Read the full transcript of Episode 84 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, journalists and trained conflict mediators. They join host Morva McDonald to reflect on how conflict shapes everything from our news cycle to our relationships and why we need to develop new skills to move toward healthier forms of resolution.
Morva McDonald: Welcome to Season 10 of New View EDU! I’m really looking forward to kicking off this season with a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for some time now.
Today’s guests are Hélène Biandudi Hofer and Amanda Ripley. They’re journalists and trained conflict mediators who co-founded Good Conflict three years ago to create original, innovative content to shift our broader conflict culture—and to train educators and other professionals to lead and communicate in volatile times.
I find their work fascinating and incredibly relevant, and I’m so excited to talk with them about the ways conflict shows up in our work as educators and how we can shift from being nervous or avoidant about conflict, to understanding how to manage it and harness it for the benefit of our schools. So Amanda and Hélène, I’m really grateful you could be here today.
Welcome to both of you to New View EDU. I'm super excited to talk to you. I always find it's really helpful, particularly for educators whose work is so driven by purpose, to kind of understand how it is that people came to the work that they do. So I'm really interested in understanding, like, how did you both come to the study of conflicts and kind of the current work that you're doing in the world?
Amanda Ripley: Well, thank you, Morva. It's great to see you again, and great to be here with you and with Hélène. We, I think, both separately were increasingly dispirited by traditional journalism and the level of conflict and division in the country. So in my case, after the 2016 election, it just felt like journalism wasn't working the way it was supposed to work. And any story we might do would either have no effect on our conflicts or make things worse. And I'm exaggerating, but that's how it felt. So I took some time to try to figure out how to be useful in an age of runaway conflict.
And it was quite disorienting, honestly, because I'd spent 20 years as a journalist at Time magazine and The Atlantic and other places. This was my whole identity and it was a great gig, honestly. I got to travel around the world and ask people questions I had no business asking them, and it was a lot of fun until it wasn't. So along the way, I fortunately was able to start following and learning from people who understand conflict really well, but very differently from journalists. People like psychologists, divorce mediators, gang violence interrupters, negotiators. And they taught me pretty quickly that there was a lot I had not understood about conflict, even though I was constantly writing about it.
So that was humbling and exciting, because it meant there was a whole other way to do this thing, which led me to write an essay about what journalists could learn from those people, and eventually a book called High Conflict about people and communities that get stuck in dysfunctional conflict and get out to see what we could learn from those patterns. And best of all, it led me to Hélène. Hélène, you want to take it from there?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, for sure. And Morva, hello. It's so good to be with you. It was the essay that Amanda mentioned that she wrote for journalists based on her learnings that I had the opportunity to read. And I read it at a time when I was hosting and producing a program for PBS in New York. And it just struck me, and—it struck me personally and also as a journalist. And I remember reading through it and just thinking to myself, first of all, where has this person been? And we need this and—we desperately need this. And how really can I apply this to the work that I'm doing?
And it was interesting because at the time I had kind of gotten to a point in my reporting where I decided I was not going to renew my contract with the news organization where I was stationed. And that was primarily because, very similar to Amanda, it was fun until it wasn't. And I was just in a time of self-reflection and introspection. And you know, when you do that, sometimes it can lead to some pretty surprising places. And those places for me, it was mostly like a reckoning of stories I had done that—never intentionally did I want to cause harm or pain or frustration. And that's exactly what I did.
And also at the same time, I was really proud of some of the work that I had done, but it was just a realization that something had to shift. So fortunately, the Solutions Journalism Network, who published that piece that Amanda wrote, they were looking for an entrepreneurial journalist to come in and take the work and turn it into a training program for journalists around the world. And so that's what I did. And from that, Amanda and I really collaborated. We would swap stories, talk about what we are learning from our work, and eventually realize, you know, there's something here and it's not just about serving journalists. We can still serve them. But my gosh, if you take a step back and look at how these skills and these strategies are applicable to people across the board in any profession, there's something really there. And it's the narrative component, which is what we bring to it. And we can serve people with that narrative component when we're talking about conflict across the board as well.
