331 - Wicked Problems - Martin Carcasson

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Podcast Introduction

0:58Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart podcast, episode 331. Welcome to the show.

Host Introduction

1:34I'm David McCraney. Before we get the show rolling, there's a game we're going to discuss later in the show. It's a workshop exercise that you can try yourself, and it's super simple. Also, if you support the show over on Patreon, I would love to see your answers to this exercise in the comments under the episode. And here's what you do. And these values are community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security.

2:16Now, number those from one to nine, one being the most important and nine being the least. Then, ask yourself, why did you put the one you put up top as number one? Then, can you define what that value means to you?

2:50Next, ask yourself, why did you put the one you put at the bottom as least important? And then, try to define what does that value mean to you? If you can do this in a group or just with another person, it's way, way better.

Group Discussion

3:08Also, ask yourself if you can imagine a situation where your top value dominates too much. Are there situations in which you can have too much of it? And next, can you make the case for the importance of your bottom value? People who care about that value, who might put it way up top, why do you think they would do that? Now, looking at your top three values, do you see any tensions between them? Does focusing on one make it harder to honor the others?

Re-Ranking Values

3:41And after doing all that, re-rank your values a second time and see if anything seems as if it should go up or down the list. Again, doing this in a group, it's amazing. It's a really great exercise and you just take turns with the questions and then take turns re-ranking everything at the end and try to agree. See if you can all agree on how the ranking should go. Okay, have fun with that. Share your answers wherever you do social stuff with this podcast, Facebook, Spotify, Patreon.

4:15I would love to see your answers. I'd love to see what happens if you did this in a group.

Dr. Martin Carcasson Introduction

4:19Let me know about it. Okay, on with the show. I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level. And actually, we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn't work, right? That is the voice of Dr. Martin Carcasson, and he is the director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State.

5:02As part of his work, he trains people to facilitate deliberation. He and his students and staff at the Center for Public Deliberation, they hold events where people in a community, in an institution, a municipality, a county, and so on, they get these people together and help them discuss how to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. They've held about 600 of these events.

5:32And in so doing, they've developed a process, a procedure, a framework that works extremely well. And it's based on science. It is based on what we know about how people work when they get together and disagree, when they share an uncertainty about how to proceed. Dr. Carcasson's work and these events, they are informed by the science, the evidence collected over the last 100 years or so on how to avoid the conditions

6:06that lead people to talk past each other, to derail their own efforts through poor conversations, poor communication, outright arguing, and everything that is not deliberating. As he puts it, his job is to, quote, spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best. I am a communication professor. So my research now, what, almost 24, 25 years, has always been,

6:40how do we have the conversations we need to have for democracy to work? My initial academic training was in argumentation, the subfield of communication studies, which takes arguments seriously. How do we analyze arguments? How do we try to make the distinctions between a strong argument and a weak argument? And early on, all my research was more national, focused a lot on the American president, how American presidents talked about complex issues. And I get more and more frustrated because it's pretty clear that the national system is not a system that rewards good argument.

7:10And so Dr. Martin Carcasson spent decades researching, studying, refining, and outright creating new ways for people to get together and talk,

Wicked Problems

7:22to discuss issues, then make plans based on those discussions that work for everyone. In other words, he refined deliberation, and he did so through a scientific lens. I was doing well publishing, but all my papers were about how badly we talked about complex issues. So that's what led to my work. When I got the job at CSU about 22 years ago, I shifted from national to local, and I shifted from being a critic. I was trained as a rhetorical critic, analyzing other people's communication,

7:55to become much more a practitioner. And it was basically learning the kind of conversations we need to have, and how do we kind of understand each other across difference, and those type of things, and just realizing most of our processes weren't leading to that, right? The incentives were kind of the opposite direction. So I started experimenting with my classes first of, okay, how do we design some things to hopefully spark better conversations? And then the CBD, which I started 20 years ago now, was kind of the next step of that.

8:25Okay, hey, the stuff that works in classrooms, might it work in the community? So we started experimenting. I trained students as facilitators, and we've run over 600 meetings now in the community. We get hired now by the city, by the county, by the school district, community organizations, to design and run events that help people have very different conversations, so we can kind of come together and address our shared problems a little bit more productively. The Center for Public Deliberation, it has a unique way of doing all of this, and we will get into all of that in a moment, especially how it deals with values,

9:01the scientific concept, the psychological phenomenon of values, as a thing that brains generate. And we will deep dive into all of that, and we will deep dive into something I think is incredibly useful to understand called wicked problems, which is the thing that his system really addresses. But before we do that, I want you to know that there are a lot of organizations working on this issue right now. There's a website you can visit, listenfirstproject.org,

9:33listenfirstproject.org, where they've collected more than 500 organizations, many of them formed in the last decade, some in the last five years, all devoted to bringing Americans together across divides in this highly polarized time. And most of them are experimenting with variations of deliberative systems. Just as you must create banking systems or highway systems or airport systems, you must create deliberation systems in which humans can coordinate.

