Episode 8: Navigating Conflict w/ Aarati Kasturirangan & Rebecca Subar
“If we don’t do the internal work, our movements will suffer.” - Aarati Kasturirangan
This conversation is about expanding what’s possible - even within conflict.
Mia is joined by Rebecca Subar (they/them) and Aarati Kasturirangan (she/her) from Dragonfly Partners to discuss how nonprofit organizations and movement leaders can navigate conflict from the inside-out.
Together we dive deep into why our individual and collective orientations to the work makes a difference, when it’s okay to walk away from conflict, and how to learn every step of the journey.
Plus, Rebecca shares their definitions of “power” and “strength” and Aarati (pronounced Arthi) explains why it’s okay to be unsure about what to do in conflict.
Listen to the Full Episode
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
[2:35] Talkers talk and fighters fight: Why our orientation to the work makes a difference
[8:26] How to visibly address conflict (there’s NOT just one way)
[19:56] How to start talking about power from within our intersectional identities
[25:41] How might conflict be generative?
Featured On The Show:
Rebecca Subar (they/them) is a strategist and practitioner who supports leaders at all levels of organizational life to make strategic and relationship choices with integrity. They have given advice and support to political actors and activists on change, challenge, and conflict for over 30 years with attention to power relations and human relationships. Their first book When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance is out now.
Aarati Kasturirangan (she/her) works with white and BIPOC changemakers to transform internal culture and structures and build effective, values-aligned strategies for change. Over the past 22 years, Aarati has been shaped by her experiences organizing with other women of color as part of Incite! Women and Trans People Against Violence and for climate justice with 350.org, her mid-career experience as a stay-at-home mom, her training in strategic planning with the American Friends Service Committee, and her experiences as a grantmaker at Bread & Roses Community Fund in Philadelphia. Aarati is also the co-creator of the incredible In It Together Toolkit: A Framework for Conflict Transformation In Movement-Building Groups.
Dragonfly Partners helps changemakers—both inside and outside the political system—get “unstuck” and work through strategic, organizational or interpersonal challenges.
Mia Henry (she/her) is the host of the Shared Power Podcast. Mia is the founder and CEO of Freedom Lifted, a training and coaching firm that supports leaders and organizations committed to justice and equity.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Mia Henry: Welcome to the shared power podcast, a limited series for organizations and leaders committed to collectively advancing justice and equity. I'm your host, Mia Henry. I'm the CEO of Freedom Lifted, and the daughter of activists, educators, entrepreneurs, and survivors. I've had the honor of teaching, facilitating, and co-leading in nonprofits and schools for over two decades. I've learned a lot, but it hasn't always been easy. There are conversations that I had, or I wish I had, that create the conditions for more effective collective leadership. In this podcast, we will explore some of these conversations, diving deeply into topics that will help us learn to build trust, navigate conflict, and lead in partnership with one another. If you believe that relationship-building is the foundation for effective work for justice, you are in the right place. Join me as we explore the ingredients of leading with shared power. Today's conversation will feature Aarati Kasturirangan and Rebecca Subar from Dragonfly Partners. We will discuss how organizations and leaders can navigate conflict from the inside out. Rebecca has given advice and support to political actors and activists on change, challenge, and conflict for over 30 years. They're also the author of the awesome book, When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance. Aarati has worked with change makers for more than 20 years to transform internal culture and build effective values aligned strategies for change. I have so much respect for these dynamos and I loved our conversation together. In this episode, the three of us talk about why our orientations to the work make a difference, when it's okay to walk away from conflict, and how to remain in learning mode every step of the way. Here's my conversation about navigating conflict with Aarati and Rebecca.
MH: Rebecca and Aarati, it's so great to have you here on my podcast today.
Aarati Kasturirangan: Thank you so much.
Rebecca Subar: So good to be here, Mia.