Morva McDonald: That's really helpful, because somebody who's listening might be wondering like, why is Morva talking to these two people about journalism? Like, what does that have to do with our world of education? Right. So I'm not, I kind of think I have an idea about that. But I'm wondering if you can help us think about from your perspective, what you think the relationship is between the work that you're doing, and I know you've done work in education, both of you in different ways. And so I'm just wondering, how do you think about that relationship? Why is this a potentially beneficial topic to be talking about with educators in particular?
Amanda Ripley: It's funny, Morva, because we didn't really expect to be working with as many educators as we ended up working with. Journalism was our main focus. But Hélène noticed in Chita P. Holdings' workshops with journalists, and there'd be educators in the room who would just hear about it and show up.
Once we launched Good Conflict a few years ago, we just noticed without us doing any marketing at all that educators were our number one client. School superintendents, school leaders, school board members, sometimes teachers, they were just finding us. And I think the reason, as you know, Morva, is that education has been fraught with conflict for a very long time. It was polarized before everything else was polarized.
So the level of conflict has done two things. First, made educators unusually motivated to do conflict differently, but also led them to develop really brilliant conflict hacks and survival techniques that we have learned a lot from. So that's been a really surprising and generative two-way street, to be able to work with educators more than any other group, including journalists, I think, Hélène, right?
Morva McDonald: That's fascinating.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I think we've worked at this point more with educators than with journalists. And they're ready. They're like, let's go. They're not, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I want to talk about conflict. They're ready to go. So that's kind of awesome.
Morva McDonald: That's really, I think, fascinating, a good thing for us as educators to reflect on about both our drive to understand that challenge as we're running organizations, but also as we're thinking about the work to do with kids, right? How do you help kids manage conflict? But you're also managing it as heads of school or administrators at schools as part of that.
I want to talk more about that because I know you guys have engaged with a lot of educators. I'm interested in what you've learned. But before we get to there, help us understand and think about the distinction between what you might say is high conflict experience or event or opportunity, if you will, and good conflict. Help our audience understand those distinctions.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, sure thing. Amanda, do you want to take on high conflict and I'll take on good conflict?
Amanda Ripley: OK, yes. Good cop, bad cop.
In all the research on conflict, the kind of conflict turns out to really matter. It's not conflict that's the problem. And that's like the first most important lesson that we've learned. Conflict, we need to be stronger, to challenge each other, to be challenged. But there's one particular category of conflict that is sometimes called malignant conflict or intractable conflict, or high conflict is the phrase that we use.
In this kind of conflict, your brain behaves very differently, groups of people behave differently, you make a lot of mistakes, you literally lose your peripheral vision and figuratively, so you miss opportunities. It's the kind of conflict that escalates to a point where all of a sudden things look very clear. You know, there's an us and a them, a good and evil. We've all felt this, right? This sort of rush of indignation and righteous certainty?
And the two most defining qualities of high conflict are contempt and disgust. So those light up different areas of the brain, but they are very difficult to work with in conflict. Contempt, if you're angry with me, it just means you want me to be different. If you hate me, you've given up on me. And I can sense that. And it changes how I respond to you. Likewise with disgust.
These are things that people are very good at sensing in others, even when we think we're hiding it. And they respond in kind because it is so threatening. These are very primal emotions, right? You get into a dynamic, like a perpetual motion machine, where you respond to contempt with contempt, which leads to more contempt. Eventually, you are at risk of violence, and then violence leads to more violence, and so you get into these diabolical loops and it becomes very very hard to resist high conflict. It's so magnetic and it is so seductive. It's almost like being under a spell. And so I think it is, for me, was very helpful to understand that because it's like this invisible hand that's influencing what's happening in our world today, but we don't often talk about it that way. We just keep pretending it's normal conflict, and it's not.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: So the flip side would be good conflict, which is this, it's healthy, it's useful conflict. And by all means, it's intense, it's stressful, it's no nonsense, but it's the kind of conflict that doesn't resort to what Amanda was describing, that contempt. It doesn't resort to name calling and to caricatures. And when we're in this place of good conflict, there's this ability within ourselves to make and also to hold space for other people. So other people's perspectives, their lived experiences on things, their understanding of something. And we can do that in spite of our differences because we recognize that A, we do not have all the answers on our own. As much as we may like to think that, we recognize that we don't.
