Leading Through Conflict With Diana Smith

In this episode, Tony Martignetti sits down with Diana Smith, a renowned thought leader in conflict management and change. Diana shares her innovative approach to leading through conflict, a strategy she developed to turn intergroup conflicts into opportunities for growth. Listen in as Diana discusses her journey, the key flashpoints that shaped her career, and the powerful insights from her latest book. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to understand how to navigate and resolve conflicts effectively in any organization or group setting.

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Leading Through Conflict With Diana Smith

Introduction Of Diana Smith And Her Impact

Diana Smith is a renowned thought leader who has led change efforts for 35 years in some of America's most iconic businesses and cutting-edge nonprofits. A former partner at the Monitor Group and a former executive partner at New Profit, Diana developed a novel approach to conflict and change called Leading Through Relationships, LTR for short.

Her frameworks and tools captured the elephant in the room, and divide or conquer has been used around the world to turn intergroup conflict into a powerful force for change. She shares her life with negotiation expert Bruce Patton, her husband, her two rambunctious dogs, and a motley family of friends. It is truly an honor to welcome you to the Virtual Campfire, Diana.

It is an honor to be here, especially since I came through my dear friend and former student, Jeff Wetzler, who I owe a great debt of gratitude.

It's wonderful to hear that Jeff was a past guest and someone who I admire. I love his new book. It's a gem. It's great when I see my campfire family continue to expand. We get to dive into your story. I'm thrilled because you've been making an impact for years, but I want to understand what got the journey started. What were the things that made you do the work you're doing?

We're going to uncover your journey through flashpoints. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'll have you share what you're called to share. Along the way, we'll pause and see what themes are showing up. I'll turn it over to you, and you can fire away and start where you like.

I was thinking about this whole notion of flashpoints. It's a great notion. It's similar to something I use when I'm working with people in groups. It is to think about moments in their life that have been defining similar moments. People have asked me how I came to do the work I do on other podcasts. I give a story about being the Goldilocks of the system change world because I've worked in small systems, medium-sized systems, and large systems.

This is a campfire and you want it to be personal, so I'm going to start with where whatever gifts I have were forged, which was my family's dining room table. There were a few things about it that were formative. One is I was relatively marginalized as the youngest and the only girl. I had three older brothers, all of whom were talkative, aggressive, athletic, smart, quick, sharp, and funny. It was a comedic time at the dining room table often. I had three older brothers.

I had a father who started with humble beginnings but worked his way up the corporate ladder. He did so because he had an incredible Jesuit training as a child. He was smart but also analytical and logical. Arguing with him was always formidable. He would conduct these arguments at the dining room table. My brothers were the primary participants. My mother was also smart, socially skilled, empathic, creative, a wonderful artist, and an incredible athlete. She struggled in that environment. She struggled powerfully.

I’m a marginalized person because they didn't listen to me. They largely dismissed me. I observed the dynamics at the table. I became an astute observer of system dynamics. What I noticed at the time, especially as I became a teenager when the Vietnam War was escalating, is the metaphor that came to mind. I saw my father when he would get into an argument using conventional warfare. My brothers would too. He'd make a point. They'd make a counterpoint.

My mother, on the other hand, was like the Viet Cong. She engaged in guerrilla warfare. She'd say these indirect things. She might get tipsy at the table. She might throw in something out of left field and distract the conversation. It would be like somebody losing in a card game and turning over the card table.

The received wisdom at the time was that my dad had the power that my mother didn't. As an observer, I saw how she was controlling the shots in a lot of ways. It was in a self-defeating way for her, which gave rise to my interest in focusing on the power of the powerless to not be self-defeating. She was powerful. She was a powerful presence at that table.

That was a seminal moment or time in my life. The flashpoint that shifted things was when I was twelve years old. I was up skiing with my brothers. We were putting our ski boots on. I was thirteen at the time. Their friends were there, and they were slightly older. It was a socially awkward time for me. How I looked and came across was important to me in front of these cute guys that my brothers were bringing along, and they called me a nasty name, which they had called me throughout my life.

