Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Lord Alderdice’s website has a wealth of information on his work: https://lordalderdice.com/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– The Accidental Peacemaker: How a Philanthropist Pursues Peace in a Complex World with Mike Hardy & Steve Killelea

– 11 Steps to Help You Heal Divides with Mike Hardy

– Peace through Better Leaders with Mike Hardy

– A Genocide Survivor’s Path To Leadership: Turning Trauma into Peace with Hyppolite Ntigurirwa & Mike Hardy

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Lord John Alderdice is a psychiatrist, political leader, and internationally recognized peace negotiator who played a key role in the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement. A former leader of the Alliance Party and Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, he has spent decades applying psychological insight to resolving complex political conflicts. His work now spans global peacebuilding, advising on issues of polarization, extremism, and leadership in deeply divided societies.

“If you come into a conflict and take a side, you are no longer part of the solution—you are part of the conflict.”
— Lord John Alderdice

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership Co-Creating our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. I’m also a fellow of the International Leadership Association, which has partnered with us to bring you a series of interviews containing the latest academic and practitioner leadership insights.

With me today is John Alderdice, and we’re gonna talk about how he’s been involved in numerous peace negotiations. Why don’t you start with how you got to this place?

Lord Alderdice: I was growing up coming into my teens in the 1960s when all sorts of exciting things were happening all around the world. But in Northern Ireland, the way this excitement and interest in civil rights, for example, was being expressed was because of the historic difficulties and divisions in Northern Ireland, and it broke down into violence and people were protesting and complaining and wanting to change and make things better.

That’s perfectly reasonable. [00:01:00] But once violence breaks out a whole new dynamic emerges. What was striking to me was that the explanations that were around for this at the time, and as a young guy coming into my teens, I was reading political science and trying to understand it, and on all of these books were telling me that people acted in their best socioeconomic and power interests.

Well, it seemed pretty clear to me that that wasn’t what was happening at all because people were being killed from all sections of the community. It was costing huge amounts of money. It wasn’t being resolved. It wasn’t going away. Nobody was benefiting from it. And so I thought, I need to try to find a way of understanding what’s going on in my community.

Maureen: So I studied economics and the same thing we were told that people acted in their own interests and yet observing humans, the interest they acted in seemed contrary to what I thought one would act if they were doing in their best interests.

Lord Alderdice: Well, that’s quite true. The line that I decided to take was to explore why people might behave in [00:02:00] self-destructive ways, because of course that’s what was happening. People were devoting themselves to violence, which meant not only would other people get killed, but they themselves would be injured, imprisoned, possibly killed, as would be the case with their friends and family and so on.

And I thought to myself, what bunch of people have any expertise in this? And I thought, well, psychiatrists spend their lives working with people who damage themselves in all sorts of ways. Not necessarily just cutting or overdosing or whatever, but in all sorts of ways in their relationships. So I went into medicine and psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and I spent quite a lot of time trying to tease out and understand what was going on with people when they behaved like that.

And also how psychiatrists try to intervene, not particularly with medication ’cause that wasn’t going to be something, you couldn’t just medicate the whole community. It was obviously going to be a psychological approach of some kind. And so that’s what I did. And I got involved in one of the political parties.

In fact, I wrote to all the political parties that were not directly involved in violence and got [00:03:00] their information, and there were two on the Protestant unionist side. There was one major party on the Catholic national side that was not involved in violence at all. John Hume, SDLP, Sinn Fein was very much involved in violence and I wasn’t gonna get involved with that.

And then there was a party called the Alliance Party, which had been established in 1970 with the obviously absurd and impossible notion that Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland might be able to work together in the interest of peace and a better community. Anyway, I joined them. After a few years, I became the leader of the party, and that gave me an opportunity to engage with the Irish Taoiseach, the British Prime Minister, who at that stage was Margaret Thatcher and the leaders of other political parties, and to try to put together some kind of conversation or exploration analogous to the way I would work with a patient where obviously you try to engage in a conversation, you try to explore things, you listen to what they’re saying. You try to dig a little bit deeper and understand where’s it coming from, why do people do what they do? And so the whole approach to dealing [00:04:00] with the violence from my perspective, was based on that.

And after I became leader of the party, I engaged with other leaders and all sorts of people in the community and the churches and business and journalism and so on. And eventually, as you know, after 11 years, we got the Belfast Agreement, Good Friday Agreement in 1998. And then I stood down as Leader of the Party and became the speaker of the new assembly.

So the job there was how do you put together a new institution with different kinds of rules and principles? And I did that for a number of years, but we still had a problem. And the problem was this, the weapons were still out there and they were still a potential threat. People weren’t using them against the other side.

They were using them to control their own people actually, but they weren’t using ’em against the other side, but they were still there as a threat.

Maureen: Okay.

Lord Alderdice: And so the whole thing almost broke down at that point. And the British Irish government set up a new body called the Independent Monitoring Commission, myself and three other international colleagues, to try to put that to bed, and we spent the next number of years [00:05:00] relatively successfully putting that to bed and enabling the community to move on into disagreeing with each other, without killing each other, which is really what a peace process is about.

Maureen: I’m from the US and we are adamant about our guns or a portion of us are. And it sounds like you got rid of weapons.

Lord Alderdice: Yes.

Maureen: And what was the justification other than we kill each other with weapons?