And then B, we also realize that we truly do need each other and we need each other to get better, to get stronger, to push and challenge ourselves and to move forward so we're not stuck or in that perpetual loop that Amanda was describing with high conflict. And so with good conflict, it's the kind of conflict that we need more of, right? In homes and schools and places of worship and in our politics. And I want to say, by no means are we saying that good conflict is about making conflict go away. It's the opposite of that. That would be a delusion if we would think that's possible, because it's really about how can we become conflict fluent where we are not avoidant and we are not going into this mode of contempt?
So with good conflict, we might have these conversations where our emotions are all over the map, but at least we're experiencing them, than just stuck in this loop of, you know, feeling revenge and wanting revenge and deep anger. But there are these flashes of surprise and good conflict when we're having these good conflict conversations. There are these moments of clarity, opportunities for humor. Who would have thought that potentially that could happen, but there are sparks of that. There's this openness to, that I mentioned, to hearing the other side. So our emotions kind of go on this roller coaster ride, but we get to a place of understanding and it's understanding something on a deeper level about ourselves, about the other person, or about the situation that we're facing.
Morva McDonald: It makes me think that the skill that one has to develop is like a metacognition about conflict itself, right? Like, can I step out? Can I look at it and say, okay, what kind of experience am I in or what's happening in front of me, which requires you to, in some ways like distance yourself.
In that space, we have to also, maybe you can help us understand what the signs are, the signals are, that are saying to us like, you're headed into a high conflict experience, right? And one of the things that's interesting here is there's like, and maybe I'm curious about this, is there a difference about whether the conflict is really personal?
So there's two questions in there really. One is about thinking about like what the signals are related to how I know if I'm headed into a high conflict situation, and whether or not there's a distinction in conflict itself about whether it's in my personal life or in my professional life. And then as I say that I think, there's maybe not such a big distinction between personal and professional, but nonetheless, we can think about it maybe in those ways.
Amanda Ripley: You know, it's so funny because I used to think there was a distinction, but it's complicated, right? Like on the one hand in your personal life, you have more invested in that relationship, right? So it's more important to, to like stay in it, hopefully to work through it. You know the person better, you know, there's a lot more intimacy.
On the other hand, that's a much more threatening kind of conflict because of that, right? So you're more likely, at least I'm more likely, to default to some of my worst instincts if I feel very threatened in an intimate conflict. I mean, obviously, I try to work through that or whatever, but it's more threatening. So it's different than a conflict at work, which is still threatening and unpleasant. But it doesn't get to your core survival the way a personal intimate conflict might. So I think the behavior is similar and the intensity varies.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, I think that with the personal relationships that we have in our lives and when conflict exists within those, it just feels like there's so much more at stake. You know, with work, those relationships are also valuable, and there is a lot at stake too, right? Like you think about, I got a paycheck that needs to come and I've got bills to pay and a family to take care of and all these things. So there's certainly the pressure there.
But there's something about the foundation of home. And when that's disrupted with conflict that just continues to ooze into all of the rooms of the house, so to speak, that is a really difficult thing to function and work. And I will speak from personal experience, it is difficult to function in the workplace when that...you just kind of feel crippled by it, when it's not functioning the way that's supposed to and the conflict is just not going away and you haven't worked with it the way that you should. So I do think there's a lot more at stake when it comes to the personal for sure.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, and to answer your question, Morva, about how do we know we're getting into it? Well, there's different ways to know. And we've talked about contempt and disgust and that feeling of being stuck internally and going over and over and ruminating on the same imaginary conversations in your head. And that is kind of an internal signal.
But we've also, when we work with educators and other groups, we usually start by mapping the conflict. And we do this in our digital course, because what happens is you get very narrowed in your view when you're in a difficult conflict. And you sort of miss things, like I was saying before. So we start by mapping a conflict so we can get all the different players and forces out of our heads and onto paper.
We were working with an elementary school teacher this summer and she was saying how when she started out mapping, it was just very small, just a few people, because you—it's those same people, right? Who will cause you all the problems over and over again. But then she had students at the center of her map, which was smart. And then soon she was adding more people and her colleagues were adding more people and different forces and different factors. And soon it was like the whole community was somehow potentially influencing the conflict, for better or for worse. But having students at the center was a helpful way to kind of step back from that and think about this system. Because conflict like that really is a system. And we are often interrupting and perpetuating it in ways we don't realize.
