Event: Zoom Knowledge Café: We Are Not Enemies, but Friends I 18th September 2020, 14:00 to 17:00 (London time)

Title: Zoom Knowledge Café: We are not enemies, but friends

Date: Friday 18th September 2020

Time: 14:00 to 17:00 BST (London time) [your time zone]

Location: Online Zoom Event

Price: GBP: 24.00

Registration: Eventbrite

Introduction

This event is the eighth in a series of online Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership run on the Zoom video conferencing platform.

Each Café is themed on material from my online blook on Conversational Leadership. The Cafés are standalone, and you can take part without having participated in an earlier event in the series.

Before each Café, I will ask you to do a little homework and read one or more posts in my blook relating to the theme.

If you are not familiar with the Knowledge Café style, this event is participatory. It is  NOT a webinar.

WE ARE NOT ENEMIES BUT FRIENDS

For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential.

Credit: Daniel Kahneman

This Knowledge Café is in two parts with a short break separating each segment.

In the first part, I will talk about what I consider to be one of the most pressing issues in the world today: the increasing polarization of society across political, religious, moral, racial and class divides and how we treat people with conflicting beliefs as being stupid or worse still as our enemies.

I will explain why I think the root cause of our polarization is the nature of our beliefs and I will share some psychological research that shows our personal opinions are based on mostly no evidence whatsoever. As individuals, we know almost nothing compared to what we think we know. Our personal knowledge is mostly an illusion.

I will make the point that we need to stop seeing each other as enemies and see each other as friends and that crucially we need to start to talk with each other.

We will then engage in a couple of rounds of Café style conversation in break-out rooms, 3 or 4 people per group to discuss this viewpoint.

After the break, I will describe the seven or so preconditions that I feel we need to accept to move forward and engage in constructive conversation across our divides (so-called impossible conversations).

I will take a look at the concept of a conversation covenant – a set of rules to which we need to agree to create a more physiologically safe space for impossible conversations.

We will then again hold a couple of rounds of Café style conversation in break-out rooms.

Finally, we will come together as a whole group to share our thoughts and insights to make a better sense of this vital issue and discuss the actions that might flow from it.

Registration: Eventbrite

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Credit: Abraham Lincoln

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