Lord Alderdice: Well, in a sense it was almost the reverse. The question is why have weapons? Is there any need for weapons?

I mean, the An Garda Síochána, which is the police service in the south of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, are largely an unarmed police service.

Maureen: Really?

Lord Alderdice: Yeah. And, and have been since the Civil War, I mean, more recently they’ve had to acquire weapons because criminals have become more violent and so on and so on.

But one of the things that is very striking about the United States is the huge level of weapons ownership. It’s not the case anywhere in Europe, for example; you don’t get this in Europe. I mean people who hunt. Yeah. In France. France, the French love hunting, but it’s very specific [00:06:00] hunting weapons.

It’s not ground-to-air air missiles. It’s not the automatic weapons, it’s not, you know, all these kinds of things at all. It’s a very different situation. I think it’s a very interesting question why the United States and people there feel the need to have weapons. I think it goes back a long way actually.

I think there are all sorts of things involved in it. Some of it goes back to the fact that settlers had to protect themselves because they were, they were taking the territory of the indigenous people who didn’t like it terribly much and they had to protect themselves. And then of course, there was also an interesting idea around in the 16 hundreds and 17 hundreds amongst revolutionaries of all kinds, that the way to protect yourself from the power of a king or a tyrant of any description was to have civilians with weapons and this militia would then engage itself in protecting the community against overweening power, whereas a professional army, it was argued, [00:07:00] could be used against the people. It’s an understandable argument at the time, it was an argument amongst Irish revolutionaries actually at that time.

But of course the world has changed a very great deal and people in most democratic parts of the world don’t see armed full-time professional soldiers as being a threat to them. On the contrary, they see them as being protective of them against external threats. And that’s one of the problems you find in the psychology of individuals and communities:

Something that developed for a perfectly good reason at one time and in one context becomes a real disadvantage indeed. Sometimes even very destructive in other circumstances. And I’ve seen that in lots of places.

Maureen: And that’s part of your study again, I assume, is as you look at what’s productive and counterproductive for individuals, groups, societies, that as the context changes, we often don’t change our thinking along with it.

Lord Alderdice: That’s exactly right. Let me take a completely different situation. I was asked [00:08:00] for various reasons to go out to Australia to meet with a number of First Nation people, Aboriginal people there. Because they were in a terrible state. There was an alcoholism, drug abuse, physical and sexual violence in the community.

And no matter how much money the government put into it, it didn’t get any better. In fact, the more money it put in, the worse it got. Some people were trying to ask the question, why is this; it seems completely counterintuitive, and I went and I visited a number of these people and one of the things that was very striking was in a number of the villages, unbelievably overweight and obese the people were. To the point where they were developing all sorts of illnesses. There was one relatively small indigenous village that I went to, which had a full-time doctor for a few hundred people. In fact, it had a renal dialysis unit for a few hundred people because they were so obese that they were having all sorts of renal problems and other problems: diabetes, blood pressure, and so on and so on.

And I tried to think about why this was, and as I explored it, the picture that emerged for me was something like this. [00:09:00] It’s a pretty tough life in the Australian bush. Not much water, not much to eat, and for a very long time. I’m not talking about a thousand years, I’m talking about 40 or 50,000 years.

It’s the longest continuous civilization anywhere in the world. For all of that time, these people had had to be searching out for food and water, and if you found something you ate it, you ate it, you didn’t say, well, I’ll keep that for tomorrow, because of course with the heat and so on, so you ate whatever you get ahold of.

They never got terribly fat because there wasn’t an awful lot. They were out on the hunt all the time and so on and so on. And then in the last 20, 30, 40 years in comes McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Express, and so on, and they continued to eat in the same kind of way as they did when food was very scarce.

So what happens? They get hugely overweight and they’re almost eating themselves to death, not because they want to do that, but that’s been their way of being and they continue with it. And of course to try to persuade them [00:10:00] to give it up. Well, none of us find it that easy to give up sugary foods and so on and so on.

But if it’s been your whole culture, then it’s even more difficult. So there’s a situation which is not about conflict in an obvious direct way, but you can see how. Continuing to behave as was appropriate in the past in a new situation can be profoundly destructive.

Maureen: Let’s bring it back then to the peace process.

How do you help people to truly act in what is currently their best interest when their current life or heritage for 40,000 years has programmed them differently?

Lord Alderdice: The first thing to do is to engage with people by listening to them. This is not usually what happens. Usually people come into a situation of conflict.

The first thing they do is they generally identify with one side of the conflict, and they try to promote them and put the other ones down. And of course, what does that mean? That means you are now part of the conflict. You’re not part of the [00:11:00] solution. You’re simply part of the conflict. You’re backing one side against another.

So that’s one problem. The second problem is that people come in and they have in their minds that they knew what the problem is, and it should be this and this and this. I remember meeting up with a rather elderly Jewish Israeli. He had been very much involved in setting up the kibbutz, and I met him in, in the one that he had set up beautiful sunny day, and I was there with two or three colleagues and I said, “Tell us, you know what, what’s all of this been about? You set this kibbutz up and tell us about that.” So he started to talk and he talked and he talked and he talked. And after about a couple of hours of us sitting listening to him, he said, “You haven’t told me what to do.” I said, “I have no idea what you should do. I’m here to listen, to try to understand. I, I don’t know what you should do.”