But one of the things that we, that we work with people to identify in that map are these four fire starters, which are things that tend to really distort conflict and make things go sideways very quickly. And so one is humiliation. And another is conflict entrepreneurs. These are people who exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. And then corruption. So when institutions aren't trusted, whether they should be or not, that's another kind of trip wire into high conflict. And then false binaries or splitting, kind of when you separate people into two camps, good and evil. So you see that in how we talk about people, right? You see that in how we, you know, in schools it might be between the union and management, or between parents and faculty or, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to do this.
Morva McDonald: There's a lot of binaries to the way we talk about all kinds of things in schools. Sure.
Amanda Ripley: But that is usually a way to lead to dysfunctional conflict with humans. So identifying those on the map can be helpful, because they're really powerful but very rarely spoken about.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: I think the only thing I would add to that is too, when you take a step back from the map and you're looking for those fire starters that Amanda identified, you're looking to see what voices have been silenced and who are we hearing from that's quite loud, right? The other thing is you kind of look for emotions too, and your emotions can be signals of high conflict as well, and thinking patterns can be signals of high conflict.
And I know, you know, if we get into that place of zero sum thinking, it's like, I got to win and they have to lose. And that's the only way that this, whatever issue we're dealing with, that's the only way that I can find resolution is through that zero sum thinking. I know for me, and I am guilty of having had that throughout my life, that way of thinking, that is a surefire way to know that, oh, you know what? It is really, really time for me to slow this thing down and take a step back and assess what does my involvement look like in this and what am I adding to it? I should probably be on that map that Amanda was talking about mapping out. I should put myself on there as well.
Amanda Ripley: We notice this with journalists. With journalists, they would often do the map and not put their newsroom on it. We'd be like, well, do you think that maybe you're influencing the conflict?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Right, right. Yeah.
Morva McDonald: I think that's fascinating because part of, I think, what you're suggesting and alluding to is in the conflict itself, your own, and this is really challenging as a leader of an institution or organization sometimes, because lots of things are happening all at once, is your own self-reflection in the moment.
I can say that for myself, having been in plenty of conflicts as a head of school, not to mention personal conflicts in that way. You talked a little bit about conflict entrepreneurs, which I think in these contexts are often a big fire starter in an institution like a school. There's like repeat people. One of the things that's challenging there is that if those people are parents, the conflict for them is very personal, but the conflict for you is professional, right? So there's a division there that's worth paying attention to. Talk to us a little bit about what you've learned from other people about the best ways of helping or supporting, you know, or intervening with conflict entrepreneurs.
Amanda Ripley: Oh, Morva, this is a big one.
Morva McDonald: I appreciate that you're both shaking your heads in ways that are not super great.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it is, is, unfortunately, we are living through like, the glory days of conflict entrepreneurship. There is no better time in history to be a conflict entrepreneur, because we've built a bunch of our institutions and social media platforms and journalism and politics. We've built those things to reward and encourage conflict entrepreneurship. I don't think that will always be the case, but that is what it is right now. And it's very easy to become a conflict entrepreneur when trying to manage conflict entrepreneurs, or respond to, or dominate. You so easily can respond in kind. And that's one of the most diabolical things about high conflict, is you will end up mimicking the behavior of your enemies.
Sometimes you do have to respond in kind. If someone punches you in the face, you're not necessarily going to turn the other cheek every single time. And just know that you are playing, now, the same game. You will not get out of this trap that way. You have to play a very different game. And that is very, very tricky when conflict entrepreneurs are empowered.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: And when we're talking about conflict entrepreneurs, what we're describing, you know, these are, just to remind people, these are people and organizations, and they love to inflame conflict for their own ends. And, you know, these are people that will just continue to stir the pot. They love drama, and they want to have it again and again and again. And some of them, to the point about the justification piece, some feel as though, no, this is, I'm fighting for the cause in doing this. They, I mean, they all feel that way. It's something like, and some are, unintentionally, right? They might mean well, but the end result is one of just destruction and creating more chaos than they probably intended.
