Pattern #56

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Multiple Perspective View Card

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Multiple Perspective View

Multiple Perspective View Symbol - Anne Deavere Smith

Credit: Broadway.com

Pattern Heart

Every conflict or issue has at least two self-legitimizing sides — and usually more. Their stories contain energies and information vital to a healthy shared future. So compassionately hear — and make visible in a compelling manner — the spectrum of perspectives, both to evoke empathy and to help everyone see what needs to be taken into account for truly wise solutions.

Some related patterns:   6 Capacitance   48 Integrity and Authenticity
63 Power of Listening   80 Story   85 Transpartisan Inquiry   88 Using Diversity and Disturbance Creatively   92 Whole System in the Conversation

  • Who is being – or will be – affected by what we’re doing? What’s it like for them?
  • In what ways are all the perspectives being shared here part of a larger picture that we’d be wise to take into account?
  • What is it like to step into someone else’s shoes and tell their story in the first person as if it were your own?
  • How can it help us as facilitators – or just as friendly listeners – to be able to really experience what it’s like to be the person who’s talking, and to let them know? And to do that with each person, even people with totally different views?
  • Is it possible to experience what someone thinks and feels and why without agreeing with them? If yes, what value might that have for them and for us?
  • In a conflicted community or society, what might happen if we could use mass media or performance to clearly reveal to everyone what it’s like to be everyone involved in the conflict?

Multiple Perspective View – going deeper …

This is an edited version of the video on this page.

This pattern was inspired by Anna Deavere Smith, an actor who did two one-woman shows about riots in the United States. One was about the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King trials which generated a violent release of pent-up frustrations in poor black communities. The other one covered the Crown Heights, New York riots between blacks and Jews. Smith interviewed diverse players from each of these riots and then, in her shows, became them. She actually said the words that they said in the interviews. She would do a 5-10 minute skit talking each person’s words while she was dressed up and acting like that person. She is a light-skinned black woman, so she can play all these different people: she could be white, she could be black, she could be Hispanic or Asian. All these different kinds of people she could easily be.

In each of her performances you end up watching 15-20 totally different perspectives of people who were doing violent acts, people who were justifying or trying to manage them, or people who were scared or impacted by them. From all these different sides – public officials, community organizers, cops, rioting youth… all these different people – you always see her face in theirs. I see that fact as a unifying aspect: here’s the human being – all these people are human beings and each have their perspectives. When you’re in the middle of each perspective, it totally makes sense, but then there is the next one and those two stories do not go together.  The whole riot is so much bigger than the sum of its parts.

So that phenomenon led to my choice of the phrase “self-legitimizing”. There’s a self-legitimizing dynamic that goes on when we’re in a conflict and are dealing with an issue we have strong opinions about. There is a psychological phrase for this called “confirmation bias”. We hear and seek out the evidence that will support our view and disregard, resist, or delegitimize perspectives that don’t fit our view.

Another psychological reality that’s relevant here is that certainty is an emotion; it is independently variable from the actual facts of the matter. We can feel certain about something that is untrue and we can feel very unsure about something that is quite true. This leads to a sense that “a viewpoint is just a viewpoint”. It is not a fact; it is a way of looking at things because of the way we been raised, the way we have come to believe, or the different experiences we’ve had. These things lead us to see things in a particular way. In the face of conflict or even just in the ordinary everyday flow of conversations and engagements, we live in our own world but we bump up against other people’s perspectives that are different from ours.

What multiple viewpoint drama does – what “multiperspectivity” does, generally – is kind of legitimize how different people think. It helps you be compassionate and willing to consider what somebody else thinks and feels or has as stories of their experience that are radically different from yours. You come to be able to relate to them in one way or another which opens the door towards exploring what might be real or satisfying or desirable to you both.

Multiple viewpoint drama is an artistic form that lays the groundwork for people to be able to relate to each other and work together. So I say every conflict or issue has at least two self-legitimizing sides and usually more. But notice how when we think in terms of “both sides”, it functions as a thought-terminating cliché. Because there are always more than two sides even when there’s only two people in the argument! There are always other sides that are floating around the edges. So the more of these you can identify and present, the more real and truly complex and reflective the situation becomes.

But each person’s story – their side, their sense of things, their viewpoint – contains information and perspectives which we all need to access in order to understand what’s going on in this situation. There’s also energy there, and this energy is also information. The fact that somebody is feeling very strongly about some aspect of the situation is itself part of the situation and needs to be taken into account and addressed and worked with. That strong feeling may also have energy that we can use to change the situation in positive ways. This energy may be pushing in a direction we want to go, or it could be energy that is in the way of what’s needed. Either way, we need to address it in an intelligent and wise manner because it is part of the picture. So getting their stories, getting their viewpoints and perspectives is really important.