And he said, “Nobody ever comes here without telling us what to do.” And then he said, “Uh, you’re a psychiatrist, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, that’s right.” “Well,” he says, “I suppose that’s why you’re listening to me. But,” [00:12:00] he says, “you know what? I don’t care because at least you are listening to me. And that’s not usually what happens.”

So the second thing is to just listen to people and try to draw them out. The third element of that was remarked to me not very long ago by a very good friend who’d been a psychoanalyst for many, many years. And he’d written a lot of books and he’d done a lot of work. And I said, “Ed” — () name’s Ed Shapiro), I said, “Ed, can you sum up in a few words what you’ve learned?” “Oh, yes,” he said, ” what I’ve learned is that when I meet somebody with whom I profoundly disagree, the main question for me is, what is this person who with whom I disagree about? Yeah, not, what are they wrong about? That takes no time at all. What are they right about?”

And that’s a real challenge because you have to really start: So wait a minute. He or she must feel really passionately about whatever it is because they’re going against the grain. They, they may well be acting not in their best, obvious socioeconomic interests, but they’re committing [00:13:00] themselves to this.

There must be a really strong reason for this. And I suppose the, the final thing at this stage that I would say is that when you’ve got a conflict, the key question is not who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. The key question is, why do these people have a disturbed relationship? And it’s a disturbed, historic relationship, ’cause if you’ve been asked to come, it’s not because it started yesterday, it’s been going on a long time. It hasn’t been resolved. And so when you are looking at, you say, I need to understand the relationship, not this side and this side, but the relationship. And very often the relationship, not just between those two people there, but the external stakeholders, the external sets of relationships that they have.

And of course I saw that, for example, dealing with young people, mainly young women with eating disorders. And what you quickly discovered was you would never get anywhere with them unless you started engaging with their family and understanding what was going on, ’cause they were presenting really actually as a symptom of a family [00:14:00] system problem rather than that they themselves were the problem.

Although of course the family would tell you they were the only problem that the family had, but they’re not, and that’s what would emerge.

Maureen: I’ve seen the same thing with drug addiction.

Lord Alderdice: Yes.

Maureen: That holistic treatment programs bring the family in. And to your point, here’s a child who’s suffering. I realize there are a lot of complex situations, so I don’t wanna say that every child who has addiction issues have family problems, and yet often when we look systemically, there were issues.

Lord Alderdice: This whole business of looking systemically, I think’s extremely important. And part of the training that I did in psychiatry was not just in individual psychoanalysis, but it was in group analysis and in family therapy. And this was extremely helpful to me as I began to try to apply these ideas in Northern Ireland because I began to see Northern Ireland as the child of a disturbed relationship between Britain and [00:15:00] Ireland.

And if you brought British Prime Minister and Irish  Taoiseach together, or senior ministers or civil servants, you know, they would say to you, “Ah, we could sit down and have a cup of tea and have this sorted out in no time at all.” But of course, it wasn’t true. The Irish Constitution claimed jurisdiction over part of the United Kingdom, and nobody was gonna be sending in the military.

But the idea that there was no dispute was just absurd. And of course, it was a profound historic dispute. So what was important was not just to work at bringing people to together from the two sides in Northern Ireland. And indeed between north and south in Ireland, but you had to bring Britain and Ireland together as well to explore these things.

There were other important relationships with Europe, the United States, and so on, but these were the three, if you like, essential disturbed historic relationships. And so the peace process developed with three strands. One, to address each of these historic relationships and the outcome, the Good Friday agreement was not just an agreement [00:16:00] between unionists and nationalists in the north or indeed between north and south. It also was about east and west, and there were three institutions that were put in base, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the North South Ministerial Conference, and the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference.

And when many people from outside, whether they’re in Europe or the United States, talk about the Good Friday agreement, they think it’s all about the relationship within Northern Ireland or maybe the North South relationship, and they forget about the fact that it’s not just those, it’s also the east west relationship between Britain and Ireland, and that was part of it, and that needed to be resolved as well.

Maureen: How do we then apply this brilliant body of work, and especially your diagnosis in treating geographic conflict as a family system? How are you working with that now?

Lord Alderdice: Well, I mentioned earlier on the situation with Israel and Palestine. And, uh, I got involved with that quite a number of years ago and explored it in [00:17:00] various ways.

For example, one of the lessons of the Irish Peace process was that I had to be prepared when the time was right to meet with the leaders of the IRA and the leaders of the loyalist paramilitaries, as well as the British and Irish Prime Minister and other political party leaders. What that meant was, if we’re gonna do something in the Israel-Palestine situation, you’ve gotta be prepared to meet not just Israelis and Palestinians, but Hamas, Hezbollah, Jewish settlers, you know, all sorts of people like this. And so I started to do that, and we started actually to make some progress. But then as is always the case, by the way, in these, you run into a hurdle, you run into an obstacle, and sometimes you have to just withdraw and see how things develop.

You mentioned young people with drug addiction problems, alcoholism the same. You get a little bit along the road, there’s a relapse, there’s a problem. You don’t abandon ship. But you don’t intrude either. You say, “Okay, well I don’t think we’re gonna get very much further at the moment, but you know, when you feel [00:18:00] able to do something, come back and we’ll take it further.”

