The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

In the preface to his new book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, Peter Coleman writes:

Coleman goes on to say, quite correctly I think, that this fight is going on within every American, within American society overall, and within individuals and societies around the world. Right now, in the U.S. and many other democracies, I would say that the first wolf is not only winning, it has a commanding lead in this contest.

The first three chapters of The Way Out explain why the wolf of anger and fear is winning, using a framework that Coleman first presented in his earlier book, The Five Percent (2011). Central to this framework is the notion that intractable conflicts (such as that between the Left and the Right in the United States) are highly complex systems that take on lives of their own, quite independent of the wishes or actions of any of the individual actors within those systems. In his earlier book, Coleman referred to these conflicts as “complex adaptive systems,” a term used by systems theorists to explain systems that have many interrelated parts and that adapt to changes in any one part of the system by changing other parts of the system in response. The level of complexity is such that it is impossible to predict how any particular change will manifest throughout the system. Moreover, the indeterminate nature of complex adaptive systems sharply limits one’s ability to influence such systems in intentional ways, as such systems exhibit substantial and irreducible degrees of uncertainty.

When I first learned about complex adaptive systems from physicist Wendell Jones, he explained that such systems are not just complicated systems; they are qualitatively different (see Jones 2003). Complicated systems are mechanical systems, built by people who fully understand their parts, how the parts are put together, and how they are supposed to work. If the system breaks, the faulty component can be identified and replaced so the system will work again.

In The Way Out, Coleman switches to the terms “cloud problems,” which are the same as complex adaptive systems, and “clock problems,” which are equivalent to Jones’s complicated systems. In clock problems, the parts are all connected in known ways and their movements are predictable. Clocks and “clock problems” can be fixed when they are broken by fixing the pieces and the connections between them.

Clouds, however, are highly complex and unpredictable, and cannot necessarily be “fixed.” It is not even clear what “working properly” would be, as the question arises, “Working properly for whom or to what end?” So “cloud problems,” or “cloud conflicts,” like the intractable conflicts Coleman wrote about in The Five Percent, cannot be resolved with traditional solutions or standard problem‐solving methods. As a result, Coleman observes, “[O]ur good faith‐attempts to address them often have no identifiable effects whatsoever” (36).

Unfortunately, most people have trouble dealing with true complexity, and try very hard to simplify complex narratives so that they are more easily understood. One easily understandable narrative is that our problems are not caused by a multitude of complex factors—often including our own actions (which is almost always the case)—but rather by “the other group,” which is “evil.” So instead of trying to understand the complexity and respond accordingly, people in intractable conflicts typically simplify their narrative and view it as a conflict with the “evil other,” so that the “solution” is clear: Get rid of or overpower or otherwise vanquish “the other.” Since “the other” usually thinks in the same way, this is a set up for ever‐increasing polarization, conflict escalation, and intractability. We certainly are seeing this today with American politics. Each side blames the other for all their and the nation’s problems, and seeks to overpower them electorally, legislatively, judicially, and even with violence, as we witnessed on January 6, 2021.

A related aspect of Coleman's explanatory framework is the notion of “attractors,” which are “strong, complicated change‐resistant patterns” exhibited by systems (15). Like “complex adaptive systems,” the term “attractor” is widely used in systems theory and mathematics, but is confusing to many of us who are not well versed in those disciplines. It is easy to think of attractors as being “attractive” (or nice or good). However, the attractors that Coleman describes in The Way Out and in his earlier book, The Five Percent, are far more often destructive. Coleman’s “attractors” are a bit like the Siren’s song of Greek mythology—seductive tunes that lure you into catastrophe.

One example of an attractor is the continuing standoff between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The destructive dynamics of what Coleman calls “the attractor landscape” make cooperative action between the two parties essentially impossible. Such dynamics also drive the never‐ending hate speech that dominates social media. These destructive patterns of thought and action are extremely deeply rooted and difficult to change. Even when people see that their adversarial behavior is getting them nowhere, powerful forces cause them to continue to, in my terms, “dig the hole deeper” (Burgess 2012). As Coleman puts it with reference to U.S. polarization, “[T]oday we are all stuck in an us‐versus‐them attractor that is much larger and more powerful than any one of us” (15).

