Kidding aside, I bet if I knew the details, and there were more than 5 people involved, I could cast the various parties into a 2x2
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I mean...... I'm not really sure what to make of your argument. These conversations objectively exist, I've been a part of them. Archetypal identification/ scapegoating is a problem but it can be dealt with, that is exactly why people do group therapy & learn conflict mediation
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Not only that, when archetypal identification comes up, sometimes that can be sussed out during the course of conversation, and this is when the most valuable learnings tend to occur
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If there were 5+ people in a room at once discussing something comparable to “this place has structural racism” and it went anywhere healthy and productive, I’d be very impressed. More likely it put something miserable out of its misery.
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Invariably when things actually break out of bad equilibria in a positive way it’s because some small subgroup went off to the side and brokered an outcome.
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it seems like you're holding these types of conversation accountable to some sort of "outcome" or "getting something done." but in my experience it's often the case that learnings from such conversations are powerful enough that they are then brought into the real action contexts
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I also hold that such learnings can be valuable in and of themselves, as these conversations often take place in and pertain to non-organizational contexts such as friend groups and families
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again the reason group/family therapy / addiction support groups / executive trainings exist that learnings derived from painful conversations are valuable and can be ported to other situations. the fact that these conversations are guided only points to their objective worth
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There’s a reason group/family therapy tends to be at or near my size limit of 5. Not 50 or 500 or 5 milli9n.
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well a conversation with 500 is not a "conversation" lol it's a forum. Even calling a dialogue with 50 participants a conversation is pushing it because such an event has to be structured otherwise it becomes anarchy
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Well then you’re disagreeing with me about the useful limit for a “difficult conversation” being 49 rather than 5 and we can leave it be.