I have to say, I took the view that some of the approaches that were being taken by various administrations from outside the region, as well as those inside, we’re gonna make sure nothing useful could be done. And so I pulled back. ’cause when you’re dealing with people like that, you gotta be very careful.

If you keep going in without actually bringing things forward, they begin to say, “Oh, this guy’s just intelligence gathering. That’s what he’s here for. He is here on behalf of the intelligence agencies.” And that’s a disaster because I wasn’t; I was an independent person. I wouldn’t come in on behalf of any government and that was a very important thing.

Maureen: So this is also then incredibly emergent as opposed to planned?

Lord Alderdice: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you, you can sit down and make plans if you like, and there’s a case for… yes. But you know, the old military adage is the plan, the strategy that you have falls at the first sight of the enemy, you know? So yes, you can plan all sorts of things, but with this kind of thing, you’ve got to be prepared to be open to the engagement and [00:19:00] see what works and doesn’t in the engagement. And this is actually quite an important difference, I think one of many between doing these kinds of things in the business context and in the political context, ’cause in the business context, to a considerable degree, and I wouldn’t overemphasize, but to a considerable degree, you can depend on the fact that people do make judgements about best interest. They do balance things up, profit and loss. They weigh it up and they say, well, if you say to a businessman, for example, “Well, look, if you do that, it’s gonna be a complete financial disaster and you’re gonna be bankrupt in six months.”

The chances are he will at least pause for thought. But it’s quite different in the context of a conflict and people going to war. Let me give you an example of the different thinking. So if you were to come along to me and say, “John, I’ve just seen that car that you’re driving, and I’ll give you $5,000 for it.”

And I would say to you, “Well, I think it’s worth a little bit more than that Maureen.” And you’d say, “Well, I’ll give you $50,000 for it.” I’d say, “That’s wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. “[00:20:00]

Maureen: You are the keys.

Lord Alderdice: That’s exactly, ” Please take it away, I just wanna see the color of your money.”

If you were to come to me and say, “Well, that’s a very nice wife that you have. I’ll give you 50,000 for her.” I wouldn’t say to you “She’s worth more than that.” I’d say, “What kind of a person do you think I am?” Because some things can appropriately be dealt with by weighing up cost benefit and some things not, especially relationships.

The flag of your country is another thing. You know, if you went to somebody and you say, “Well, you know, you’d be better to just allow yourself to be invaded because this is a big wealthy country and you know, you’d do quite well out of it.” People don’t say, “Oh, right enough. That’s a good thing. We’ll just allow ourselves to be invaded.”

They say, “Not on your life. And I will fight to the death to defend my country.” So this is a big difference between working with people in business, whether it’s businessmen and trade unions or those in government that are involved in that work. And politically motivated violent political conflict, or indeed, it’s also true not just in the nationalist context, but in religious context where again, [00:21:00] people are not prepared to have their faith bought in that way.

So understanding that difference is a really important part of the work. We’ve discovered that people’s brains actually work differently. Different parts of the brain that operate with a different grammar and syntax of operation, as it were, come into play in these different kinds of situations. So this is not just soft stuff, if you like; we can measure this.

We can even photograph what’s going on in the brain at the time and understand that it’s different functions and different parts of the brain that are working.

Maureen: Can you say more about that? ’cause I know under threat, I’ll lose functioning in my prefrontal cortex, but you’re talking about something different.

Lord Alderdice: Yeah. When people are under existential threat, for example, okay, they will engage with parts of their brain that will start to judge things on what is right and wrong rather than what is beneficial and not beneficial. It’s not a cost benefit analysis. It operates more on, And I suppose what you might call, ethical [00:22:00] principles and it’s actually different places that, that you can see them lighting up, as it were.

That’s quite true. I mean, the whole business of the way our brains function is incredibly complex. And indeed, you were talking earlier on about things being emergent. They are complex. They’re not just complicated. They’re complex

Maureen: and

changing,

Lord Alderdice: and changing their dynamic all the time. That’s also something about relationships.

Of course, they’re changing. You know, if you, if you think there’s a relationship that you’ve got sorted out, it’s already in trouble because you think you’ve got it sorted out. These are dynamic things, and of course this was one of the problems with the Good Friday agreement. We got it more than 20 years ago.

We put the institutions in place, and then particularly those outside Northern Ireland, for example, British and Irish governments, for years, they didn’t meet at the senior level. Even though the British Irish Intergovernment Conference had been put into place by the Good Friday agreement. They thought, “Oh, we don’t need to. It’s all fine. We’re busy doing other things.” What happened, of course, it all went awry. We had Brexit, we had deep misunderstandings [00:23:00] arise. The north south thing stopped working as well, and of course, the Northern Ireland assembly itself got into difficulties. So you can’t, with any of these things, just allow them to drift with the assumption that it’s all going to be fine.

Maureen: That is true also of any human relationship.

Lord Alderdice: Absolutely. Right.

Maureen: And for anyone who’s listening who’s been married

Lord Alderdice: Yep.

Maureen: They hit bumps.

Lord Alderdice: Absolutely. And with your kids and them growing up, and they’re changing, they’re changing even more rapidly because they’re maturing as well as experiencing all the internal and external changes.

And so all the time you’ve got to engage with them. And engaging with children at one stage and at a different stage is quite a different thing. Some people think it’s great whenever they’re babies. When we get to be adolescents, they tear their hair out and some people, believe it or not, are the other way around.