Looking at multiple viewpoint drama, the underlying challenge is to present all these different perspectives compassionately, thinking, “this is something that is worthy of consideration. This is not just stupid or dismissible. This is something that is real, it’s part of what’s going on. So let’s get into it and feel our way together.” It is compassionate and compelling. It’s like, “Let’s get the energy. Let’s come to a point where we can see it as filled with as much energy and importance as the person for whom it is natural to feel and think that way.” So we want such a compassionate compelling presentation for all the different perspectives that are present so that we – whoever we are who are involved in the situation or who are trying to deal with it, or even the whole population – whoever is involved – can actually see what needs to be taken into account for long-term broad benefit (which is our working definition of wisdom here).

Another approach that is very different but is actually closely related is the multi-perspective consciousness of facilitators who take on the worldview of diverse people speaking in their facilitated groups in order to help them be heard and feel heard.  Although this kind of hearing is not a formal drama, there is definitely a dramatic aspect to it.  And the more public the drama, the more powerful the impact on everyone involved.

So if we want to truly have wise solutions we need to feel into these different perspectives, and multiple viewpoint drama offers one way of doing that.

Video Introduction (20 min)

Examples and Resources

As I said, Anna Deavere Smith has a highly developed and totally fact-based way of doing this because she bases her performances on interviews she did with real people involved in real situations.

Arnold Mindell has a transformational group therapeutic activity called Process World Work or Deep Democracy. He was a quantum field physicist who became a Jungian psychologist. He thinks in terms of fields of energy and the archetypal voices in such fields. So he deals with large social issues like racism. In the field of racism there are voices of oppression, voices of withdrawal, voices of attack or judgment, all these voices are out there and he doesn’t care from whom those voices come. He just wants those voices to come up, show up, and interact with each other. By that design he is calling forth many very diverse viewpoints into the room. Although it is not dramatized – it is not people acting or role-playing like Anna Deavere Smith does – he’s bringing out actual people and the ways they feel into a shared space to talk together.  But sometimes he does something that at least looks like role-playing:  After hearing what someone says he will trade places with them and speak their perspective (usually quite brilliantly) while they watch from where he stood – exercising both his and their multiperspectivity.

Playback Theater is a practice of hearing somebody’s story or watching some activity, and then acting as an improvisational mirror to that person or those people who were involved in the situation. Playback theater actors creatively go through the kind motions and interactions which are appropriate for the particular story they’ve been presented with. Somebody tells the story of what happened to them, some tragic event in their life, like the mother did this, the father did that, that guy came in and did this. Then the playback theater people take that story and act it out in front of the person and everybody else in their audience. Often significant shifts occur in the person’s perspective as they experience from the outside the different voices in the situation being acted out. Playback theater could be applied to political conflicts or public issues, too. I don’t know whether it has been done or not, but the playback model seems to be very suitable for those things, too.

Dynamic Facilitation applies multiperspectivity in real time by having people speak and giving them adequate space to be fully heard. Everybody involved in the situation is given the space to really say their sense of the truth and their perspective and to be respected and heard for that perspective. That’s part of the facilitation technique in Dynamic Facilitation, where the facilitator becomes the multiperspectival “designated listener” and seeks to experience and reflect back each speaker’s full viewpoint so they feel fully heard and everyone in the group gets what they’re saying at a deeper level.

In 1991 Maclean’s magazine in Canada chose a dozen people for their differences and in a very public way had them engage in conversation with each other. Their 3-day event was designed to see if these folks could come up with a shared vision for Canada during a time when it was a very divided country. Because it was so public – being covered fulltime by both a national magazine and a public affairs TV documentary – in a sense it was like Anna Deavere Smith’s work.  It takes these very different people and shows you how this person believes this, this person believes that, this other person believes this other thing – and what happened when they all got together to seek common ground. In effect, Maclean’s was saying to their Canadian audience: “These are strong willed vocal representatives of some very different perspectives, and we are going to put them together and have them talk and you are going to watch them and see how they interact – see if it goes well, see if it doesn’t, see what they come up with.” All this is a multiple viewpoint drama that is real and in real time. This is not being acted out or a play. The whole initiative and its results are quite remarkable.