Amanda Ripley: I would say all, all feel like they're on the side of good.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: One thing that Amanda has written about, and I think it's important to point out, is that oftentimes with conflict entrepreneurs, there is some kind of internal pain that just has not been dealt with, right? And they are spreading that internal pain around and around and around. And I think, to this idea of, well, my gosh, they're so destructive. How in the world do we even think about managing them? I think just recognizing first that there is some deep pain there that they are not aware of, that's a helpful first step in thinking about developing a plan to manage them.
There are these three ideas, we call them the three rules for dealing with conflict entrepreneurs. And one of them is first and foremost, my gosh, please try not to become one yourself. And Amanda and I have this joke where we look in the mirror every morning as we're getting ready, we're like, come on, damn it, Amanda, damn it, Hélène, just don't do it, not today, don't be a conflict entrepreneur. So that's the first thing we say. And the second rule that we try to live by with this is, if you can, distance yourself from them. Now we're going to come back to that one, because that's not always possible. And then the third is, just consider not giving up on conflict entrepreneurs entirely. Consider that. And there's a reason why.
Amanda Ripley: You know, when I wrote my book, everyone I followed out of high conflict started by turning down the volume on the conflict entrepreneurs in their lives. So for the politician, it was changing his advisor to be someone who was less of a conflict entrepreneur.
Morva McDonald: Like avoidance, right? Like an avoidance strategy, right?
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, well, if you've got someone over your shoulder, always framing everything as humiliating and telling you that you're in a war and you've got to fight and you've just, that kind of thing is, even when they have good intentions, it really warps your view of the conflict.
So Gary Friedman, who is a conflict expert that we've learned a lot from, he says if they're 80% conflict entrepreneur, see if you can speak to the 20%. See if you can figure out what else do they care about, because we are all more than one thing, even conflict entrepreneurs.
Usually, not always, usually in education, people do at some level care about kids, or their kid at least. And so that's something that can be a real asset that you don't always have in other industries. But as something, as you know, Morva, right, that you can come back to and keep coming back to.
Morva McDonald: Some kind of shared value or something like that.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And the other is you can also, in terms of managing them, ask for help, right? There's somebody who knows them quite well and likely on a deeper level than you do, and ask them for advice. This is not something that you have to chart the course for on your own. You know, get that support.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, sometimes you're not the right messenger, right? Because you're kind of a lightning rod. I mean, we've learned from school superintendents that sometimes they have to recruit others. What have you found, Morva? You have to have encountered conflict entrepreneurs in your work. So what are some of the things you've tried?
Morva McDonald: For sure. I mean, I think they're the things you're talking about. Like sometimes in schools, at least with kids, we talk a lot about if you think about conflict as a behavior that you're enacting. One of the things people, educators do with kids is try to figure out what's the belief behind the behavior that the kid is manifesting. Right? Which is a little bit like this question about, like, what's the pain that somebody's enacting in this moment in the conflict? Right? It's a very similar kind of idea.
It's hard to do in the moment, because it requires you to manage your own emotions, right? In that space. I think educators are primed to do it in some ways if they can build on their understanding of the work that they do with kids and kind of understanding children, right? Which we have a lot more generosity often with, right? Than we do with adults or peers or colleagues, right? I hope that we are more generous with children than we are with adults. I think that is generally the case for educators. So I think there's that.
I think finding, like, the other people in your community who know somebody better than you do, who can kind of help you understand, where is the common space or the common ground? And then of course, knowing your own faults, right? Like that just seems really important, right? Like I love to argue. I will argue until the ends of the earth. I'm really good at arguing, I enjoy it. I thrive in that space. It's really probably not great for me, right?
So I have to kind of know that and that shows up personally, but it also shows up in my professional space. Like I want to defend the idea, right? And I get stuck there. And so it's important, as anybody would know who's thought about this, I think, to identify that challenge. And then I think in schools really to remember, particularly if it's with parents and having, being a parent of four kids, to just remember like the, so much of the intensity is driven by their concern or their care or their worry. And you have to really empathize with that and understand that in order to come out of the situation.
Because it makes sense. It's their most precious thing, often. It's an item, that, it's the thing they care the most about. And so being able to straddle that and recognize that is, I think, super important. I don't know if that's helpful, but I think those are some ways that I would think about it.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: It sure is. I was taking notes, Morva.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, this is what I mean. We learn so much from these conversations with educators, because you've had to do this over and over again. In fact, I was just in Massachusetts talking to a group of school boards, members, and superintendents together, which is great because you rarely get them together.