MH: Yeah, so I wanted to start with Rebecca and your phenomenal book, When to Talk and When to Fight. Can you share with our listeners why you wrote the book? RS: You know why I wrote it? Because talkers talk and fighters fight. And we don't always have a full range of tools available to us when difficult stuff happens in our movements, in our organizations, and in our communities. And I learned that because I was a student of negotiation, and I was a movement activist, and I could not formulate a sentence that tied together these two urges, which really are very different in some ways, and are intrinsically related, and one urge is to fix it. And the other urge is to fight it. Both completely legitimate urges. And what's fun about writing the book, I only wrote one book, so maybe this is true for everybody who writes a book, but people will read into the book what is familiar to them, so that people will say, “I'm so glad you wrote a book that tells people that you can work it out, that conflict can always be avoided or, or settled between people and, and you can always reconcile.” And I'm like, you're the person who I wanted to get that sometimes, you have to put up a big fight. And try to force somebody to do something because they're not going to do it otherwise because they have more power and they have no reason to give it up. Conversely, there are always people who are like – the other day, someone said – this was in a group and they were like, “Well, I happen to be able to tell from your book, from how you write the book, that you definitely are on the side of reconciliation and that you don't think you don't really see...” And I'm like, wow, this is why I wrote the book. This is why I wrote the book, because to invite us to see the different orientations that we have in the world, for good reasons. But the orientations that predispose us to either being strategists around our power is – there's a big gap between their power and my power, and we definitely have to fight. And even seeing that gap where it's not there. It's usually there. But sometimes it's not there. And you cause pain when you impose the power gap where it's not there. And, of course, many people who are like, really from sincere places want everybody to get along and want things to work, and find it difficult and even despicable to think about fighting with another human being when you should be able to work things out, and they don't want to acknowledge power differences. And so we wind up bringing our own childhood and psychological and community and our orientations from wherever we're coming from. And that works sometimes, sometimes it's not enough. So I wrote the book to really help us to expand what's possible to be able to talk about these different categories of approaches to conflict, and for us to be able to figure out how to tell stories of change, and how to make choices that will be liberatory and be more open to what's possible. That's kinda why I wrote it.
MH: Well, a few small reasons! I mean, so huge. I mean, these are some of our fundamental questions around being, and this idea that you know, that we do have a range of choices or there might be a range of choices that get us through conflict and still everyone remain intact. And there's not just one way. There's not just one way. Y'all got to get this book. So this book has, it's not just writing – there’s diagrams. We're going to put the link in the show notes. But, I mean, just even how you approach sharing this and respecting the fact that people are visual learners. We learn from storytelling, which the book includes so much of, and from theories, right? Put to the test. It's so rich in that way. I love it so much. And so, I'd like to gush over the things I like, but I know that there's something else I want to gush on, which is the In It Together Toolkit. So, Aarati, this toolkit is amazing. I still have to dig through it myself more. But I use it often. I include it in my online trainings and I use it often to refer to people who are struggling or moving towards conflict and feel a little bit of what Rebecca said, is like we're moving off a cliff. And so I'm like, no, you don't have to fall off this cliff. There are these range of options available to you, and it takes some introspection, right? And I think that's what the toolkit really helps organizations do, is look inward at the roots of conflict and again, you know, to the same spirit of Rebecca's book, what's possible. So tell us about how the toolkit came to be, and how you've seen leaders really use it and what's emerged since it's been out in the world.
AK: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mia. I'm really glad to hear that you've been digging into it. The toolkit's been out there for about a year and a half now, which is kind of hard to believe. We came to developing the toolkit because Miriam Kaba from Interrupting Criminalization in the months after the 2020 uprisings and summer 2020, getting a lot of people coming to her who saw her as a mentor in the abolitionist movement, if you're not familiar with Miriam Kaba. Coming to Miriam and saying, “We've got these groups, so there's a lot of passion about doing this work on the ground. Money is getting poured into us, and we cannot get along. We are imploding. Help. Come help us figure it out.” Which Miriam said, no, that's not what I do. Because if you know Miriam, you know you're going to get a straight answer from Miriam Kaba. So, Miriam is also a great resource, developer, and connector and was able to leverage some resources and said, let me bring this to Dragonfly. Miriam and I have a long history connection of movement work together, and Dragonfly has done some work with some of the groups that Miriam supported. So we knew there was some alignment there. And we put this together. And what we've seen in the toolkit is that there are different things that kind of hook people into it. One being – a surprising one to me was just the assumptions that we write about in the toolkit in the very beginning about, you know, we believe that we need movements, and we believe that systems of oppression have harmed us all. Some basic assumptions that a lot of folks, that was an aha moment to say, my God, we haven't said these things in our groups. We assume that