It was awful. It was a moment where I said, “I'm not going to take it anymore.” I looked my brothers in the eye and said, “Call me pig again and you will live to regret it. I never want to hear that come out of your mouth again. You'll be dead.” I said it with such conviction that they looked at me like, “Who is this person? I better be careful.” They never called me that name again.

Confronting Childhood Challenges: A Seminal Moment

That was a seminal moment that solidified this notion that we have more power than we think we do. By catering to what they were doing and going along with it, I was advocating my power, and I needed to take it back. That was a powerful lesson to me. That was the first flashpoint in this larger context of having observed how systems work. The subtle ways we don't see because we don't get back far enough to the periphery to look at it. I was wedged on the periphery, which 67% of our population called the exhausted majority right now, which is why I'm speaking to them.

We have more power than we think we do. It's about recognizing when to take it back and set boundaries.

You're coming right out the gates with such a powerful notion. I love your story because it's something that resonates with me. I can feel this sense that people often rush in and have that attack. They bring in the arguments and act. The reality is the people who are observant of the situation, almost the people who slow things down are where you get the most power from.

Even seeing the passive aggressiveness that your mother was putting out into the room during those arguments. That wasn't well either. In reality, it's how you displayed that. It took a while for you to get the courage to be able to speak up and do what you need. You were always paying attention to the dynamics and seeing how that was going to manifest. That's a lesson for a lot of people who are leading in tumultuous times.

Had I not been doing that observing, I could never have made that move but I was quite sure I didn't want to go the way my mom went and abdicate my power and exercise it indirectly. I wasn't making an argument. What I was doing was setting a limit or a boundary. We all need to do that in life. It can be hard to do, and it's frightening. It takes courage. It also takes desperation which, in my case, was more likely the case.

Here you are as a young adult. It’s not like you’re a seasoned professional coming in and saying, “Enough is enough. I can stand my ground.” You're still only a teenager at this time. That speaks volumes for who you are as an individual. Tell me what happens next. What's the next big flash point? What happened that propelled you into the next stages of your life?

I'm torn between the two. I'll give you both of them. I was a rebellious teenager. Early on, I was involved in the civil rights and the anti-war movement so were my friends. The rest of my family was the athletic set. Everybody in my family was liberal. My dad is the most liberal of all because he grew up in Europe. I was the most involved in the political movements of the day, which made me an outlier at the boarding school my parents sent me to because they were concerned about what I would do if I weren't at a boarding school. I'm grateful to them because, in retrospect, I share that concern. I ended up getting a great education, for which I am grateful. I have the incredible privilege that I enjoyed. I was aware of that privilege from the moment I stepped onto that campus.

Fortunately, while I was at that school, which was Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, my English teacher Karen Kelly introduced me to African American literature. It was around when the Harlem Renaissance had taken off and came into the mainstream. I read a lot of African American literature and poets. I had this experience of like, “I am not black, but I know what it's like to feel marginalized and powerless.” It was the first time that people were telling my story in a different way and different from my privileged background, but I could resonate with what it is like to feel marginalized. No matter what you did, you weren't seen. You were Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

I immediately became acquainted with the African American experience, which changed the trajectory of my life in many ways. When we had the 125th racial reckoning in our country, and everybody was talking about woke, I was like, “When did we go back to sleep?” This was the wolf and warp of my life back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. I wrote that to a friend of mine with whom I was involved in the movement. She said, “Because we didn't carry the ball between then and now, it's our fault. If you're looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror.” She's right.

Going back to boarding school, it was a time when I felt quite alone in my perspective but also reassured by people like Karen Kelly, who introduced me to African American literature. I also had an incredible social studies teacher, John Schuler, who was revered and loved. I write about him in one of the essays in my book. He did a mock UN and I got to be Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was a fascinating satellite country because it was the only one that said, “Screw you, Stalin.” This was right up my alley for standing up to authoritarian leaders. As I tell the story in the book, Stalin had sent a bunch of assassins to try to kill the leader of Yugoslavia. Finally, Tito wrote them back and said, “Stop sending all these assassins because if you don't, I'll send one over to you and I won't have to send another.” He broke free and became the head of the non-aligned countries.