When I initially read The Five Percent, I didn’t like it, as I thought Coleman used esoteric and jargony language that made simple ideas seem unnecessarily complicated. But after several readings, I have come to conclude that the idea of “attractors” is core to the understanding of intractable conflicts, as it is core to the understanding of U.S. polarization. Later in The Way Out, Coleman explains the key idea further:

Attractors keep us trapped in very destructive patterns of behavior because they provide us with a simple understanding of a complex situation (which we tend to like) as well as a stable platform for action, making it clear what is right and wrong for us to think and do.

Coleman explains further that attractors are fractals, meaning the same patterns play out at all levels of society. They pull us into destructive behaviors in our families and other personal relationships. They do the same in the organizations with which we engage and in our communities, our states, our nation, and our world. Thus, the polarization we see in the U.S. Congress is repeated at Thanksgiving dinner tables around the country, in churches, workplaces, schools, parks, anywhere where Americans gather and interact.

While most Americans are distressed at this polarization, and particularly at the dysfunction it is causing in Congress and other American institutions (Duffin 2021), few know what can be done to change these dynamics and reverse these trends, even in their own behaviors and relationships. Moreover, far too many of us have concluded that since there is no way of escaping today’s big us‐versus‐them confrontations, it is best to do whatever it takes to make sure that our side wins. So we fight with all our might, hoping to help achieve that outcome.

Nevertheless, Coleman argues that there is reason for hope. Citing the work of William Zartman (Zartman and Berman 1982; Touval and Zartman 1985; Zartman 1989; Zartman 2003), as well as his own earlier research, Coleman sets forth three factors that are most important for getting people to stop fighting and consider, instead, more peaceful ways of resolving their differences:

• First, there must be instability—something that throws the system out of whack, thereby releasing the grip of the attractors that are holding people in destructive patterns.

• Second, there must be a “mutually‐hurting stalemate” between the parties—a situation in which neither side can win and both sides are damaged by continuing the conflict.

• Third, the parties must see “a way out”—an alternative future that is more desirable than continuing their destructive confrontation.

(The latter two concepts spring from Zartman’s notion of “ripeness” in negotiation theory.)

Coleman asserts that all three of these conditions now exist. The first destabilizing event was the election of Donald Trump in 2016, followed by his highly unorthodox and disruptive presidency. COVID‐19 was another shock that further upended our basic social and economic patterns and security.

The chronic failure of our Congressional leaders to get anything done attests to the stalemate that afflicts our political system, at least at the federal level. And this stalemate is clearly hurting us, as it is preventing us from solving any of our pressing problems, from beating COVID, to successfully addressing racism and inequality, to slowing climate change—and many more.

The last requirement for overcoming hyperpolarization, according to Coleman, is “a way out,” and he promises that his book offers just that. The remainder of the book describes that “way out,” which has six steps: (1) “think different,” (2) reset, (3) bolster and break, (4) complicate, (5) move, and (6) adapt.

In telling us to “think different,” Coleman explains that this is not a typo, but rather a term that he copied from an Apple campaign touting its designers as “misfits…rebels…[and] troublemakers” (63)—the kind of people we need to get us out of the polarized attractor in which we are stuck and to think differently about “the other.”

Using language more familiar to those in the conflict resolution field, Coleman writes that we need to “change [our] theory of change” (74). He goes on to explain that most of us think of conflicts in terms of clocks (meaning simple, mechanical systems), so we think of resolving them with linear, cause‐and‐effect actions that fix what is broken. Indeed, Coleman asserts, this approach will resolve a majority of our conflicts, but it will not resolve the intractable ones, which are “cloud problems,” not “clock problems.” Coleman got the name for his earlier book, The Five Percent, from his finding that 95 percent of conflicts can be resolved using rational, linear approaches, but five percent cannot. Those are the ones that he called “intractable” in the first book and “cloud problems” in The Way Out.

These problems/conflicts require what Coleman calls “radical relandscaping,” a term that relates to his notion of “attractor landscapes.” “Instead of focusing on analyzing and identifying the broken pieces of the conflict in order to fix them,” which is a mechanistic approach, radical relandscaping involves understanding “the nature of the context that gives rise to these conflicts and the capacity to work with the flow of forces within the context to support the rise of more constructive patterns” (73) (emphasis in original). This, he points out, is a very different theory of change than the one typically relied on in conflict resolution, according to which negotiators or mediators seek to understand each others’ interests or needs and then work out compromises that will meet as many of those interests and needs as possible—an inherently rational, simple cause‐and‐effect approach to conflict resolution.

