A Solution to Collusion
Written by Tim Buckley, July 2024
Collusion sounds negative doesn’t it? A cousin to “collision” perhaps, collusion means a conspiracy for underhanded reasons, perhaps to cheat or to deceive.
Is it possible to collude without knowing it? That was the question posed to a group of 70 last month as CBEL gathered its bi-monthly Collaborative audience to discover a shared humanity. On hand at the breakfast gathering were dozens of Neighborhood Family Council members, leaders of nonprofit organizations, city officials, educators, and faith-based folks…a grassroots meets “grass tops” kind of gathering where all kinds of healthy bonds are formed.
Leading the session were Kasha Coombs and “TK” Ford, staffers for Project Peace at the Center for Community Excellence. Graduates and former staff at the Arbinger Institute, the duo are practitioners and teachers of what Arbinger calls Outward Mindset. Ford said that collusion can be intentional or mindless. Coombs said that practicing Outward Mindset can help us be more aware of our thinking, our feelings, and our surroundings. When we’re aware, the chances of colluding mindlessly are greatly reduced.
Living in an outward mindset helps reduce conflict, thus the name Project Peace. Coombs unpacked the word PEACE. It’s an acronym:
P – Purpose
E - Empathy
A – Awareness
C – Connection
E – Empowerment
Coombs and Ford have been actively creating peace through a multi-pronged campaign, funded entirely by Mountain West’s Center for Community Excellence. They teach Middle and High School students, and they teach parents. Another example of the virtue of doing grassroots and grass tops work simultaneously!
Can collusion be organizational too? Of course. Look at political rhetoric, especially during heated campaigns. There is an intention to distort the opponent’s character and thus win votes for your side.
While it is less apparent, Coombs and Ford suggested that organizations can also be party to collusion, and like personal collusion, it can be intentional or mindless. Let’s give Salem and Keizer a break here and say that if collusion exists, it is probably because it is mindless. In other words, organizations are so complicated and large that they don’t see all the unintended consequences of policy and procedures they enforce.
CBEL’s Building Community Resilience model uses Outward Mindset to uncover the unintended biases in our personal, interpersonal, social and governmental structures and gradually eliminate them. How does that happen? Project Peace’s website has this as a part of its Purpose Statement: “…to understand and transform conflict by increasing self-awareness and accountability in the relationships that matter most.”
Outward Mindset begins with each of us, becoming self-aware of our unintentional collusion with unhealthy and uncivil ideas and practices, active all around us. Without that mindset (which involves more than the mind, incidentally) we are more easily swayed into collusion. Outward Mindset helps dissolve the illusions and delusions of collusions.
As we begin to orient our personal compass to Outward Mindset, we begin to operate in groups from that place, and that gradually turns our organizations and our governance in the same direction, towards equality, fairness, and peace.
Please join us next time, in September, when the Collaborative will continue doing it’s best to create an environment of trust, of belonging, of growth and outward mindset.