10:07Otherwise, if the problem is very complex and there's lots of uncertainty and there are multiple groups with different value structures, we don't do a great job working on problems together. We need something to help us coordinate. Also, before we get into Carcasson's work, it's important to note the difference here between deliberation, argumentation, and debate, scientifically speaking. Deliberation is a collaborative decision-making process under conditions of uncertainty.

10:42So, for example, just a couple of people trying to decide where to have dinner or a group of people on a road trip trying to decide which road to take, where to stop, when to eat, when to leave, where to park, stuff like that. So, deliberation is a collective cognitive process aimed at figuring out what to do next, what the plan should be. It is future-focused and it involves weighing options, entertaining counterfactuals, forecasting consequences, and, as you will soon learn, taking everyone's values into account.

11:16Just addressing the fact that everyone does have values. Argumentation, on the other hand, is a communicative practice focused on supporting or challenging claims using reasons and evidence and justifications and rationalizations. And debate is a formal, if done well, it is a formal adversarial interaction where two sides of an issue take opposing positions and attempt to persuade the other side or an audience

11:47to agree that their argument is superior to their opponent's. So, deliberation will include some argumentation and some debate, but it isn't those things. It's a framework. It's an architecture, a system, a constructed mechanism designed to help people not yell at each other. And to prevent a joint decision-making process devolving into throwing lamps and lecterns or fists. And, as Martin Carcasson mentioned earlier, we know how to do this, how to do this well,

12:23how to make such structures, how to create such systems. So, he, his organization, and more than 500 organizations like his, are all quite optimistic that we can, with science, evolve our institutions to survive the rapidly changing information ecosystem in which our democracy and democracies across the world are struggling to adapt. Part of my optimism, as hard it is to be optimistic these days,

12:54I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level, and actually we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn't work, right? And this is where I connected with your work a long time ago, with the You Are Not Smart book, as I was doing this deep dive into psychology and brain science, and just, like, trying to understand how our brains work. And how I typically explain my work now is, like, I try to create processes

13:28that are specifically designed to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best of human nature. And there is a lot of good stuff, right? You know, we know how to do this stuff. It's not natural. And, unfortunately, I think the negative aspects of human nature are easier to trigger. I mean, one way you framed it in one of your books is, like, we're preloaded with all these biases, right? So we're preloaded with all these biases, and then we have a lot of, you know, bad faith actors and conflict profiteers, one of the new terms that are taking advantage of those and, you know, purposely kind of doing the opposite of what I try to do,

14:00purposely trying to bring out the worst in us, whether that's to win elections or to draw eyeballs or to, you know, raise money or whatever. So our goal and, you know, part of lots of different organizations doing this is, okay, now how do we try to do the counter movement here? How do we use the social science in a pro-social way and start giving people an alternative to what we're getting at the national level that divides us so much? Yeah, I feel this so much. I mean, I've used all sorts of metaphors over the years. The human body, brain, and, like, visual system

14:31and all of our other sensory modalities, it didn't evolve in an environment that had, like, jets. And so the pilot getting you from point A to point B is having to work with the system they were born with. And we had to build an infrastructure around that to make it possible for us to sit there and fall asleep on the way to, you know, Pittsburgh. That didn't just happen. We had to make it. And we had to contend with all manner of things. Like, what about people have to poop on airplanes? Like, what about pilots could be having a problem in their family right now

15:05and not press all the buttons they need to press? Like, what do you do to create a system that works? I think about it just dealing with traffic going from one place to another and all the interlocking systems on the highway inside a city and going out of a city onto another highway. An enormous amount of work had to be done to make it as safe as it currently is. And I think about some of the stuff you've written. And, like, we're not looking for democracy or civil discourse to be perfect. We're not looking for a utopia.

15:37We're looking for a way to how do we muddle through this in a form that doesn't come crashing down and does the best possible thing it can do. And you have to contend with the brain that comes preloaded with a bunch of weird stuff to do that. I see that all throughout your work, and I really dig that. Yeah, I appreciate that. We've been doing a lot more work lately with the notion of, I like to look at my local community where my work is focused and then try to help other people, you know, build similar things in their community as a deliberative system. So using systems thinking, design thinking, kind of like what you were just talking about, right?