One of the superintendents said that she had recently discovered a new tactic with conflict entrepreneurs, particularly the repeat offenders that are just known. And so they send you the 51-page emails and all the complaints and the matter. And so she started asking them to coffee. This particular conflict entrepreneur, so she's doing the thing. She's leaning in. She's trying to figure out what's the 20 percent. But here's the thing.
Nine times out of 10, she's found, they don't respond. So on the one hand, well, that seems like a failure, right? Because you didn't get the chance to figure out what the 20 percent is. On the other hand, you've now disrupted that dynamic. You've done the opposite of what they expected or what they're doing, which causes this little tiny destabilization in the force. It just slightly, a little tremor is sent through that high conflict system.
And you don't know. Maybe if you keep asking, maybe one day, they will meet you for coffee. But in any case, you have stepped out of the dance that you were in with them. And it's hard to say what that will lead to, but it does have implications that sometimes you can't see right away.
Morva McDonald: So if you were to like, synthesize for us, your learnings from your engagement with educators about high conflict or about, in some ways, leading schools, right, where there's a lot of humanity is involved. Like, what would you highlight? What are the kinds of things you would kind of highlight for us?
Amanda Ripley: So many things, right?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, I would say I think learning from the top, like from the very, very beginning, Morva, it was really clear that there were so many different emotions that educators were feeling and there was a lot of weariness. And simultaneously, there was just this deep desire to continue to serve as a leader and to make a difference. And so you could feel that and they...the folks that we have the opportunity to serve are coming with us with all sorts of conflicts.
I mean, there was internal conflicts that they were facing, you know, this idea of wanting to serve students, but also being stymied by these certain feelings or external roadblocks and conflict entrepreneurs as we've been describing. But at the core, it really did come down to being a better leader. I mean, we're talking, these were K through 12 plus higher ed, but being a better leader in the service of young people. I mean, that's that common thread, right? That's the thing that we have that we can hold on to.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, that's a really deep commitment.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Exactly, exactly. I think some admittedly were skeptical. And I remember one person in particular, and bless her for telling us, but she did say that, she said, I just was not sure that this is something that would work for me. But she showed up and she did the lessons in the digital course. She created this conflict playbook, which really walks people through how to, right? It's the how to engage meaningfully and how do you actually have good conflict?
So she created this playbook through the digital course. And she, the most surprising thing that she found was how immediately useful, and those were her words and not mine, immediately useful, the tactics across multiple areas of her life. So it was not just within the school setting, but also personal.
And I think that's the part that is like the, at least it is for me, it's the bright spot, is that recognition of all of these things, they do apply to the work that we do. And it comes back to that question that you asked about kind of differentiating, is there a difference or a distinction, rather, between these personal conflicts that we have on the home front and then the professional? And this, her, the work that she did and her moments of kind of contemplation, reveal that they are all connected. And also, the very clear reality that it will continue to take work.
It is a continued practice. It's like, my husband is training for a half marathon right now. That is a daily thing, right? And I mean, I watch, 'cause I'm not joining him. I watch, but it's daily practice. And that's the, that we learned from all of them is that this is just, this has been great, and this is going to be hard, and we have to keep trying.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah. And I would also add like, oftentimes with different people that we work with, there's an untreated wound. Like there's, in the group, in the community, in the country. So when I work with members of Congress and their staff, for a lot of them, not all, that's January 6th, because they still have not talked about it to each other across party lines in 99% of cases. But it's still in there, right? It's still having its way with them and influencing conflicts in like, really distorted ways. With a lot of educators, what we found, and parents and kids, it's the pandemic, right?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Morva McDonald: That's fascinating.
Amanda Ripley: In different ways that that, yeah, kind of shredded trust in institutions or in each other or…
All different ways, played out differently in different places, obviously, but there's a lot that hasn't been even articulated out loud, right? And so you get like, deep foundational doubt and cynicism that keeps roaring up in different forms in school board meetings and other things.