we're on the same page about all of this stuff. And we haven't actually said it out loud. And so that was an interesting one, which was for us more of just like, this is what you should do when you start something, is locate yourself and what you believe in. So many of our groups were formed so quickly, moving so fast, right? Feeling a lot of pressure for very good reasons, to do the work and to be out there. And I think that's another thing that we really emphasize in the toolkit is the work of relationships inside your organization is also the work. So that idea of what is the work, it's both internal and external. And that if we don't do the internal work, our movements will suffer. And that was what we were seeing in that period. And certainly before that, but that's when it was coming to a head. And that's a lot of the work we do at Dragonfly as well. I think the last piece is there's a diagnostic tool in the toolkit. That's really just a simple list of questions to help people to pause and think to themselves, “Why are we having this conflict in this group? What is going on?” And often the thing we think it is, is not really the thing. It's something else, right? And so there are some questions in there about, you know, is the conflict between people who have more or less are benefited by systems of oppression, you know, more or less, or targets of systems of oppression. Is it because some people are not living up to the expectations of the group? Is it because we have different ideas about how change happens, which kind of goes back to when to talk and when to fight too. And we're kind of working at odds there. So that piece around self reflection, like you said, Mia, organizational reflection on what's going on here and the invitation to pause and to ask those questions within your group. And then there's just a ton of tools that our team really went and looked everywhere to see what we could find. I'm sure we missed some good tools, so let us know if there's tools missing that you think would add to it. But we just tried to bring as many things as we could in for people to try because the idea was that our movements need to be doing this work and it shouldn't require everyone to have a consultant come in, right? You can do it yourself. That's really the spirit of the toolkit, is at least try, at least give it a try, right? Try one of these exercises that's in there. Try going through some of these questions together, and see where you come out on the end. Try creating some grounding agreements with one another, and see what happens. So that's really the spirit, is we believe that folks can do it. So many of the folks in movements are such great educators, are such great facilitators. But when it comes to doing that inside their own groups, they kind of lose it, that skill that they have, they don't bring it into the internal stuff.
MH: I find that the toolkit and the book, honestly, you all, these are not just tools to help us when we're in the middle of it, but also to help us process what we've experienced, and understand how we can give us the encouragement that we can do it differently, and approach it a different way, right? When we re-up instead of walking away from the work forever.
AK: I'll just add one thing, which is that, we did also create a companion to In It Together called When We Fall Apart, which you can also find on Interrupting Criminalization, to say to folks, it's okay if you needed to walk away. That is okay. It's okay if our movement group that we started doesn't exist forever. In fact, we don't really want our groups to exist forever, as we just said. And we can learn from them, right? We can learn from that experience that we had as we should. But I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be perfect and if it's not perfect and we had to walk away, that we failed. And I think this also goes into this larger idea, which also is in the toolkit around culture of punishment and perfectionism and the ways in which we're just steeped in it. And that we're so afraid in a lot of cases of conflict because conflict equals punishment in our mind. So we wait until things are really way far gone to actually address a conflict in some cases. Or, at the other extreme, the way that we have conflict is very punishing, very punishment based, like a lot of blame, a lot of shame. And we don't get into the sources really, it's just you're bad and – or I'm bad, and I don't want to think about myself that way where I feel defensive because you're telling me that I'm bad, as opposed to something you did was unhelpful or maybe caused harm.
MH: Just a quick break to note that the shared power podcast is sponsored by Freedom Lifted and our flagship training program, Justice at Work. Justice at Work offers blended learning and professional development for organizations and individuals who are strengthening their commitment to justice and equity. In their workplaces and in their communities, this training combines discussions with online modules that teach frameworks and critical history to help you examine the relationship between identity and power. You'll even have opportunities to join live group discussions facilitated by me, Mia Henry. Go beyond diversity and inclusion to find your role in building a more just and equitable world. Learn more and sign up at freedomlifted.com.
MH: I really appreciate you all's framing so, so much. I know I could talk to you all day, but I want to definitely – this is the Shared Power Podcast, and I want to make sure we do return to this idea of power and what it means to share power while we make the assumption that conflict will arise. And in my training work, we always start with these three questions. What is power? How can we gain power? And how can we use power? And what are those choices in those last two questions? Rebecca, your book does an incredible job of breaking down, particularly when people gain collective power, and how they can gain collective power. If our goal is liberation work, what are the choices we have, and how we use it? I'm wondering when and how in the process of working with clients, and working with organizations – partners, I know you call them as well – when do you bring up this use of power to the leaders that you've been asked to work with?