16:09So if I look at, say, the city of Fort Collins as a deliberative system, I'm really looking at, okay, what are the different institutions, organizations, individuals, groups that are elevating the quality of public discourse that are making it easier for us to have these kind of conversations and engagements, and which are the ones that are kind of undermining it? And my job, you know, being the center, the director of the center, yes, we're running events, which are part of the system, but we kind of changed our thinking about 10 years ago, like, no, I want to kind of step back and how do we kind of build the capacity of my community overall?

16:40That led me to working a lot more, say, with the local library, with the local community foundation, with the local newspaper, with, you know, K-12, like, how do we kind of help build the capacity in our community for these different kind of conversations and to show people an alternative? You know, so similar where you're saying, like, let's look at this system, and we've got, unfortunately, so many pieces of our political system, much more nationally, but still all the way down, tend to reward things that reduce the quality of public discussion, right? People don't want these good conversations.

17:12And so that's the exciting thing of how much work there is going on. You know, you look at something like the Listen First Coalition, if you go to that website, you know, there's probably 600, 700 organizations there. I think most of them probably started in the last four or five years of people realizing we have to change things, like we have to have a different kind of conversation. So I work with, you know, Braver Angels, Better Together America, and all these kind of new organizations. A lot of them, like me, focus on bottom-up, right? We have to change.

17:43The more and more we change individual local communities, I think eventually that starts kind of changing broader things. Changing our national system is going to be tough, though some smart people are working on that.

17:59After this commercial break, wicked problems,

Solving Wicked Problems

18:02how to solve them, and how the smart people at the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State are working on how to improve deliberative systems across the United States and across the world. All that, after this.

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18:58So whatever trip you're planning, it's easy to find a new car that fits your adventure. Heading out for a sunny drive? Then a new convertible with very little roof is for you. Considering a fishing trip with your Mini-Me? Then you need a new minivan that's anything but mini. And if you're planning on some stargazing, a new SUV will give you plenty of space. Get paired with our newest fleet yet at Hertz.com. Okay, that thing I said I would talk about in the middle of the show. It's not quite the middle of the show, but here's the thing.

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22:12and lock in your place.

22:16And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the You Are Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney. I am your host and our guest in this episode is Dr. Martine Carcasson. And I should mention, I met Dr. Martine Carcasson earlier this year at a conference at Northwestern University where a group of experts devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements

22:47gathered to compare notes and trade ideas. That conference was held at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement where the directors, Eli Finkel and Norika Talley, are right now building something truly amazing. And it's also where I will be spending a portion of April as a writer in residence doing lectures and teaching freshmen the things that I have learned over the years both on this podcast and writing a book about these topics, including how minds change.

23:19Eli Finkel has already been a guest on the show and so has Josh Green and Stephen Frankenary, all of whom attended that conference, spoke, traded things. And we will talk more about the center and all the projects people presented in upcoming episodes as the other guests join us to talk about what they're up to, what they're doing. And in this episode, that guest is Dr. Martin Carcassonne. And one of the first things I asked him was how did this become his life's work?

23:51Yeah, so it started like I mentioned earlier. You know, I was trained as a rhetorical critic and argumentation scholar, looking at how presidents talked about complex issues, got more and more frustrated with it. One of the big changes, so I was in grad school during the Clinton administration, beginning of his second term, he started a national conversation on race, right? And, you know, so what I was doing back then was how do presidents talk about complex issues? So I was looking at his speeches and so forth and how he was framing that issue. Well, as part of that process, they created these discussion guides.

24:21So they worked with some people I know now in this kind of dialogue and deliberation field, you know, basically creating this how-to, how do you get people together in your local community to have a better conversation about this complex issue? In argumentation, I was trained in debate. I was never on a debate team or a competitive debate, but I taught debate classes and had debates, you know, competitive debates in my class. All of a sudden, I'm introduced to dialogue and deliberation as these two other ways of talking. And I saw that as, oh, no, this is kind of what my students need, right?