But all of us, if we’re bringing up children, have to be prepared to engage with them in different ways at different times and continue to be there. Otherwise, as you see things go awry, they’re dynamic things.

Maureen: And that is a consistency in the business [00:24:00] community. Then when we hire someone in many organizations, we’re making a commitment to them, to the ethical interchange of, I pay you to do work.

I also have some commitment to make decisions that allow you to stay employed for the most part. And again, I realize that’s a much more complicated situation.

Lord Alderdice: But I think it’s very important that you point out that it’s not just an instrumental engagement because sometimes it gets thought of in that kind of way.

And the truth of it is if you’re going to be a successful leader in business, you’ve got to be concerned about these other human beings that you’re engaging with. And of course, some people get off with not doing that. They don’t care about people. They take them on, they throw them off again. And indeed, there are even some professions that have tended to become like that.

I just don’t believe it’s a good way to be. And I don’t think that in the long run it actually is beneficial in a meaningful human way. Yeah. Sometimes people can make a whole load of money, but you know, I saw as many people with money who were miserable as a psychiatrist as I did those people who did not have money and who were [00:25:00] miserable; at least the people who did not have the money and were miserable, could look to the possibility of being less miserable if they got some money.

What was really a problem was the people who thought they had everything and were, well, in some cases even suicidal. And that was much more difficult for them to see that there was another way. ’cause they actually had to let go of the attachment to money and make an attachment to relationships. And that was quite challenging for them.

Maureen: So it’s a shift in meaning making?

Lord Alderdice: It is. It’s not just meaning in the sense of my cognitive operation. It’s about how I engage in a feeling way with others who have their feelings, not just on a bilateral basis, but as part of a community of people, large or small, with its history, with its way of being and with its hopes and fears for the future.

All of those are things, you’re quite right, that are present in all communities, whether they’re business communities or cultural [00:26:00] communities or military communities or church communities or whatever. You’re absolutely right. Those things are present in some of them. As I was saying earlier on, like in business, the relatively rational actor component is stronger.

And in some situations of existential threat to communities it’s weaker and people become much more dominated by how they feel and and so on. These two aspects of us are always present, but sometimes one is a lot stronger than the other.

Maureen: When I assume one of the reasons it becomes stronger when I feel safe and secure in my being and in my enterprise’s being, then I tend to be more rational when I feel under threat and specifically existential threat, either myself or my organization, or both.

I’m gonna become more dogmatic. Have fewer options, that’s when I can behave against my self-interest.

Lord Alderdice: I think that’s exactly right and we see it all over the place. In fact, at the moment we see it globally [00:27:00] because people are reacting to the development of technology. To the geopolitical change, to the climate crisis.

People look at those things and they’re very frightening and they genuinely are. They’re not just, “I’m an anxious person, so I’m frightened.” These are genuine threats to our survival as a species, and so of course, in that context, what do we see? We see deepening polarization, greater fundamentalism, more extreme nationalism, countries behaving less in what we would calmly and coolly judge to be their best interests, and responding in ways which are ultimately extremely dangerous, and that’s one of the concerns that I and many of my colleagues have at present, is that we’re in this frightening place, genuinely frightening place, and the leadership that is being offered is being caught up in the crisis. Rather than being able to understand the crisis, put its arms around people and say, “Yeah, it’s very difficult and problematic, but let’s just [00:28:00] sit down and work our way through this and we’ll try to do that together.”

Instead of that, what’s happening is we’re back into polarizing again at the global level. Even the United Nations is unable to get decisions through the Security Council because it’s so polarized. So we’re not in a good place at the moment, and that makes it all the more important that we try to work with these things and understand them and engage with them.

Maureen: You know, I had a conversation this morning with a colleague who is writing a book with someone who went on one of the spaceships. She’s with NASA, and the change that happens when you look down and see the earth as an interconnected single system, it’s not my continent in your continent or my faction or religion or whatever.

We are living in a shared ecosystem, which is unavoidable, and yet, unless I see from that set of eyes, it’s easy to get caught up in win-lose. I want your stuff and you want my stuff, and we’re gonna That’s right. Pull each other’s arms off.

Lord Alderdice: Let me give you an example of that from the Irish context. [00:29:00] When John Hume, who sadly died not very long ago when he started to engage with the IRA, he said to them “What do you want?”

And he’s coming from a nationalist perspective himself. And the IRA said to him, “Well, we, we want a United Ireland.” And he said, “Well, look at the map. It is one island. How are you gonna unite it?” And he said, “Ah, yes, yes, but there’s a border. What the border tells you is that the people who live on that single island cannot agree how to share the land.”

And they said, “Ah, yes, but it’s ’cause of the British. The British are interfering.” He said, “Okay. So if we were to go and talk to the British government, and the British government was to say, ‘We no longer have any selfish, strategic or economic interest, whatever it was in the past, our only interest now is in getting a peace outcome to this.’ Would that make a difference?” And they said, “Well,, it probably would, but they’ll never do it.” And so he went to the British government, and the British government did exactly that. They said, “Look, whatever the past, situation now is this. We no longer have any selfish, strategic or economic interest, and therefore we’re prepared to do whatever’s [00:30:00] necessary to get peace.”