And of course certain documentaries focus on multiperspectivity. This style of documentary is to document this person’s perspective and that person’s perspective and so on. That is very good and it’s much easier to do than having a dramatic artist like Anna Deavere Smith do it. I notice when the face of Anna Deavere Smith is always in the “middle”, there is something humanizing about that, as opposed to seeing the very different actual people’s very different faces. Viewing the real people, you can kind of keep them separate, you don’t have the same subliminal linkage of all these people as being all human beings with legitimate struggling perspectives. But the documentaries are extremely valuable, anyway.

And there are also fictional representations of that kind of thing. The director Kurosawa is very famous for a movie called Rashomon which presents a number of different people who all have a different perspective on an instance of rape. And within the movie he has all of them speaking about what they each saw or heard or believed happened. Those different perspectives don’t really quite fit together. So there is a funny way in which you get the same feeling from watching Rashomon as you get when you’re watching Anna Deavere Smith.

An interesting twist on all this is research that’s been done recently on eyewitnesses:  People were shown a movie of the same situation. Then they were asked after some other activities to describe what it was they saw in the movie. Different people described it differently even though they had all watched the same movie.  What does this tell us about the descriptions people give who were across the street from each other when a real life incident happened? This finding is shaking up our whole sense of what we thought was the most dependable kind of evidence we could have in a trial. Eyewitnesses were there, they saw it! But the fact is that they experienced different things and that they remember different things.  So what do we do with that?

There is a way in which people witnessing the same situation but having different experiences is very problematic for us.  And there is a way in which that it can be valuable. There is the story of the blind men and the elephant: These several blind men are all feeling the same elephant but having different experiences.  The one feeling the elephant’s ear thinks the elephant is a giant plant with big leaves.  Another is feeling a leg and claiming the elephant is actually like a tree.  Another is feeling the elephant’s trunk and saying that it feels like a snake. They are all creating their independent images of what this elephant is but none of them are seeing the whole elephnat. But if they got together and talked, they might be able to come up with a model of what the whole elephant looks like. That’s not part of the fable, but it’s part of the implications of this phenomenon.  We should take the opportunity to help people with different perspectives build larger, deeper understandings out of their diverse pieces of the puzzle.

A group called National Issues Forums runs one of America’s largest citizen deliberative activities. They have citizens across the country deliberate for an evening or afternoon about some public issue. The citizen deliberators are given briefing materials in written and/or video form which briefly describe 3 to 5 perspectives on the issue they are deliberating. Each perspective is presented to embody the legitimacy of its argumentation. The briefing materials acknowledge that there are people who hold those perspectives and who would be arguing in those ways. Advocates of each perspective would say, “This is what makes sense, and this is why it makes sense, and here’s all the evidence I am trying to convince you with.“ And the materials do that for all the other perspectives as well. So people who are deliberating get to enter into the worldviews of several different people before they even start talking about what’s involved with this issue. So that is a more analytical form of multiperspectivity. NIF is analyzing an issue and creating these 3 to 5 perspectives that together seek to represent the conversation that is happening around this issue in the larger society, so that the deliberators can be brought up to speed even before they start their deliberations. They sense what’s going on in this conflict and then start to explore together what they think.  The process of creating those diverse arguments is called “framing an issue for deliberation”.

Lastly I want to add to these examples the many novels and short stories that serve our multiperspective awareness. One of the powers of fiction, both written and audiovisual, is to help us climb into the world of other people or situations with which we are unfamiliar. In really high quality novels, you climb into somebody’s head and into their life experience in such a way you think, “Oh, that’s different from my way of looking things! That’s different from what I’ve lived through, but I get it! I really get why a person like that thinks, feels and acts that way.“

There is another practice called The Council of All Beings created by Joanna Macy and John Seed. Since this is an effort to bring in the viewpoints of other species, you have people in the Council who are there to speak for certain trees, certain animals, certain plants, certain landscapes or mountains, and so on. The participants that are there try and speak for the perspectives and issues of those entities who usually can’t participate in society’s other councils. It’s somewhat analogous to some of the things that happen in some native cultures who give voice to “all our relations” – all the entities and forces of life.

Both within specific efforts to deliberate on a particular issue on behalf of the larger society, and in general in the larger society, all these approaches can help people be able to see more clearly the multiple viewpoints that make up any given situation and that make it “a situation”. That’s their gift.  And because we want to have a wiser democracy, we want to have people who can see into that as part of the complexity of whatever it is they’re addressing so that they can take that into account and generate the kinds of benefits that would satisfy most or all of those people involved, and all the lifeforms existing today and in the future.