Finding Higher Common Ground on Values
© 2005 by Corinne McLaughlin

    People care deeply about moral values.  Values shape our vision of a preferred future. The question of the hour, however, is:  Which moral values should be promoted by government and public schools?  Is there any consensus on this question?  And if there’s a consensus on values, how can they be applied to specific political issues?

     Actually there is a great deal of evidence for consensus on values world-wide: The Institute for Global Ethics in Maine, founded by Rushmore Kidder, researched values around the world and found there are five core values that all societies agree on: love/compassion; truth/honesty; fairness/tolerance; responsibility/accountability; and respect for life.

    Surprisingly, schools in such diverse area as liberal Berkeley, CA and conservative Kansas City, MO have found they can agree on common values to be taught in their schools when they dialogue together in a professionally facilitated process. The Partnership for Character Education, based in Washington, D.C., has had a great deal of success bringing together principals, students, teachers, parents, and community members to explore common ground on values.

    At the 1992 Parliament of the Worlds’ Religions, hundreds of representatives from most of the major religions built a consensus around key values they had in common:  non-violence, tolerance, truthfulness, respect for life, equal rights, solidarity, a just economic order, and partnership between men and women.

    When we look for the common threads in moral values, we find there is actually more agreement than differences among a wide variety of people in the U.S.  For example, Character Counts, a coalition of the largest and most influential, educational and youth organizations, such as YMCA, 4-H Clubs, the National Educational Association and the American Federation of Teachers, found a consensus on core values to be taught in the public schools: trustworthiness, respect, caring, fairness, responsibility, and citizenship.

      The consensus building process is often called a “multi-stakeholder dialogue”—a dialogue among many people who have a stake in the outcome. Finding higher common ground among participants through dialogue and deep listening, where everyone is heard and real concerns are shared, can cause dramatic breakthroughs, even among groups with very diverse views.

    Even in intractable conflicts around specific policy issues, such as abortion, common ground can be found using a professionally facilitated process.  Both Search for Common Ground in Washington D.C., and Public Conversations Project in Boston, for example, have found common ground in dialogues with pro-life and pro-choice opponents on this issue.  Both sides found that instead of arguing about when the fetus in the womb became life, they could expand the time frame of their discussion and focus instead on the cause of pregnancy.  Both sides found common ground on preventing unwanted pregnancies, and they have created a joint campaign to reduce teen pregnancies.  Both sides also wanted to make adoption more easily available.

    Public Conversations Project has also hosted a series of dialogues between an inner-city Islamic mosque and a suburban Jewish synagogue and found surprising commonalities.  Search for Common Ground convened many dialogues with a broadly diverse spectrum of religious and political leaders on the highly divisive faith-based social services issue. They came up with 29 consensus recommendations, many of which were incorporated into governmental initiatives. 

    Another pioneer in finding common ground, The Institute for Multi Track Diplomacy in Washington, D.C. (on whose board I served for several years), works in many conflict-ridden areas and has found similar results through multi-stakeholder dialogues among diverse adversaries. When there is professional facilitation that brings together all sides in a conflict, creating a safe space where people really listen to each other, opponents can hear each other’s pain and understand their values and point of view.  This often leads to amazing breakthroughs in seemingly intractable conflicts.

     For over 60 years, MRA (Moral Re-Armament), a spiritually based organization with offices all over the world, has helped resolve conflicts in many countries around the world using a deep listening and dialoguing process.  Its recent “Hope in the Cities” initiatives have helped promote racial reconciliation in Richmond, VA, Hartford, CT, and Portland, OR through public dialogues to find common ground.

   The listening process is transformational. It tends to draw people out, as a safe space has been created for deeper reflection on an issue.  Some people would call this creating a “sacred space”. Each participant learns to respect other people’s perspectives even if they’re totally different from his own.  Others may have had different life experiences, a different journey that had led them to the opinions they have.  When there are many participants in a dialogue with many diverse values and perspectives on an issue, each person can then see more of the big picture, and so get closer to the full truth about an issue.

    Several years ago I coordinated a national Task Force on Sustainable Communities for The President’s Council on Sustainability, which brought together members of President Clinton’s cabinet as well as CEOs of major corporations and national environmental organizations to build a consensus among adversaries on environmental and economic issues. Several members of this Council actually said that the consensus-building process transformed their lives. It was powerful for them because they had never sat down with their adversaries for an extended period and dialogued in this way before. When they got to know their opponents as human beings, underneath their differences, they began to understand each other better.  What they found was that both sides essentially wanted the same thing: to build healthy communities that were economically viable and environmentally sustainable for future generations.  This motivated them to find innovative approaches to achieve these common goals.

    For example, they recommended policy incentives such as trading pollution credits or renting products (such as carpets) rather than selling them, so that the component parts could be returned to the manufacturer and totally recycled.  They focused on creating tax and other incentives to promote “smart growth” that protects the environment (which they call “the green infrastructure”) and eliminating disincentives to creating healthier communities.

    The Center for Visionary Leadership, which I co-founded with Gordon Davidson, ran a series of year-long citizen dialogues in Washington, D.C. on racial healing, where we invited both blacks and whites to dialogue with each other.  We asked people to share their stories and their life experiences, which were often very painful.  People were often carrying much anger and fear.  But in these dialogues, both sides learned a great deal from each other, and found that we actually had many values in common, such as the need for love and understanding and the need to be treated fairly and respectfully.