High school was a pivotal time for me intellectually. I had a mentor and teacher in political dynamics by the name of Bob Randolph, who went off to become the dean of students at MIT and was the chaplain at MIT. He would take me on in a way that suggested that I had a right to be in the room. All of these things in high school were important to me developmentally. I didn't do well academically because I was caught up in what was going on outside of school, both in my family, which was struggling, and in the larger world, which was struggling. My academics were harmed by that.

I trundled off to the University of Denver. It was the only school I could get into after going to Dana Hall. I was miserable there because it was a party school. My mind had come alive. I was involved in the political movements of the day. Joan Baez came to the University of Denver to sing. After she sang, she talked to students. She was sitting on the edge of the stage. I came up to her and said, “I'm going crazy here because I'm looking for a place I can get politically involved.” She goes, “Go to Boston.” I went to Boston. I've been here ever since. That was a flashpoint. I went to Boston. I did what she said. Everything else is history.

It’s a wonderful story. At the crux of it all is this sense of having the right people around you. The environment is important to harness your thought leadership and your ability to make an impact if you're feeling stunted or if you're feeling overwhelmed. What I've realized in this short conversation so far is that you have a lot of interest and energy to make an impact. The problem is if you're overwhelmed, it can be hard to buckle down and do the things that are needed. The key thing is to get that focus and to be with people who are doing the same things as you and be able to have them harness who you are as an individual.

That is such an important point because when I went to Boston, I had nowhere to go. I had no money. I had dropped out of school. My family wasn't keen on supporting my near-do-well ways. I called up my friend David Gage, who was living on Commonwealth Avenue at the time, attending BU. I said, “Do you have a place for me to stay.” He said, “I got a couch in the living room. You can come to stay here.”

I was there for three years. I ended up going back to BU to go back to college. All of his friends, who I came to be close to were a social context that allowed me to be who I am and to explore the world because it was psychologically safe enough to explore the world, explore ideas, and try out different things. I am grateful to David for my whole life, for being that person who bet on me and gave me a place to live while I got my feet on the ground.

We need people around us who are allowing us to flourish as individuals. One of the things that I often think about is that our thinking becomes more powerful when we're in concert with other people, not just thinking alone. People often think, “What an amazing thought leader or person.” It wasn't like you had these thoughts come out of one brain. It's because your brain was in concert with other people in conversation.

That is why I think relationships are important. You can only grow in the context of relationships. People who challenge you, people you find frustrating, and people you love.

What happens now? Is there another flash point you want to bring to the table? I hope there's another one that brings you into the work that you did at the Monitor Group and beyond, but I don't want to lead the witness.

People always say, “How did you get to where you are?” It’s like they can get a recipe. It is following your passion and talents, and wedding the two. I did go to BU. At BU at the time, I had extraordinary teachers. This is when I was no longer living with my family. I had a group of friends who created the support and synergies that allowed me to flourish. My work performing academic life was left behind. I started to excel academically, which was pleasing for me because my brother Rob and I were the only two people in our family who had not done that well. Both of us, once we got to college, took off. That was gratifying.

To create real change, follow your passion and align it with your talents. That's where the magic happens.

I met Howard Zinn. He was my political science teacher. He had a profound influence on me because he wrote about the people's history of America. This comes back to the theme that if all we do is focus on the people who have formal power, we're missing a large part of the story. At the beginning of Remaking The Space Between Us, my book, I talk about the twelve or so citizen movements that have led nations out of darkness. This reinforced, while I was at BU, this notion that people have power.

I went from that to starting a program in the South End with a couple of other people to help the program. It was the beginning of what was called the self-help movement in many low-income communities around the country. These were communities that many, especially White people and people who had more money, thought, “These poor communities, we have to help them.” Even to the point of if there's an addiction problem, rather than people helping themselves like an AA model, getting off of whatever chemical they're addicted to will give them methadone, which is another narcotic.

There was resistance to that in many low-income communities, especially communities of color. A self-help movement took off, and I got involved in the self-help movement. For a while, I was the editor of the Massachusetts Self-Help Area Coalition. I worked in these communities as a catalyst to generate self-help. That was a huge part of my life in my twenties.

I ended up working in a community mental health program where there was an adolescent program of self-help. I was a young person. I worked with young people. I was trained by professionals, including David Kantor, who was one of the founders of family therapy. That's where I learned about family systems. I also learned about community systems and how communities affected and shaped the lives of people.