24:52Now, part of it, the whole big project I'm working on now was making distinctions between those three words, debate, dialogue, deliberation. And for a while, like a lot of dialogue and deliberation people, I became pretty anti-debate. Like debate is bad and this stuff is good. That's now changed about the last 10 years, realizing, well, no, like bad debate's bad, but good debate can be really good, right? The problem is most of our debate's bad, right? But I was kind of attacking a foil in a sense. You know, so as we're looking now, toxic polarization is one of our huge issues,

25:22but just information disorder, information chaos, just, you know, misinformation, disinformation is also, and, you know, debate done well inherently elevates good arguments and exposes bad argument, right? So we need elements of debate. So we need all three. But that just kind of started this process of me learning these new tools that people were designing and that also led me to like conflict resolution world and other kind of mediation and so forth, like realizing we need better ways of how to talk to each other.

25:52Through all that too, I started, my favorite class as an undergrad was a persuasion class, which is much more of a social science class. When I got to CSU, they're asking me, what are the classes you want to teach? And I'm like, oh, I'd love to teach the persuasion class. And I started teaching that and I used Calendini's book, Influence. I don't know if you're familiar with that. That was not the first book that really kind of social psychology basically makes the argument that we've already been talking about that human nature has these quirks, right? And then these marketers take advantage of those quirks to get you to do things, right?

26:23And that really started that process of me melding together this dialogue and deliberation world with a social psychology of like, okay, so bad faith actors are taking advantage of these quirks of human nature. How do I do the opposite? Which for me is a two-step process. One is doing things that doesn't trigger the bad stuff, right? But then also, and this is the, for the last year with, you know, national craziness going on, I've spent a lot more time focusing on what are the positive aspects of human nature we can trigger

26:53rather than just focusing on avoiding the negative, which is much better for your mental health, right? But there is a lot of good stuff, I think, in the How You Change Minds book you mentioned this, like, the fact that we're able to change our minds is one of our superpowers. Right, yeah. Like, now it's hard to change our minds and we're resistant to changing our minds, right? But once you figure that out, so that's where a lot of my work, I think humans are incredibly creative problem solvers when put in a good situation. Right.

27:23Our political system doesn't put us in good situations, right? So how do we create different situations so we can tap into that? If you watch an episode of Mad Men and you marvel at how great Don Draper is at something, it's not like he went to school for it. It was a bunch of A-B testing in a marketplace that rewarded doing things that got you money and then you just keep going in the direction of things that work out and you start to develop best practices. That's true across the board in any information economy, right? And that's, we're getting to,

27:54we had social media just long enough that people who have A-B tested it pointedly so are starting to get the results they were looking for. Whether they have any like conscious understanding or could even articulate what it is that they're doing well, they're starting to do it well in several different directions. If you've been on autopilot, your democracy is like, pull up, pull up, pull up right now. I don't know why I have so many pilot metaphors, but that seems to be what's happening. So how does

28:31Carcasson approach this problem? How does his team at Colorado State, how do they get together and create deliberation facilitation systems? How do they work?

Values and Deliberation

28:43Well, to answer that, we must first, briefly, attempt to define what is a value. In the collection of psychological phenomena that come to the foreground when we have difficult conversations, things like beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on, what separates a value from those other things? What makes a value unique? In short, in terms of something that our brain generates,

29:14what is a value? So if you create a list of common values, you'll notice right away that they are difficult to define. That is, if you were to ask 50 people to define something like freedom, you might just get 50 different answers. Freedom, justice, equality, progress, tradition, diversity, personal responsibility,

29:45community, all of these in a philosophical sense are abstractions. That is, they're not concretes. You can't hold them in your hand like an apple. You can't put them under glass like a fossil. You can't pin them to a board like a butterfly. Cognitively, what does that mean? In the brain, what is an abstraction? Well, from a cognitive linguistics perspective, an abstraction like, say, the word intelligence,

30:16it has no platonic essence, no final definition. In language, abstractions are merely functional labels for the sake of coordination. And those labels can create a sort of illusory stability when, in fact, the concept, the category, is, in the brain, a network of associations. And because it's a network of associations, there's a fuzzy border to it. You can go just a little bit outside of it and you're still

30:46kind of talking about it. You can find examples that seem more like the abstraction, some that seem less, but in different contexts, in different situations, that can change. So even if you think about one particular abstraction a whole lot, it's just a habit of interpretation. The brain is noticing a recurring relational pattern. If you want to get super brain science nerdy about it, abstractions are learned, dynamically activated schema that allow

31:17the brain to group non-identical but kind of similar sensory, motor, and social experiences into buckets. Categorical neurological buckets. Patterns of activation. And they form sort of an equivalency which we use for the purposes of communication, coordination, and when alone, prediction, inference, and action. So the sun is a concrete object. A sunrise is a concrete experience. But when we share through

31:48language how beautiful and awe-inspiring a sunrise can be, beauty, awe, and inspiration are abstractions. And it just so happens values tend to be pretty abstract. So with that in mind, what is a value? Well, when scientists who study the brain and social systems, when they talk about values, they're referring to stable, socially learned preference structures.

