Hi all,

This conversation comes in three parts. I've been thinking a lot about:

It starts when we're young. We get trained to misunderstand each other.

I love when my teenage daughter tells me about her day (IYKYK).
This made my sudden rage a surprise to us both.

Her science class is studying climate. The assignment:

The class then got busy assembling their facts. For conversation C, they agreed that "educating others about climate change and their responsibilities" was one of the best things they could do.

I nearly succumbed to the white-hot impulse to be that parent, lashing out to "educate" this teacher about his responsibilities. Not because I'm a denier, but because the exercise assumed only one conversational path.

"Incorrect" statements must be corrected.
We must prepare our children to debate and defend right thinking.

Which leads to:

And around we go.

You may notice that all parties fully engage. They're included, they're in it, they're using their voice and sharing their thoughts! We can overcome all the bias and personality hurdles, and still find ourselves stuck in an unproductive doom loop.

Adversarial, yes, and I know many of you don't like conflict. And yet, these loops are more comfortable than the alternative.
They reaffirm our identity and invite the applause that drenches us in dopamine. Ooooh, 500 likes for that zinger!

And they shut down true curiosity, understanding, and the imperative to change.

As long as we stay stuck in these loops, there is no space for the productive conversations we could be having instead.

Lucky for me, my daughter knows better. She's heard my stories about helping people find better conversations. She said:

We rarely find the most useful path forward by bludgeoning each other with our superior opinions. The climate change debate is a great example of how closed conversational loops block progress.

I facilitated several conversations between people with opposing views about climate change, including some who see it as a positive thing. (Plants ❤️ carbon!) They all come armed with facts about historical rates of change, atmospheric carbon, solar activity, and the archaeological insights from eras gone by.

And as long as we debate which facts to trust or how to interpret all this data, we never get to the more important conversation.

What should we do?
We. Not they.
Do. Not think.

Now we can get curious.

For example, when we talk about local energy policy and the implications of voting to increase taxes on diesel, we learn that no one is in love with diesel fuel, but they do care deeply about whether farmers can afford to run their tractors and deliver crops to market without it.

As long as we lounge around in the debate about the origins of climate change, we never get to discover how to run farms on affordable, clean energy.

So how do we get unstuck?
In theory, we have many strategies for shifting our conversations.
In practice, most of these rely on an exceptionally skilled conversational steward.

The approach we used to unstick these climate conversations (and many others) requires a bit of prep, but doesn't rely so heavily on gifted individuals.

We use 5D thinking to make it easier to literally see missing conversations.
5D thinking is a way to visualize different perspectives on a topic. We ask everyone to place their ideas on a shared visual map, positioning them along dimensions like scope (big picture vs. concrete details), stakeholder (whose perspective?), and time horizon. When you can see where everyone's thinking lands in space, and how you place your ideas differently than I do, the gaps become obvious.

With these maps in front of us, we could see three common traps that catch us in these doom loops

People were saying the same words, but assigning them different meanings. This made it impossible to really get what the others were saying.

Example: The End of the World! 😱
Does this mean the whole planet and all life on it will crumble to space dust?
Or that your world—your current way of life—will go away?

When two people compared where they placed global impacts on a timeline, and the kinds of impacts they worried about, they could see that they were arguing about totally different things. No wonder the facts didn't line up!

Before we mapped out the conversation, this mismatch triggered a debate in which both sides were outraged by the other's ignorance. They demanded: What scientific evidence do you have to back up your claims?

Once they understood each other's perspective, they realized that they largely agreed. The world (and probably humanity) will survive climate change in the next 100+ years. But for many, it's the end of the world as they know it, and they're not feeling fine about that.

With this clarity, the conversation became:
What is the best way to support people whose lives will be significantly disrupted in the next few decades due to climate change?

There are a few really excellent things about this second conversation:

Two things change after these conversations.
First, people change how they react when encountering opposing views going forward. They enter the next conversation less defensive and more curious.

Second, they seek new ways they can take action.

And that's the real opportunity our loops regularly miss.

Since my examples here start with heated debates, this may seem like an odd claim.

But let's revisit that science class assignment and the resulting loops.

a) Climate change isn't real.

This conversation focuses on comparing climate records over time. Is our climate different today than it was 50 years ago? Is this difference normal variation or an abnormal trend?

The other two loops follow the same pattern. Debates about global patterns in the past and potential futures.

And wow, isn't that a load of chickenshit?

As long as we argue the history and the future and all the big global what ifs, no one is looking at what we're doing right here, right now.

We avoid agency.

In our climate conversations, when they turned their attention to areas of agency, the beach dwellers shared experiments with sea walls, raising buildings, and how they're establishing a cultural center for the many islanders who relocated to the city.

The ranchers talked about converting from propane to solar, adding windmills, and adopting no-till practices that sequester carbon. They're seeking acknowledgement and tax credit for what they're already doing to reduce carbon emissions, which could help offset higher fuel prices while we wait for the spread of electric tractors.

Another person shared how their company is converting their packaging to eliminate plastic (they use packing material made of mushrooms now!) and the results from their annual ecochallenge competitions.

And, they talked about how our state's current regulatory and tax environment makes most of this harder.

They recognized what they were doing, what they could do, and the need for institutional change.

I'm using climate examples here because I can speak publicly about these experiences (see this related video).

I'm writing about this now, though, because you can see the same patterns in our conversations about AI.

Zoe Scaman wrote about the Six Loops she's hearing from leaders in conferences and boardrooms, nicely illustrating the third trap.

In Part 2, we'll map Ms. Scaman's observations and see which conversations we may be missing. Stay tuned!

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