And one of the things that, so, after we have folks map the conflict in our course, we have them investigate the understory. And you were kind of getting at this, Morva, earlier, is like, what is underneath here? There's a thing we're arguing about endlessly, whether it's CRT or books or trans rights, whatever. But then there's the thing underneath that thing. And it's usually one of four things, which is the good news, right? It's usually the same four things over and over. And one of those is one we've learned from educators. And I'll let you guess which one. But the first three we learned from psychologists.
So it's respect and recognition. That's often the thing. I would say most commonly, that's the thing. And that gets back to humiliation, but also stress and overwhelm, just like deep, deep fatigue. And this is like the last straw, whatever the thing is. Care and concern, right? Like, especially with kids, like this is really about, do you care about my babies? Or about my teachers or whatever, or about any number of things. But that's the question that we should be asking, but we're not. Or in a couple, it's like, do you love me? Instead, we're fighting about whether you're listening to me when I'm talking or you're looking at your phone or whatever. But there's this underneath, this understory.
So respect and recognition, care and concern, stress and overwhelm. What am I missing, Hélène?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Power and control.
Amanda Ripley: Power and control, how could I forget?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Yeah. I feel like that's a big one up there with respect and recognition as well.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Okay. So, Morva, which of those?
Morva McDonald: I mean, here's my guess, only for two reasons, one of which is because we had just been talking about the pandemic. And so my guess is that it's fatigue and overwhelm for educators, that would be… And having been a head of school during the pandemic myself, like, I can very much relate to that challenge on everybody's side, right?
Amanda Ripley: Yeah.
Morva McDonald: One thing somebody could take away is like, I can't solve this conflict with this individual or in this system until I really have a deep understanding of their moment of pain or anguish or whatever. Like, we have to go back and solve all of that in order for us to move forward.
Amanda Ripley: Right, we have to go into couples therapy with everyone, yeah.
Morva McDonald: Exactly. Like we have to like, you know, we have to get all of Congress, right, engaged in like years, years. And maybe so, right, like years of that.
I just, I'm hesitant there because as somebody who's also trying to move things forward, you can get a little bit stuck even if it might be necessary. So I have a question about that. And then I wonder if your four ways of thinking about this are, for lack of a better term, like a shortcut into thinking about that when I'm, when I'm working with somebody, I'm in a high conflict situation, should I really be asking myself is like, do I think the understory here, which of these things, not that they're inclusive probably, but which of these things are mostly operating? Help me think about that problem.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I think describing it as a shortcut is exactly right, because you're right, we can't be spending, you know, hundreds of hours unpacking this person's childhood. Like that's just—nor do they want us to, right?
We work with a member of Congress who, a counterpart across the aisle was behaving in a way that didn't make sense. Like they'd been very close to doing a deal on something, and she just went silent. And it didn't make sense. It wasn't in her interest from what they could tell. And so she started thinking, I wonder if there's humiliation here. But she could not, for the life of her, think of a reason why there would be.
So she asked her to lunch. Luckily, the woman went. And as they started talking, and she used a technique that we teach called looping, which helps you kind of get to that understory faster, to your point. So you're kind of listening to what you hear, putting it into your own words, playing it back, and checking if you got it right. Sounds simple. Definitely requires practice, at least for us.
Morva McDonald: It's like checking for understanding. Yep.
Amanda Ripley
Yeah. So she's doing that, which is building trust, which is showing that she's really curious and really listening and really trying to understand. And the woman tells her that she had felt disrespected because she wasn't consulted about some topic that she feels herself to be an expert in, whether she is or not, whether she should have been consulted or not. And in that case, it costs the other woman nothing to just apologize, to just be like, my gosh, I'm really sorry. That was not the intention. I can see why, given your experience, you would have wanted to weigh in on that. And then they did the deal. So it didn't take years of therapy.
Now, in other cases, it's harder, especially if the person won't sit down with you. And that's where you might need to talk to other people or have someone else talk to them. It's complicated. But using looping to investigate the understory is a really helpful way to get there faster, and also to get there for yourself, because you have an understory too. And it's useful to think about it.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, yeah, that's helpful. I'd love to hear a little bit about, like, how you're evolving this work. I know you both a little bit and know that your hands are in lots of different things and just out of curiosity, kind of like, what are you really excited about how this work is continuing and proceeding and where is it taking you next?