RS: It's a great question because we want to talk about power all the time, and it's a word to a lot of people. It lands differently on different people. But then there's, how does it land on a group, and why do we want to talk about it all the time for the same reason that it's hard for people to hear it raised individually sometimes. We want to work with it all the time because those systems of power differences. All of the oppression that happens in the world is directly related to differences in power. It's abuses of different levels of power and different amounts of power and its abuses because there are these different gaps in power and those projects that all of us are doing in social movement space in are targeted at those gaps and at that oppression. So we're targeting the oppression. All of us are targeting the oppression, whether we're working in housing or working in restorative justice. Whether we're working in climate change, whatever we're doing, we're working on turning around and transforming the stuff that happens because there's always going to be advantage taken when power is so stratified. And it's as old as enslavement, as old as people, as old as gender differences. It's ancient. It's always there, but there's that second level of it, which is actually shifting the gaps. There's a shift in the impact of the gaps and what people do. And that's terrible because of the gaps, but there's also the gaps themselves. And both harsh impacts due to differences in power. And differences in power exist in our organizations. So those things we want to change out there, they're all happening here. I'm a white person in a consultancy with a group that is white led, in legacy white led. My partner is a woman of color. I'm a non-binary white secular Jew. I'm old. I'm 63. So I think I get to call myself kind of old, and the person I'm partnered with, who is a cis straight woman of color is, it's you, Aarati. It'll be you for this experiment. Isn't there one of these? Okay. And here we are working together. And this is a white norm, white led legacy, white organization that is more and more multiracial as time passes. And there are a lot of black people and other people of color in the leadership. And in this dynamic, we're trying to have a conversation about climate change, right? Now, in the room talking about climate change are visible and invisible differences in power. And every one of those differences in power-based on lived experience, being part of targeted groups or not being part of targeted groups, the intersections of all the targeted groups we are or aren't part of, all of those things come to bear in this organizational space, not only among the client group, but between me and Aarati, and between us and the group and all of us as individuals, and the new formations and formulations that we create consciously or unconsciously. And there's no way to unpack all that stuff at any time in a one year, two year, one month engagement with the client. But what we can do is what we've been talking about, is just like an always, not just like learning the tool so we can do it. Not just getting better at the thing, but like you said, Mia, what did you say before about what is strength? What does strength feel like when we redefine it, it doesn't always mean I'm tough and I can get everything and you can't push me over. It means quite the opposite of that. It means that I'm like this Bozo the clown toy that I had when I was a kid that had sand in the bottom and a plastic blow up top and you could bounce it and you can bounce it, but Bozo's always going to come back, right? And it's like, that's resilience. Oh, so it was resilient. That's what that was, right? And we're also cultivating cultures of learning. It sounds old as the hills. It sounds even a little bit boring, but what it means for me as a person who's up rank in many settings, not all settings, right? I'm not a cis straight man and I'm not super wealthy. And so, I understand down-rankness to some degree. It's my queerness more than anything that predisposes me to knowing that it's possible to be both uprank and downrank, you know, in a system. I'll just say that I, as a white person, every time someone calls me out on something, humanely hopefully, and that does happen quite frequently, I learn something I didn't know before. And I've been playing with the edge of perception as a really powerful place. If I can just orient myself to the idea that my perception does end somewhere, and that if someone does something that seems really effed up to me, I want to assume, even if I'm wrong one percent of the time, I want to assume that it's because things are happening beyond the edge of my perception, that I'm able to either trust or learn. Might never learn them, but I can learn to trust that there are things that I don't understand. And all of that helps me to take apart the assumptions that I make, the instincts that I have, the knee jerk ways that I enter a conflict situation. That's a lot.
MH: That's a lot, but that's why I wanted to record a conversation with you! What does it say about me that I just keep thinking about how all our tools can be the sand at the bottom of a Bozo toy? These are all the things that help you bounce back!
RS: Things we know from childhood turn out to be great images. Simple things, right?
MH: And a little bit of the humility too, of like, of all of us being Bozos. I keep thinking about it. I love it. Well, we're almost to the end of our time, but I just want to end by asking you both, like, is there anything else that you want people to remember as they are attempting to share power in the organizations and build models of collective leadership, which we aspire to in movement work as they're trying to build these shared models. What do you want people to remember and retain, anchor themselves in, when conflict is apparent? It may have been there for a while, but when they're ready to acknowledge it or when they're in the thick of it or when they're healing from it, what do we want leaders to remember?