32:20And these preference structures guide judgment, attention, emotion, and behavior across contexts. You notice there's a lot of abstractions in that previous statement. That's just how this all works. Language, it's weird, it's messy. So, yeah, preference structures. These are tied to what we consider good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. These particular preference structures are about what is more important and what is less important when it comes to how we spend time, money,

32:51resources, how we spend that which is expendable. For instance, where should our tax dollars go? To education or to aircraft carriers? That's a value judgment. You can imagine in a much earlier environment around a campfire near a cave, we would have similar discussions about what is more important or at least similar intuitions about where we should be spending our time, where should we be spending our effort? And we might disagree, but we'd probably group up in a way

33:21that allowed us to cooperate and coordinate. There are two things, though, that make values truly unique. one is that they're usually deep. Psychologically speaking, they're usually unarticulated. They motivate our behaviors and drive our emotional reactions and responses, but we might not be consciously aware of them, or at least not aware of how important they are to us, or not aware of how we're prioritizing them. And that's the other thing that makes them unique. The research

33:51suggests that we all tend to share most of the same values. It's sort of a collection of values that we all agree upon are important for human beings doing stuff. We all care about tradition and progress, security, and freedom. It's just that tradition versus progress, security versus freedom. As individuals, we rank values like that differently. We consider some higher than others. And the

34:22differences in how we rank them can create friction when attempting to solve a shared problem or achieve a shared goal. But here's the thing. To solve the shared problem of how to better solve shared problems, humans have had to create all manner of institutions and systems for coordination and deliberation. Science, for example, is one of these systems. But when it comes to wicked problems, systems that are great

34:53at sorting out facts and producing empirical data can get bogged down by issues that are inherently value-laden. And that's why we need systems like the one created by the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. Here's Dr. Martin Carcasson to explain. In argumentation, you know, you look at how people are making claims. Like an argument is I'm trying to convince you of something, right? So I'm making a claim which I'm trying to convince you of and I attach that to some sort of evidence, right? Some reasons,

35:24sometimes that's hard evidence and facts and sometimes that's other reasons. So argumentation is try to kind of understand how arguments work and kind of put it in as pieces. I use the Toolman model for that that some people might know about. But one big distinction that they make which I think is we really need to think more in our world about is distinctions between a factual claim, a value claim, and a policy claim. So a factual claim is a claim about reality, right? I'm saying something that at some level of factual claim, you should be

35:54able to check it. There's a famous kind of thing in journalism education, like if one side's telling you it's raining and the other side's telling you it's not raining, the job of the journalist isn't to report, oh, there's different perspectives, is to go outside and see if it's effing raining, right? So factual claims, if I'm a reporter, if I'm a conflict resolution person, and two sides are saying something that's factual but have different perspectives, my job is to seek, hey, can I go figure out which one's right? So that's this whole world. Instead of making a distinction between fact and opinion, I think fact value and

36:24policy is much more helpful. So that's facts. It's something real you can check and somehow some of those are easy, some of them are much more complex because a lot of causal arguments like wearing a mask will reduce the spread of COVID, that's a factual claim but a lot harder. Anytime you get into cause and effect, you have multiple variables and a value claim is a claim that something is good or bad or favorable or unfavorable. It's a reason why you're making an evaluation of something. And that's where if there's a value conflict,

36:55there isn't an outside source I can go to resolve it. Particularly if we believe we're a diverse society that believes in democracy, believes in freedom, and believes in pluralism. The reality of living in 21st century democracy is we're dealing with lots of different values and lots of different people rank those values differently and then the problems we face inherently involve multiple of these values. It's just really messy. Our brains don't like messy. Our brains don't like nuance. We like simple stories.

37:27So the way we talk about values is huge because when we talk about values badly, it's one of the biggest sources of the false polarization and division and all this kind of stuff. When we learn how to talk about values better, all of a sudden it becomes this huge mechanism to shift from these really bad conversations to actually tapping into the good parts of human nature like creative problem solvers. And that's the heart of this work. Our basic model is if I'm focusing on national security and you disagree with me, I'm

37:58just thinking they don't care about security. We love to define the people we disagree with by what they're against. Monica Guzman makes this a great point in her TED talk about curiosity will save us. That's our default on our brain is we've got the good values and the people we disagree with reject those good