changed. They, they decided to face it. They came through it. They're all kind of exhausted. A few days later, they found themselves all at the same dance party, but none of them were the host, and they found each other again, and the song, like, Cotton Eye Joe came on, and it was, like, their song from their college days. And they, they, almost without being able to help themselves, like, ran to the middle of the dance floor, all started, you know, dancing, jumping up again and down, laughing, and, like, remembered that they love each other.

Anita Rao
Yeah, have that, have that cathartic- Yes ... release after this experience. I wanna, I wanna close our conversation by coming back to your personal experience because you, you mentioned a little earlier, like, you still find conflict really uncomfortable. Your, your palms still get sweaty. Absolutely. You have, like, an elaborate conflict preparation ritual you need to do. So I'd love for you to speak to kind of conflict tolerance and, and- Yeah ... maybe through the example of your kids. I know you're a mother of two kids. Like, how are you working to help your own kids with their conflict tolerance and, and become able to kind of tolerate this kind of healthy heat?

Priya Parker
Such a good question. I mean, when my parents divorced and separated, everyone was shocked because they never fought.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
And so I, I, I learned that there's also great loss in avoidance. And I've learned that holding conflict and getting really good at it is a learnable skill.

Anita Rao
Mm.

Priya Parker
And it's also a creatable culture, but it does need to be created. With my own children, I mean, the first thing is when my husband and I fight or argue, even us, and often I'll say to them, "We're fighting 'cause we love each other." And I'll look at them and I'll, and I'll pause, and again, it's also, I'm also telling myself this.

Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.

Priya Parker
I'm, I really am. And just like my- we're fighting 'cause we love each other. It's okay that we're arguing. We're arguing about something that really matters. We're, we're figuring this out. We're... And you know, it's okay to fight. Friends fight. I say this to them with their own friendships. Friends fight. They see this with our, the friends that we have over the course of many decades, and they'll see us go through some, a moment with a friend, and I'll look at them, and they'll now look at me, and they, "Friends fight." Mm-hmm. Not all the time. You know, the ratio should probably be nine to one. Like, there should be more good experience, many, many more than, than these difficult moments, but it's a commitment. And the other thing I try to do with them is, even in their own relationship, is help them practice repair with each other, and help them practice giving a real apology. And actually, one thing I've noticed is almost more difficult, helping them actually receive- Mm ... and accept-

Anita Rao
Yeah ...

Priya Parker
a real apology. And it's, it seems tiny, but one of the things I do with them, and you know, don't worry, I get made fun of in my own family just like everyone does. But when I, when I try is when, say, you know, if my son is apologizing to my daughter or vice versa, they'll, they'll say the phrase like, "It's okay." And it's okay, at least in the Eng's language, could mean all sorts of things. It could mean it's okay that you did that, or, you know, it means it's okay, like, I forgive you. And so one replacement phrase I often encourage them to say is just simply, "Thank you."

Anita Rao
Hmm.

Priya Parker
Because they're receiving the apology, and in receiving the apology, it's actually a vulnerable act to admit that you were affected by their action. But there's an exchange there, and then there's actually the clearing.

Anita Rao
Yeah, so much of this being a member of a group and, and being a part of a community requires this kind of a- ability to be vulnerable, to be able to say, "This is what I need. You affect me. I still wanna be in community with you." And all of those things are really hard. So like, what would you say to someone who's like, "I hear you. This is important, but this also sounds like a lot of work," and like hard work when we're so used to kind of, you know, texting our friends and not necessarily saying all of this stuff in person. Like, what are some of the small steps we can take to kinda get better at making the implicit explicit? Which feels like a huge part of all of, all of your work.

Priya Parker
Yeah. I mean, the first is grow the love. Grow the love, invest in people, spend time together where you're watering each other's garden. Create a group w- or join a group and, and being intentional about, "Is this how I wanna spend my time?" Because there's a higher capacity for conflict when you have shared questions. What I see is the groups that really last are the groups where people actually don't have shared answers. They have shared questions. So the first is grow the love and grow relevance, because that actually increases people's willingness to stay in the heat. You need love and you need heat, but heat will just burn the house down. And then I think the second is, in a work context, if you have some amount of control or power over the culture, to normalize tiny little moments of repair. And y- I studied restaurants for this book a lot because restaurants, every single night of service, there's 150 micro-conflicts. And so some of the best restaurants have ways where people have s- like signals to each other, this episode of The Bear where they just rub their hand over their heart in the si- American Sign Language for, "I'm sorry." These tiny little practices to notice little rituals to normalize that, like, we're gonna hurt each other, sort of like siblings.

Anita Rao
Yeah.

Priya Parker
And it's just normal to basically find simple forms of repair.

Anita Rao
You can find out more about Priya Parker and her book, The Art of Fighting, at our website, embodiedwunc.org. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Wilson Sayre provided additional editorial guidance, Adesina Newkirk is our intern, and Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. WUNC is a broadcast service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.