One of the things I tried to do was to help kids figure out how to navigate these different systems. That was remarkably difficult, stressful, and fraught with opportunities for burnout. I was working many hours a week, and it became quite frustrating. This is in my Goldilock story where I felt like these systems, the individual, or their families were small.

I decided to go back to graduate school. It was by happenstance that I was looking at this catalog, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I had been accepted into their master's program. My dad was looking over my shoulder. By then, my dad had gone from being quite poor to being one of the top people at IBM. He looks at the catalog and says, “Chris Argyris teaches there?” I had never heard of the guy. I said, “Yeah, what's the big point?” He goes, “He's one of three people who came through IBM I ever had any respect for.” I said, “Who were the other two?” He goes, “Herb Simon, who got a Nobel Prize in economics, and Jay Forrester, who's the Father of Systems Dynamics.”

I hadn't heard of any of these people at the time, but I trusted my dad that he was onto something. I went and took a course with Chris Argyris. It was on organizational learning and consulting. He was the Father of the Field of Organizational Learning. There are about 100 people in the class. He's very confrontational, which, as you can tell from having confronted my brothers and my brothers having confronted me and each other all my life. It was not as daunting as it was for many of the other students in the class, who were outraged at his behavior.

They were saying he was being unfair. He goes, “What's the data on being unfair?” They're like, “It's something I feel. My feelings are the data.” Finally, I hype up at the end of the room. I point to something that he had said and done in the case he had given us. I said, “I can see why people might think that's unfair because you said this, and they could naturally conclude that.” He went, “Good point. Thank you.” It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship because I thought, “This guy is influenceable.” He thought, “There's somebody who's not basing what they're saying on their feelings but is pointing to something we can independently assess for ourselves.”

Entering The World Of Organizational Behavior And Change

I became a mentee of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. I became immersed in organizational behavior, change, and learning. That's where my life doing work in organizations began and lasted for 30 years until I realized having abandoned the political world, it was time to go back to it. I spent 30 years tilling that soil. It was fascinating. As Goldilocks, it was right. It wasn't too big like a political system. It wasn't too small, like an individual or family. It was just right in terms of size.

I love how you started this off as following the passion in a sense because this is where the Goldilocks story is powerful. You have to test them all out and see what happens. As long as there's a central theme here of like, what is at the core of all this? There's this sense of wanting to make a difference and impact and not accepting things at face value because a lot of people are saying, “That's the problem. Take that problem and solve it at the top.” The reality is it's getting under the surface and understanding what's systemically going on.

That's such an important point. That's where the passion and following your passion, bliss, and talent come together. I did have a passion for changing systems and having an impact because my own family system was struggling, and my survival was dependent on it. That nurtured an incredible passion. I thought it could be different. I saw the potential for it to be different. It was frustrating because I saw the potential. There's the desire for impact. The thing I will always say to all of my students because they always want to know, “What do I say? What do I do?” I always start with, “You have to observe first. If you don't observe first, whatever you do will not be as effective.”

Observing first is key. You can't change what you haven't fully understood.

There's a wonderful movie called Chasing Mavericks about surfing. You have to watch it. It's about this master surfer and this young boy. His family is adrift. He's adrift. He wants to learn. He saw him surf on these big mavericks, 50-foot waves, and he wanted to learn how to do it. He gets rebuffed a million times. Finally, the guy says, “I'll teach you.” At first, he does all like the Karate Kid wax off, wax on. He has them do things like holding his breath underwater for five minutes. All these peace parts that need to be in place to be a master surfer, he has him do all of that.

He's done all of it. He brings them to the ocean, where these big waves are. The kid gets on the surfboard and tries to swim out with the surfboard to get past the breakers so he can surf. For every effort he makes, he gets slammed. The waves slam him. He comes in and collapses on the beach. The guy comes over and goes, “Let's figure out what you're doing. Look out there. What do you see?” He goes, “Lots of waves.” He goes, “What are they doing? They're knocking you down. Look over there.”