AK: I think for me, I'll say that there is generative potential inside of conflict. And what Rebecca was saying, like that opportunity to learn, but not just learn me learn from you, and you learn from me, but together we learn something new that actually can be beneficial to a lot of people, right? So, increasing the possibilities that any one of us can make – it's not just the sum of our learnings, but something completely different that can arise. And that gives me hope, personally. And it tells me that I don't know everything. And I don't think we should believe that we know everything in our movements because that really limits us, you know? So that same vision that propels us forward, I think we can have, if we can just hold onto that when we're in these moments of conflict and say, if I can believe in a different world, that where the forces have come back and our human relations are organized in different ways, I can believe that Rebecca and I can get through this tough moment together, and maybe learn something new about how that world might look in the future, that we can bring into that with us.
MH: Yeah. Good. Thank you, Aarati, for your relationship and for your wisdom.
RS: I'll just add that the opposite of punishment is not any one particular thing. But the world of possibilities beyond punishment is vast and creative. And you read Adrienne Marie Brown, you read Miriam Kaba, there's so much to think about to develop ourselves, whoever you are and whoever you're working with. But that one thing that sits on the punishment side of the definition that is not in the liberatory alternative set of the definition is that people are not “got it or don't got it.” People are not “they should be here or they should be out.” And I think learning gives us slippery slopes and gray areas in good ways where we're like, oh, actually this is so basic. This is so, kind of, Bozo the clown basic. But the better we can see that not everybody is on the journey, but it is possible for anybody to be on the journey. And what I mean by the journey is to like, be in a learning stance around race and class and queerness and power and change. And if we're on a learning path, we don't get thrown out. We don't throw each other out, and we don't have to fear getting thrown out. Because those things are punishment. And so I hope that what Dragonfly, what our publications and our work is doing, is opening up possibilities for people to feel their full selves, to feel humane, to feel resilient, to feel like there are possibilities. And of course, always to be thrown over, and always if they can't get up themselves, if we can't get up ourselves, then know that we're in communities where people pick each other up. That's something I want to end on.
MH: A stance of learning so that we can grow and create new things. Both of your works are the result, and I say result, not as the end, but as a benchmark, if you will, and a reflection of learning of all of those, all of us who have taken that stance and have been able to see and move to the other side of really hard things. I so appreciate it. I'm going to just tell this one story. At the beginning of one of the trainings that I do about oppression, one of the harder ones, it's part of a series. My check in question is, are you on the city bus, the school bus, or the struggle bus? And I actually have a picture of each of the three. Just as a check in, where are you? Where are you coming into this conversation with? City bus is like, okay, Mia, let's get through this because I got work to do. All this touchy feely stuff about history and ourselves. That's cool, but you know, we got campaigns to work on and things to do. And then the school bus is that place if you came in and you were ready to learn and you're excited to have the conversation with others and you're wanting to get into the dialogue and you've learned it about yourself. And then, of course, the struggle bus is real as well, where it was just, it took everything for them to just walk into the room or hit join on the Zoom call. The struggle bus is real. So that check-in has really helped us acknowledge where people may be coming from. And I ask people, if you're on the city bus, let's take a breath. We've already taken a breath. So I say, let's take another breath, and appreciate this special time that we have to talk about real things. And then if you're on the struggle bus, let's let the whole group hold these folks up and send the energy that they need in order to, again, be present and feel stronger. Yeah, new way of defining strong. And if we're on the school bus, let your light shine. Let's all pick up on the energy of the folks who are on the school bus and see if we can climb on that bus with them. Because I love the way you say “the stance of learning” and the work of learning together to create something new is what it is all about. That's what it's all about. And with that, conflict is an opportunity. It's hard. It's not easy. But it's nothing but opportunity to grow. You don't grow doing things that are easy, right? So, I appreciate you all so much. Thank you. Thank you, thank you for being on the Shared Power Podcast.
RS: Thank you so much, Mia.
AK: Thank you, Mia. Thanks for having us.
MH: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Shared Power Podcast. This podcast is a production of Freedom Lifted, a company that provides training, facilitation, and coaching for leaders rooted in justice and equity. It is produced and edited by Cassandra Sampson at It's 97. Production support also provided by Alicia Tate, Amber Kinney, Alicia Bunger, and the AK Collective. For more information about our work, visit freedomlifted. com or follow us at Freedom Lifted on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Join us next time as we continue to unlock the ingredients for leading with shared power.