Patterns Versus Stereotypes

I've now been home quarantining since March 12, closing in on a year. While I still have plenty of work as a cooperative process consultant and trainer (in fact, I've never been busier) I do it all via Zoom and email, and there's no travel—which ordinarily consumes about two months annually. So that's quite a shift.

There are serendipitous benefits of all this unexpected time at home: the increased opportunity to indulge in my voracious appetite for reading and my recreational passion for duplicate bridge are two. In addition, and it's given me time to participate in an antiracism study group that meets weekly for an hour via Zoom. In a normal year (remember what that was like?) my travel schedule would make this impossible. We've been at it for nine months now and some precious insights have gestated in that incubator.

The study group has relied on White Fragility by Robin Diangelo and Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad is inspirational texts for our exploration. We take turns reading, and then pause and share reflections or questions. We are in no hurry. It's all about the journey and what we discover along the way. The group is about a dozen, mostly north of 60, but not all; mostly white, but not all. The one thing we all have in common is that we're past the initial white trap that most of us fall into—I can't be a racist because I don't engage in it overtly. So it's a process of digging out our reactions and how we've all been inadvertently complicit with systemic racism—the water we've swum in all our life and become inured to. We've learned to not see it, and now we're doing the poignant and often embarrassing work of unblinding ourselves.

Last week we focused for a time on stereotypes and the ways in which they can be damaging to BIPOC. I had no trouble understanding the dangers of stereotyping (broad brush categorizing certain groups in defining ways, based on race, creed, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class, you name it). We especially took time to see the insidiousness of stereotypes that are ostensibly positive (Blacks are better at basketball; Latinos are better are baseball; Asians are better at math; gays have more fashion sense) as they tend to be limiting and grossly homogenizing. Putting people in boxes inherently has a dehumanizing quality.

I admitted to the group that a stereotype that I've struggled with is a knee-jerk tendency to assume that when I hear a heavy non-English accent that that the person will not be fluent in English idioms or humor. My dear friend and process peer, María, is an Argentinian national and retains a strong accent from her upbringing, and her professional work as a court translator (Spanish/English). That said, she has been in the US for more than 20 years and is completely fluent in English (and very funny). I love being brought up short like that, pointing out how stereotypes can take you down a path that reality will require you to retrace your steps. Oops!

Then I started thinking about my relationship to patterns in group dynamics. Understanding tendencies in groups is enormously beneficial to me in diagnosing what's happening and how to respond (where have I seen this, or something like this before?; what do I know about what's effective as a response?; what constitutes a sound structural response for shifting into a healthier system?) As someone who has been in the field for 30+ years (and been to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of cooperative group meetings) one of the valuable things that clients and students get when they work with me is access to my pattern library. In fact, I tell clients (only half in jest) that it's hard to show my something I've never seen before.

But the antiracism focus on stereotypes got me thinking. Aren't patterns just a less pejorative name for stereotypes? How can one be OK and the other bad? Excepting the despicable practice of promulgating stereotypes maliciously for the purpose of justifying racism, I think that most stereotypes contain at least a germ of truth, or they wouldn't have been created in the first place. How do we discern signal from noise; what is useful from what is damaging and limiting? 

Patterns allow me to sort quickly in messy situations, and to perceive a pathway through a forest where others see only a dense stand of trees. I believe the key is understanding that patterns are tendencies, not facts, and I must always remain vigilant to how emerging information is converging or diverging with the pattern, telling me that it's OK to continue, or it's time to adjust. The pattern is a just a tool, and when events tell me it's not the right tool, it's my job to put that one down and select another (or modify the one in hand appropriately).

I also need to be on guard against the seductive ego-stroking trap of wanting to be the hero; having my initial analysis be deemed correct and to be seen as the savior in the situation. Thus, I might fight for my pattern when it's no longer serving, and I may be a bit slower to let it go and adjust (but it was such a nice pattern)—which doesn't serve my prime objective: what best serves the client. (Instead is serves my hidden agenda: what best strokes Laird's ego. Yuck.)

One of the most interesting aspects of my group practice is working with outliers—people who don't fit in easily and are often experienced as difficult and labeled "the problem." In recent years I've come to focus more on helping groups understand that people come in incredible rainbow of varieties and that a group's overall health is directly related to its ability to understand that variety and discover ways to embrace it as normal (an opportunity to benefit from hybrid vigor), rather than pathologize it and turn it into us/them dynamics. This is the heavy lifting of diversity.

Ironically, patterns are both an aid in that work and a potential blind spot. On the plus side, I am aware of patterns in how people are different, and that helps me unpack the issue. Further, I am aware of how groups are susceptible to ostracizing someone who doesn't easily fit in (culling them from the herd). It can be brutal, and often the majority (those accepted in the herd) are oblivious to the ways in which they have closed their minds to what they're doing. Where they see it as the outlier's problem; I see it as system failure.

On the not-so-plus side, pattern recognition can lead me to missing nuance that doesn't fit the pattern (which only happens all the time). While patterns allow me to work quickly (I'm good at it) it leads to mistakes. At my best, I learn from those mistakes and my patterns get adjusted (or I learn to go slower). But how can I be sure I'm catching all my mistakes? That question haunts me at night.

I observe other group dynamic practitioners and I notice the patterns they rely on. If I have a problem with their patterns (because I don't think their approach or solution works well in the field) I tend to see that as a blind spot they have. Surely I suffer from the same disease.

One of the reasons I like working in teams (of two or three) is that it's invaluable to have peers seeing me in action and letting me know when they sense that I'm off or have missed something important. I dare not rely solely on my own senses. 

At the end of the day, I see stereotypes as bad to the extent that people rely on them without reflection—where people are too lazy to see nuance, or are blind to their damage. I see patterns as good to the extent that they are living tools and I remain open to adjusting them in light of what's actually happening. It's a dance, and the music never stops.