He points to an eddy on the side where there are these cliffs where there's a flow of water going out to the ocean. He goes, “What do you see?” He says, “The waves can't come in. The water is going out.” He goes, “That's a conveyor belt out to the ocean to get beyond the breakers.” He shows them how to do it. The thing about observing is that you can spot the conveyor belt. People always say to me, “It's hopeless. I've tried, and tried,” just like that kid. It's not how hard they're trying. It's what they're trying. Until you observe, you can't see that.

I love how you bring this all together because finding the right wave unlocks the key to success in business or whatever you're trying to do. The problem is that many people are working hard to catch that wave. They exhaust themselves. They don't take a step back and say, “What can I observe as opposed to constantly trying the same things over and over again and exhausting myself?” It's getting observant and seeing that.

Sometimes, they can't even get out beyond the breakers to find the wave because they're exhausted. They've been beating the heads against a wall. How many times I've heard people say that in organizations? I can't count.

In the meantime, they build a lot of animosity, resentment of others, and all these other things that can build up a wall of like, “I can't overcome this. The story I'm telling myself is that it's not possible.” I'm loving these stories, but I want to shift gears. I'd love to hear about the book. How did you get here? Share some of the key nuggets you think others would love to hear that we should hear from the book.

The most recent flashpoint was during the pandemic. The pandemic, as everybody knows, is a collective trauma we've never processed. As a result, we're getting goofier, like individuals who don't process their traumas. We were in the midst of the collective trauma, the pandemic, a divisive presidency, and a racial reckoning. This was a tumultuous time. Groups were turning on groups at that moment. They do a lot of destructive things to one another, White, Black, generational, geographical, urban. You had groups turning on groups.

I'm sitting here in Vermont looking at all this. I had rewired by then. I didn't retire because I'm always going to work. I decided to rewire, which means I'm now only going to do what I wanted to do. I was looking at all this. I said, “This is what I saw in organizations.” That was at the heart of my work. When groups start fighting with each other, several things happen.

The first is they start to become more insular within. They start to share the same data, beliefs, and rumors. Their mental space in those groups gets smaller. When that happens, the distance with other groups gets further away. The distance gets greater. The more distant they get, the more insular they are across. The more insular they get within, the more distant, fearful, and hateful they get across. That dynamic, the more insular within, the more distant and fearful across, is self-reinforcing. It escalates over time. The organizations that sometimes came to me because they had escalated so badly that they were no longer able to function and compete in the marketplace. That's the first thing.

The second thing is when groups across an organization start to get insular within, distant across, and start fighting, they can no longer solve the organization's problems. They worsen. They also no longer pay attention to their external relationships. They're focused on their internal relationships, cozying up within and distancing across. They lose sight of their external relationships. When that happens, everybody starts to look up the hierarchy to save them. They look to the leader to save them because they've lost confidence in their ability to save themselves. They start to look to the boss, but we have to make decisions faster. You decide to get rid of this participatory stuff. The same people who cried for it at time T one are now crying against it.

My interventions were almost all geared towards improving the ability of people to operate more cooperatively across groups so that two things could happen. One, the relationships across groups got stronger and no longer put a ceiling on the growth of the organization. There is also individual growth. The more they competed, contested, and fought across groups, the less they had to grow. All they had to say is it was hopeless.

They didn't have to think about what they might be missing. They didn't have to think about what their inability to work across groups was saying about their leadership and their failure as leaders. How is their frustration requiring them to grow? When you interrupt the distancing, which is what I would do, step number one is the distancing and get people together. They have to confront their own limitations and abilities. It starts to increase the growth of individuals. It also increases the growth of the organization because they can now solve problems.

I looked around at our country and I'm seeing the same thing. Groups are fighting against groups. The more they're distancing from each other, the more insular that mental space is becoming within groups. That's distancing across. Over the past 50 years, we've seen more of a desire for an authoritarian, autocratic leader to take over so they can solve the problems we can't solve.

If you look at the history or the reality of autocracy, autocracies are far more likely to trash an economy than a democracy. There's plenty of data on that. People who think that we're going to make America great again through an autocratic leader ought to think twice because it almost always destroys the economy and helps the super-rich, some of whom are trying to support the ascendancy of an autocracy.