That changed the whole dynamic because it became possible to take that helicopter or spaceship view that you were describing. Look down at the thing not as we are on this side and they’re on that side or somebody else’s to blame. But look down and say, “Well, look, how do we in this island and in this little archipelago of islands off the west of Europe, how do we find a way of living together with our disagreements, with our different cultures and different attitudes, but find a way of living together without killing each other?”

Maureen: What’s most interesting to you right now?

Lord Alderdice: There are others that I’m involved with as well in, in Latin America and other parts of the world. And what’s striking about it is there are all sorts of differences, but it’s all about people, it’s all about people and communities and their relationships and the way that history has disrupted their relationships. And so what’s interesting for me, and I suppose what I spent a lot of my time thinking about is how do we understand this and help others to understand it and [00:31:00] grasp hold of it?

Because one of the difficulties is that even if you do understand something, To help the person engage with it is quite a challenge. You know, we’re gonna find this with patients. You listen to the patient, you maybe listen to the family, you come to an understanding of what it is that’s going on, but there’s no point in just giving the patient a copy of a book and saying, “If you read that, you’ll find page 54 has you written all over it. That’s you; Just do that and you’ll be absolutely fine.” The person would say you’re mad and they’d be right. What you have to do is engage in a relationship with them that helps to take them to another place, another way of understanding things that’s difficult at an individual level. It’s much more difficult at a communal level, and that’s one of the big challenges of the moment.

How do you make those changes? And we’ve tried various things. We’ve tried liberal democracy, we’ve tried the rule of law and human rights. These things have been helpful to some extent, but many young people are losing patience and conviction about them. [00:32:00] And so I think we’re at a point now where we need to deepen our understanding and go beyond where we’ve been working at for quite some time.

So, for the last few hundred years we’ve been operating from the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and so on. But I think now we’ve come to a point with all the kinda major changes that I mentioned earlier on where we actually have to take our thinking forward. And when you were talking about issues of complexity and emergence and so on, for me that is the wavefront that we’ve got to take and apply to these human questions. Lots of work has been done on them as important understandings in physics and indeed in economics as you were saying. But I think taking them into the human dimension and understanding the implications is kind of where the wavefront of creativity is from my perspective at the moment.

Maureen: As we think about specifically governance systems, our form of democracy was created when if I wanted to communicate with you, I would write a letter.

Lord Alderdice: Mm-hmm.

Maureen: Give it to generally a man on a horse. [00:33:00] That man would take it to another man on a horse and then on a boat, and it would go to you at some point and get back on a horse.

And a year later I would have a response from you and it may not even be what I wanted. This could be a multi-year process. Now, I hit send on my computer. You respond literally in two minutes. So the pace of decisions and who’s engaged and the technology for who’s engaged and the technology for effective education and communication all unfolding and one of my concerns is the polarization of information that having an informed electorate is in my mind, not a given at this point.

Lord Alderdice: I think you’re absolutely right and one could start to blame the new technology and say that that’s the cause of all the problems and so on, because it certainly is related to the problems.

No doubt about that. The pace of change, the difficulty at present for anyone to have the time to reflect on anything. I suppose that’s one of the things that I noticed when I moved outta frontline [00:34:00] politics was I began to be able to create a space where I could think about the problems.

Whereas most people in politics, even the most senior level, are reacting to what’s happening rather than really being able to think about it. And you could say, this is just a catastrophe. We’re gonna blow ourselves to bits, which is entirely possible. And then I began to think, you know, when printing was invented in the 14 hundreds and lots of people were able to get the Bible initially and in their own language. I mean, before that, there’d been very few Bibles and they’d all been in Latin, which even the religious people couldn’t even understand. Nevermind the ordinary people in the community. And then it began to become possible to read the Bible and political tracts and all sorts of other things in your own language, produce cheaply– huge numbers of people and what happened? Well, of course there was chaos for a period of time and I’m sure there were people sitting around, you know, the kind of bulwarks of society where there are glasses of wine sitting around. said “You know, this printing business is a bad [00:35:00] job. All sorts of people can print all sorts of things. That might be true, might be not true. They make it available to ordinary people who aren’t educated. They have no idea what they’re reading and look what is happening. Social chaos, it’s a disaster.” Well, of course they were absolutely right. Now, what was chaos? There were the wars of religion in Europe. We eventually found some kind of way through it.

It was a challenge. It was a difficulty. It took a long time. But we found, and nobody now ever really seriously says, you know, we should go back to not having any printing. It really was a big mistake. You know, nobody says that now. And we are in a situation where there’s technology, disruptive technology to the power of X.

And it’s a real challenge and it’s a challenge for us as human beings. And it may well be that the size of change that needs to take place is of the order of what happened four or 500 years ago, plus plus. And the struggle for us, the [00:36:00] challenge for us is to find those ways forward. And that’s the exciting thing.

And you know, fear and excitement aren’t that far away from each other, but that’s the exciting side of the coin.

Maureen: And that was where I was going with launching into this is what worked brilliantly for a long time needs to evolve.

Lord Alderdice: Yes.

Maureen: Just like everything else in our world has evolved. Yeah. Given technology and

Lord Alderdice: that’s right.

And I’ll tell you the problem that one has. The people who were the progressives of a previous generation always become the conservatives of the next generation. They think, ah, we made this great piece of progress. We discover this new way of working or governing ourselves, or whatever. That then becomes the sacred method, and if you then start to say, well, actually it doesn’t work very well anymore for all the reasons that you’ve outlined.