     The staff of our Center worked on a year long project for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, researching the key values and principles behind their most successful programs to help housing residents become economically self-reliant and to prevent violence and drug abuse (see our guidebook for H.U.D. called The Spirit of Success:  A Guidebook to Best Practices ). In interviews with hundreds of people at housing developments around the country, we found that these projects had key values in common: partnership, collaboration, inspiration, empowerment, and whole systems approaches. In each program we researched, it was the values-based side of it that created its effectiveness.  A firm basis in values gave people something more important than just financial incentives to make the needed changes in their lives. 

     In our consulting and training work for business, government and non-profit organizations at our Center we focus on the underlying values held by our clients and by their organizations. We ask people, “What’s important to you and why?  What values or principles do you want to steer your life or your organization by?  What is the inner compass or direction that is key for you?”

     We help people look at their life journey and the key turning points in their life that have related to leadership and values. We utilize effective techniques we’ve developed to help them prioritize their values and make real commitments to them.  Participants get very clear about what’s their number one value, what’s next most important, and so on.  They then create a clear vision statement for themselves or their organization based on their values, and develop strategies for accomplishing their mission.

     In 1998 we hosted the first Spirituality at Work conference ever held in Washington, D.C. with CEOs of major companies and nationally known authors who care about the “double bottom line”—profit and values. We asked business people, “Is money the only thing that makes you feel happy and fulfilled or do you feel greater satisfaction when you take care of your people, your community and the environment?”

     Many speakers at the conference from business and government spoke about the need to create a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in their work.  They spoke of their need to bring their whole selves to work, body, mind AND spirit, by living their values at work.  Each defined spirituality in complimentary ways:  Some spoke about spiritual values as the importance of doing high quality, honest work with a lot of integrity.  Others valued how they treat their workers, or how they protect the environment or volunteer in their community.  Some discussed meditation, prayer and spiritual study groups in their workplace. The conference was very intriguing to the major media —we were interviewed by many newspapers and TV shows. It was very exciting and inspiring to hear people’s personal journey, how they applied their values at work, and the emerging consensus around spiritual values in the workplace.

     In April 2000, we organized a leading edge conference in Washington on Values and Spirituality in Governance, with several congressmen, best-selling authors, and activists from around the country who presented values-based solutions to social problems ass well as techniques such as conflict transformation for creating a new politics. We called it “Re-Igniting the Spirit of America” because we can renew our democracy if we can build a consensus around our values, and more importantly, embody them. 

   A diverse group of spiritually-oriented political leaders, authors and activists from around the country met together several times over a two year period leading up to the conference and we built a consensus on how our moral values might be translated into politics:

 1) Empowerment: supporting citizens in connecting with their purpose and passion and providing opportunities to develop their full capacities to participate in society.

 2) Respect and Compassion: recognizing the innate value of all people, appreciating diversity, and providing for those who truly cannot support themselves.

 3) Collaboration: promoting communication, cooperation and community among similar and diverse groups.

 4) Equity: providing equal opportunities for education, meaningful work and entrepreneurship.

 5) Common Ground: promoting non-violence and dialogue to build consensus on mutually beneficial solutions to divisive issues.

 6) Whole Systems Thinking: focusing on emerging opportunities and the interconnection of all aspects of an issue.

 7) Stewardship: recognizing that humans are an interdependent part of the web of life and that we have a responsibility to protect the environment and ecological diversity.

 8) Positive Solutions: promoting best practices that are just and sustainable— effective and proven solutions to social, economic and political problems

 9) Balancing Rights with Responsibilities:  protecting individual rights, as well as encouraging a sense of responsibility to give back to society.

10) Political Courage and Honesty:  encouraging elected officials to embody their values and speak their conscience.

    Most spiritual traditions respect the grain of truth on each side of a conflict and promote healing, reconciliation and forgiveness. The training of initiates in ancient mystery schools included training in paradoxical thinking--holding two opposite ideas at the same time.  The Taoists teach about yin and yang--the polar opposites—that are held in a dynamic balance. The Buddhists teach about the Noble Middle Path between the pairs of opposites. In the Jewish Kabbalah, The Tree of Life, the middle pillar shows the path of balance between the opposites.

    A common mission and goal can be especially helpful in transcending different lifestyles, as volunteers who recently helped victims of Hurricane Katrina learned. The media reported that traditional, middle class Methodists from Kentucky worked hand in hand with free-spirited, tattooed hippies from the Rainbow Family to set up a camp in Waveland, Mississippi to serve food and medicine. The barriers between people come down more easily when there is open-hearted serving.  They find appreciation for  common values such as compassion, hard work, and flexibility.

    As Einstein said, we can’t solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created the problem. We have to find higher common ground. Thomas Jefferson noted that,  “Law and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”  If we are to keep evolving as a society, our institutions need to reflect the changes in our consciousness and a new consensus in our values.  Otherwise our institutions will become rigid and crystallized, holding back the evolving life within them.  If we are willing to dialogue with others with different views, openly searching together for common ground, we can forge a new consensus in areas where there now seems so much conflict, and so create a better future for us all.