I love the ideas that you're bringing here because there's a sense that it's not about me. It's about the we. That's over always constantly brought to the surface. People say like, “We need to do it together.” The reality is as soon as we start looking to one person to solve it, we've gone into a scarcity mode. We've gone to a limited view of the world. The reality is when we slow down and look at it from a big-picture view, we realize that we need each other to understand how to move through this together and have that view of not even in one country but also thinking about it more globally.

This is important what you're getting at because, as my mentor Chris Argyris would say, “A lot of people would espouse that and agree with that point of view that we ought to do it together. It has to be we.” At a theory-in-use level, we've been raised to think the opposite. We've been raised to think it's win-lose and zero-sum, which makes it very difficult for us, even if we believe what you're saying, to shift modalities. I see a lot of people on the left who believe what you're saying still act in a counterpoint, win-lose, unilateral way. The play goes on. It evolves, and it's not very pretty.

One of the things we're up against is that our democracy and our country are still living in the vestiges of evolutionary legacy, which long ago, we learned to go from hunting as an individual to hunting as a collaborator with one or two people to learning how to hunt in groups. We learned how to cooperate within groups. We were prevalent in groups.

The Adversarial Notion Of Democracy

What we overlook is that the reason we've learned to cooperate within groups is so we can compete against other groups. Those two capabilities evolved hand in hand. Our entire history as a nation is built on that legacy. That's why our democracy is based on an adversarial notion of democracy. That adversarial notion of democracy is built on how citizens deal with each other.

One of the things I argue in the book is that we need to reconceive our democracy and role as citizens, as friends. A woman by the name of Danielle Allen, a scholar and political scientist, brilliant, wrote about this in one of her books. She said, “If you conceive of citizens as friends rather than adversaries, their self-interest becomes your self-interest because you can't stay in a friendship if you don't care about the interest of your friend. If you care about the interest of your friend, then you can convert rivalry self-interest into equitable self-interest.”

When I wrote about this in the book, I said, “I can imagine what people are going to say, especially the guys. They're going to say, “It’s like a girl. She doesn't like the idea of an adversarial democracy. She wants us all to be friends. How naive is that?” I followed up with three essays about what happens when so-called adversaries form friendships with their so-called adversaries. One is Congress. It's in a committee in Congress and the modernization of Congress led by Derek Kilmer. What happened is they produced more recommendations than any other committee in Congress. Two-thirds of them got passed. The committee before them trying to reform Congress passed at zero.

The second is about what happened in Pittsburgh after the Tree of Life massacre when eleven Jews were killed by a White nationalist. In Pittsburgh, communities that had been segregated for generations. African American, Jewish, Muslim, and Asian came together over the course of three years. Patrice O'Neill, from not in our town, produced a film called Repairing the World. It's about how befriended their enemies.

The third essay is about how two Orthodox Jews and a third young woman named Allison Gornik from the Middle West befriended a White nationalist who was the heir apparent to the White nationalist movement, godson to David Duke, and the son of Don Black, who created Stormfront, which is a hate site, and how Derek Black's views transformed over the course of two years by his own words because friends regardless helped him see the impact of his actions and his beliefs.

This has led me to believe something I saw on a TV show on Netflix called Inside The Mind of A Dog, which talks about how dogs are the most successful species on the planet. They are the most diverse and successful species on the planet because they follow the survival of the friendliest. He makes a case that those species that have done best have not been the ones who have dominated. It's been those who have learned how to make friends with other species.

Survival of the friendliest: The most successful species are those who learn to make friends, not enemies.

I've been having a hard time watching it because my dogs always get crazy. It’s a wonderful way to tie this back together. There's such a wonderful aspect of how we can create more friends in the world instead of enemies. When we do, we realize that the overall benefit of all that is that we can create a better society and impact and live a better life.

All of us, not just some of us.

I don't even know where to bring this because you served up a masterclass right there. I'm blown away, Diana. That was wonderful.

Thank you for saying that. This was from the heart. Thank you for creating a context where I could tell my life story. All of it culminates in a book. I've written three other books, but this one is my love child. It has been favorably received, but I am unfortunately of an age and a stage in my life where my ability to promote it and have a platform as a political, historical writer is not what it needs to be for this book to get the attention. I and people like Yuval Levin on the right, Deval Patrick on the left, and Jane Mansbridge, a credible political scientist, all believe it is worth people reading. I look to people like yourself to help spread the word.