We need to move on to something else. I say, no, no, you can’t do that. That’s absolutely terrible. But actually, we do have to change. Now, I can’t map out for you exactly what that would be. I’m trying to understand. I [00:37:00] rather suspect it will be my children and grandchildren who actually begin to understand what to do, but we start where we are.

Patients used to come along and say to me, uh, I don’t have the time to sort this out. And I said, well, we can’t start earlier than today, and we can’t start earlier than today to address these complicated problems, these complex problems. But we should start today and we should try to be adventurous, take some risks, know that we won’t necessarily get it right.

Know that we need to try different things in different parts of the world and different places and different cultures, and try to find out how we might move forward and therefore, for example, the profound temptation for us in the West to look at China and places in Asia and say, “these are a threat to democracy,” which is true.

Therefore, “we have to fight against them,” is I suspect, the wrong approach. What we need to do is understand why do they think and feel the way that they do. Not so that we [00:38:00] abandon ship and say, “well, they must have got it right.” But if we can understand that better, we might be able to construct a different kind of relationship with them that might actually enable all of us as a global community to move forward rather than blow ourselves apart.

Maureen: Hybrid ideas often work. If I think middle path, and we’ve got communism here and democracy here, are we taking best qualities from both systems? And I know that’s heresy to a lot of people, but are we taking best qualities from those and other systems to create a path that will allow us to live peacefully, economically, viably on a shared planet that’s dealing with climate issues?

Lord Alderdice: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. And all the other issues that we’re trying to deal with, many of which don’t seem to have any kind of obvious solution at all. You know, I often think, and I’ve said it quite frequently to colleagues, if at the end of the Cold War we in the west are turned to the Soviet Union that was breaking down [00:39:00] and said to the leadership there, “look, this is wonderful. We have a whole new opportunity to build a different kind of world together, but we cannot do it without you. We need to engage with this thing together.” That’s not what we said. What we said was, “your system was rubbish, your system failed. It was a disaster. You have to take our system and implement it in your part of the world. That’s the only thing that’s gonna work.”

And what happened? It was a disaster, didn’t work at all. And we end up now split again into what is at best a cold war and could become a hot war. And not just on one front, but on more than one front. We need to learn from that. That was a big strategic and human mistake of catastrophic proportions, and we need to try to learn from that and realize none of us have the answer to all these questions.

All of us have experiences of the past, which we want to learn from and escape from, and together. That wonderful picture that you mentioned earlier on and being up in space and looking down at [00:40:00] this little bead of blue and green in the blackness of the universe to look down and say, “you know, the people in that little community need to find a way of getting on together and not destroying themselves and each other.”

And I, and I think that’s the vision that we have to grasp hold of and do what we can to implement.

Maureen: As you were talking about the cold war, instead of the old to the victor goes the spoils and they write the history, but rather, there are cases where the conquerors absorbed and changed because of the people they conquered and created a very different community than the we’re- right- You’re- wrong.

Lord Alderdice: That’s right.

Maureen: That’s, and we’re gonna destroy you.

Lord Alderdice: And it is entirely possible to do these kinds of things, but you need to be prepared to sit and listen to the other guy and think to yourself, this person that I disagree with, what do they write about? For example, in the case of China.

In talking with the Chinese, which is a quite a challenging thing because they have a very different culture and history and background… but one of the things that [00:41:00] absolutely drives many of their leaders is what they call the century of humiliation, which is where the West, and not least Britain, engaged with China in a very destructive way.

People, you know, see what’s happening in Hong Kong and deprecate it quite unreasonably and so on, but how did we get Hong Kong? We got Hong Kong as a result of opium wars and all sorts of horrible things that went on, which you’re looking back at it unjustifiable, but that’s what happened. We need to be prepared to engage and have conversations about that and about what left us with this disturbed relationship rather than simply say, “well actually, you know, whatever happened in the past we’re the good guys.

They’re the bad guys, and we need to fight it out with them.” If we do that, then there is the possibility that we learn more about ourselves and more about them, and all of us actually move forward. That is always a real possibility, but it’s not an inevitability and that’s why we should be anxious as well as excited about the possibilities.

Maureen: Anxious, negatively [00:42:00] and excited positively.

Lord Alderdice: Exactly.

Maureen: It also seems that much of the field of psychotherapy, you’re helping people look inside. So not only in this negotiation process, am I listening, I’m also taking in what I’ve heard and using it as an opportunity to change who I am and expecting you as the person on the other side of the table to be doing the same thing.

Lord Alderdice: That’s right. And you’ve got to be able, not just to look at it from yourself personally, but to look at your community and try to understand how is it that we came to be in this place? And you need to look at the other side and say, “how did they come to be in this place?”

Because, for example, if you’re involved in the peace negotiations, the person you’re negotiating with has got to be able to survive and persuade his people to go with it. Otherwise, there is no point in the negotiations unless they can live with it, unless they can go with it. It’s negatory. It’s not going to achieve the end of the conflict at all.

You’ve gotta understand, [00:43:00] well, what can I bring my people along to accept? But you’ve also got to think about what the other side need to be able to do to bring their people along. In that sense, there’s a similar challenge. Yeah. People will sometimes say, “well, you know, I can’t engage with those people.”