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: We've been dreaming and scheming in the best way possible over the last couple of months. And you know, this idea of narrative and how the impact of narrative when it comes to just trying to understand disagreement and understand where we are right now when we think about polarization in our society.
There's just this, we can't really shake from us this idea of, you know, we need culture change. And…we need culture change, and we know one way that the two of us know how to do that is through stories, and the stories that we tell.
And also I would say, really focusing on the stories that we tell, it's not just the stories that we tell others. I believe a lot of this is about the stories that we tell ourselves. I think there's just this whole inner piece of this work that is really scary for people to do. And you mentioned that Morva, but like, we've got to do that, that self analysis. And we don't do that as often as we should. But so we're excited about kind of thinking through how can we really hone in on story and tap into a journalism ecosystem in a way that hasn't been tapped into before, while continuing to serve people like we do with educators, politicians, nonprofit CEOs, and so on. What might that look like for us?
Amanda Ripley: We can't find the news that we want to consume. And like we are tired of feeling frustrated by the way many outlets cover controversy and division. And we understand why that is, because we did the same thing for many years. But now that we've stepped away from it, it's easier for us to have that meta view, right? Like we can kind of see how this is actually…not only is it not helping, but it's not that interesting. Like it's not even interesting, which is the number one thing that stories should be.
We think we need more stories that break the binary, that expose the drivers of high conflict, like humiliation, more stories that help us widen our vision again. Right? If our vision is narrowed, the stories that are exciting and interesting to me are stories that take me by surprise.
And that actually reminds me, one of our partners recently pointed out to us, the New York Times had issued a call for people to share stories of division in their community. They put a survey out, tell us about division, like division in your community. And we were like, well, you know what might be more fun and interesting? Is like the opposite of that. So we're working on a survey. So please tell us about surprising stories of function and collaboration in your community. Not Pollyanna, but things that are kind of working that you didn't expect.
Morva McDonald: All right, we're going to post that survey link if we can, and then we'll have people respond. I love that. I think looking for the alternative to the divisive story is a great way to end. As always, I so appreciate talking to you and checking in and seeing what you're up to and so, feel so lucky that you're helping educators across the country just do better work for kids. So thank you.
Amanda Ripley: Thanks, Morva.
Hélène Biandudi Hofer: Thank you for having us, Morva.
Morva McDonald: I’m so glad I got the chance to talk with Amanda and Hélène today. They’re doing so much important, groundbreaking work, and I think it’s exactly what’s needed right now.
There’s so much tension and polarization in almost every space, but especially in schools, and as leaders, we have an incredibly complex role to play in managing conflict across all the different stakeholders in our communities. It’s not just about how we deal with disagreement or polarizing narratives as adults, either with parents or board or staff members—it’s also about how do we model navigating conflict for our students? We also have to be managing those different roles in real time, which takes a tremendous amount of energy and metacognition.
I really value the opportunity to sit with people like Amanda and Hélène and learn about their views on what good conflict looks like, and why it’s actually helpful to lean into that, rather than instinctively avoid conflict in our schools, or shutting down debate because we’re afraid of the consequences.
I like the way they talk about becoming “conflict-fluent,” because it reinforces the concept that we can learn to be adept at managing strong feelings and opposing beliefs just like we build an important skill, in school or in life. I’m also really impressed by how tactical and usable their techniques are. The way they talk about mapping conflicts and handling common challenges like conflict entrepreneurs is so similar to the way we might approach teaching our students to break down a math equation or build a thesis statement—there are steps we can follow to help us build understanding and practice growing through conflict. It’s actionable, and it’s also a complete, total shift away from how most of us usually view conflict. We’re conditioned to think of it as something that drains or limits us, but the way Amanda and Hélène work with conflict in different systems shows that meeting it as a useful challenge can really help us expand who we are as people and as leaders.
There’s so much potential here to explore, and I hope everyone listening will practice some of these ideas in their own work. As Hélène said at one point during our conversation, this is going to be hard, and we have to, we have to keep trying.
Next week on New View EDU, a special guest host will be in the studio. Ann Snyder, NAIS vice president of strategic initiatives, will be here to talk with George Suttles of the Commonfund Institute. See you next time on New View EDU.