You have my support wholeheartedly. I am thrilled to be able to share this with others, not just here but in other places. I'm going to continue to rally on that. We're going to go a little over time, and I hope that isn't a problem. I have to ask my last question, which I'm excited to ask. What are 1, 2, or 3 books that had an impact on you and why?

You did give me a heads-up that I was able to think about this. Many books have affected me. I'm going to throw a fourth aside. This didn't make it on the list, but To Kill a Mockingbird, which I know is controversial. It was an extraordinary book for me when I was a child. Our dogs are Atticus and Scout. I have to give a call-out to that.

I'm going to mention three books. The first one was James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. There's nothing by Baldwin that wouldn't make this list. There's a documentary out called I Am Not Your Negro, which is a story of James Baldwin's life in his own words. I strongly recommend that your audience watch that documentary. It is by far the most powerful documentary when it comes to thinking about race in America. We are a multi-group democracy now. Not thinking about race is not an option if we want to move forward. That's number one.

Number two is Václav Havel essay. Václav Havel was a dissident in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet regime, a playwright. After the Velvet Revolution, he became president of the Czech Republic. He wrote a book called The Power of the Powerless. It came out in the late 1980s. It was at a time when the solidarity movement in Poland was losing steam, and they were about to give up. It completely reinvigorated the movement. People began to see the power that they had to organize workers and resist Soviet control. That essay is credited with revitalizing that movement and with helping to take down the Soviet Union. The Power of the Powerless is an incredible essay, and it had a profound impact on me.

The last one, there's another book coming out by him, Timothy Snyder. He wrote a book called Bloodlands, which documents the terror of the Nazi regime in Germany and Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union in the ‘30s and ‘40s and the tens of millions of people whose lives were taken by those regimes. It is a grueling book to wade through. I don't know how he wrote it. It must have been painful to write.

Fortunately for us, he distilled twenty lessons from that book in a bestseller called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. It is a must-read. He published it shortly after Trump was elected in 2016 because when you've done the observation he's done, you know where that train is headed. You're going to do everything you can to head it off. He has another book coming out. I'm blocking the title, but it's coming out. If you look up Timothy Snyder on Amazon and forthcoming books, you'll find it. I haven't read it yet. I can't recommend it other than I know it's going to be great. Those are the books.

Closing Thoughts And The Power Of Words

I'm blown away. Those are amazing selections that you've shared here. One of the things that comes to mind around all the things you shared is this idea of the power of words. People underestimate that my voice can have an impact on others. When you think about having that book written, creating a movement, and having people realize that they have more power than they think. That is something that excites me, inspires me, and makes me want to think, “How can we get more people empowered to put their words out into the world?”

You are doing a great job at that.

Thank you so much. I could go on for hours with you. This was a wonderful conversation. I'm glad that I'm able to share you with my audience. Thank you for coming to the show. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where they can find your new book, reach out to you, and learn more about your work.

Remaking The Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together To Build A Better Future For All is the latest book. It is giving voice to the power of the powerless. It documents the hundreds of thousands of people who are already working across the country. That can be found on Amazon. It can be found elsewhere. I would be grateful if people bought it on Amazon. It would go up in the rankings, which will help it have a greater impact. If people like it, they would write a review. It’s important.

I have Remaking The Space at Substack. I have a biweekly Substack newsletter where I'm building on what I learned in the book and updating it and trying to help people see the voice they have and the importance of exercising it while at the same time staying sane in insane times. I have a website, which is RemakingTheSpace.org, where people can get their feet wet. I recommend that as well.

Thank you for sharing that. Thanks to everyone for coming on this journey. I know you're leaving completely blown away at all of the great insights, the stories, and the time to make a difference in the world in your own little way. Thanks for coming on the show and the journey with us.

Thank you. I appreciate it, Tony.

You're welcome.

Important Links

• Diana Smith - LinkedIn
• Jeff Wetzler – Past Episode
• Invisible Man
• Remaking The Space Between Us
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Fire Next Time
• The Power of the Powerless
• Bloodlands
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
• RemakingTheSpace.org

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