It’s a moral question, you know, they were terrible. They killed people. They ran a terrorist campaign. They did all sorts of terrible things. And I say, you’re right. Absolutely. There is a moral question, but it’s a much bigger moral question than you’re talking about,

Maureen: because if you don’t engage with them…

Lord Alderdice: yes, because the moral question is this, do I abandon those in my past who suffered and died and therefore I don’t get an agreement? Or do I abandon the next generation, do I abandon my children and my grandchildren? And if that’s the choice, then for me it’s clear: with regret, I have to let go of the past, not forget about it, but not be bound to it in order that my children and grandchildren have a [00:44:00] prospect.

’cause that’s actually in the end, the moral choice I think I have to make.

Maureen: And I think we forget that that exercise of seven generations or taking the future, if I were to sit avatars in each of these chairs in this room, the future is one of those avatars. And through that lens, like the lens on the spaceship, I see the impact of my decisions today differently than only the rear view.

Lord Alderdice: You are absolutely right. It’s something my wife and I have talked about from time to time. How many people we come across who don’t seem to have it in their minds, how will the future look at me? They do things, they behave in certain kinds of ways. They abuse other people. They cheat, they deceive people.

They get involved in all sorts of activities, and they don’t seem to say to themselves, “I wonder what my children and grandchildren will think about this.” And yet for me, that really is a very, very important question. How will my grandchildren think of [00:45:00] me and feel about what I have done? Life is a short term business, but the life of our community isn’t, we hope it’s something that continues on.

And so you’re absolutely right to make that observation and, and to think about in that chair over there is sitting my great-granddaughter. What does she think about what I’m doing at present? You know, politicians do often think male politicians, for example, what would my mother think about this? I remember taking a leading member of Sinn Fein, who actually was a leading member of the IRA, taking him to a dinner with other politicians in the House of Lords, which of course was an athema almost, and he stopped at the door and I said, “what’s wrong?”

He says, “oh, I’m just thinking, what would my mother think if she knew where I was now?” And I said, “if she knew where you were, she’d wanna be here for dinner as well.” He said, “I think you might well be right.” But we often think about what the previous generation might think of us. What’s far more important is what the next generation might think of us.

And when we think in [00:46:00] that kinda way, I think it’s a salutary indicator.

Maureen: I’d like to ask for all of our listeners, what would you like them to take away from this conversation? Because some of them will be in these rooms. Either they are now or they will be over the next decades as people who are sitting on one side of the table or the other, or will be impacted by choosing to look in the rear the forward, or find a way to bring our heritage into inform, but not bind us as we go forward.

Lord Alderdice: I think what’s important is to realize the person you’re engaging with is a human being who has their wishes, their fears, their needs, and their families and communities. And so it’s not just a question of what I want for me or what they want for them. It is how we can construct a new set of relationships in which all of us can bring our different approaches.

It’s about a [00:47:00] pluralist approach to society really because there is no fundamental agreement on the good, except in some very fundamental human senses. You should do no murder. You shouldn’t steal or lie. You should pay respect. These are fundamentals. But many of the other things that we talk about as moral issues are social issues that come and go, and if we can grasp the things that are really important about relationships, see them in the person on the other side of the table, as well as the families and friends that we have and engage to create a better future where all of us have the chance to make the choices we want to and still live together, whether it’s in business, in politics or in our own personal and family lives. It seems to me that those are the kind of principles that are important.

Maureen: I’m gonna summarize one, and it’s something I do in preparing for a difficult meeting. So I’m gonna meet with [00:48:00] someone that I know has a different point of view and I can go in preparing myself to do battle.

Or I can go in preparing myself. Yes, I want to be mentally prepared, but this is a person, often with a family, they are trying to do a good job as they define it. Someone chose to hire them. Someone probably chose to marry them. This person has good qualities. If I can hold in my mind and my heart, the goodness of that person, the engagement feels different to me.

Lord Alderdice: I think that’s true, and it’s this question of engagement. One of the things that young politicians are often told, and I remember hearing it when I was starting out, and there is an element of truth to it, is when someone starts to interview you, have in your mind beforehand, what is the message you want to get across?

So you’ll find us using all sorts of tricks like, “well, that was a very good question. Thank you very much for asking. Just before I answer it, I wondered if I could say such and such,” and you say what you want to say. Well, that’s fine, but it’s not really a conversation. In [00:49:00] a conversation, you are listening to what the other person says.

You are allowing that to affect you, and you are responding to that and engaging with it. It seems to me that if we’re going to get beyond simply Propagandizing, instead of when we’re listening, be thinking, what am I going to say to get my message across next? I need to be listening to say, what is the message this person is trying to get across to me and how do I engage with that?

Seems to me that’s what conversation is about and, well, I think we’ve been having one of those in the last little while.

Maureen: It’s felt wonderful. I’m deeply appreciative of you taking time out of your incredibly busy schedule to meet me here and share with our listeners what I think is a very important and impactful message.

Lord Alderdice: Thank you very much indeed, Maureen. I’ve enjoyed it too.

Maureen: To our listeners, thank you for joining us. And for using this information to innovate and evolve your leadership, please like and share this information and a special thank you to the [00:50:00] International Leadership Association whose partnership with us made today’s interview possible.