Coleman’s second step is to “reset” the system. Sometimes, he says, such a reset can happen after a “bombshell,” a deeply destabilizing incident that resets the workings of the entire “cloud” or, in the language of systems theory, the complex adaptive system. Coleman considers Trump’s election and term of office as one such bombshell; COVID‐19 was another.

While it makes intuitive sense to expect such massively disruptive events to shake up established patterns, it is sobering to note that—it seems to me—neither event has done so. Even COVID—an inherently nonpartisan event (viruses do not care who we are; they attack everybody equally)—was turned into a political battle, deepening our divides, rather than bringing us together to fight a common threat. This supports the utility of Coleman’s notion of “attractors,” but not his assertion that he has found “the way out.”

Coleman finishes his “Reset” chapter by giving a series of recommendations to help people reset their relationships. Here he discusses “the butterfly effect,” which occurs when very small changes in conditions significantly impact the fate of a complex system. Coleman asserts that because there is always the potential for a butterfly effect, it is important to do what we can to put our “best foot forward” when we first meet people on the other side. If we come to the discussion with a positive attitude and a desire to cooperate instead of compete, for example, the outcome can be significantly better.

While this may be true in some cases, it seems to me to be hard to square with the notion that cloud systems are inherently unpredictable. Positive attitudes and a desire to cooperate are certainly more likely to move systems in positive ways than are negative attitudes and competition, particularly if they are held by large numbers of people. But it is very hard to say which part of the system is vulnerable or “ripe” for such changes, and which parts are likely to be impervious to them. Moreover, while positive attitudes and cooperation are fairly likely to be helpful in interpersonal interactions, a change in a relationship between two people is several orders of magnitude different than a significant depolarization of U.S. society.

In The Way Out, Coleman introduces the notion of “bolstering and breaking,” a concept earlier expressed in The Five Percent as “building up and tearing down” (2011). In both books, he argues that one should “build up” or “bolster” “latent attractors”—positive patterns of relationships that lay dormant, overpowered by the stronger, manifest, destructive attractors.

Coleman does not seem to consider the possibility that latent attractors could also be destructive; apparently assuming that latent attractors are constructive and manifest attractors are destructive. But there does not seem to be any reason why latent attractors could not be even more destructive than the ones that are currently operating. For instance, taboos are still preventing widespread violence in this country, but should those break down, the latent attractor of atrocity‐revenge‐atrocity that is so apparent in civil wars around the world could become manifest here. So, while bolstering constructive latent attractors is indeed useful, we need to be careful to keep some latent attractors latent.

Bolstering can occur by leveraging what Coleman calls “threshold‐effect changes” (114). Notwithstanding attempts to ignore or deny information that contradicts our beliefs, if we hear it over and over again, it accumulates in our brain until it passes over a certain “threshold” and causes us to radically change our views.

Such radical reversals, according to Coleman, are “surprisingly common.” He shares stories about skinheads who became tolerance trainers, peace activists who became violent militants, and religious zealots who became atheists. While I agree that such changes do happen, I do not find them “surprisingly common.” Rather, I am surprised by how strong is the pull of our preferred narratives and identities, even when belied by evidence that is obviously true. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the stories of people who deny the existence of COVID until the very moment that it takes their lives (Villegas 2020).

I guess Coleman is more of an optimist than I. Focusing on the power of threshold changes, he offers the following observation:

Coleman explains that before this era of rapid polarization, people had more positive views of those on the other side. Those more tolerant views got pushed to “more isolated corners of our minds” but they did not disappear (115). They have become latent attractors for alternative ways of thinking about, and acting with reference to, those we view as the outgroup.

It is essential, Colman asserts, to look for these buried, positive thoughts or relationships and try to strengthen them, while working to diminish patterns of thoughts or relationships that are overt but destructive (destructive manifest attractors). This is very similar to the approach to organizational or community change called “appreciative inquiry,” which works to solve problems by going back to earlier strengths and positive behaviors, rather than focus directly on current weaknesses and destructive behaviors (Cooperrider and Whitney 2001).

A related approach is to find people and organizations that are working effectively to cross the divide to reduce polarization. These are the people and groups within otherwise polarized communities that are still open, and able to speak and work constructively with those on the other side. One such organization identified by Colman is Essential Partners, formerly called the Public Conversations Project (PCP). For years, the group has held highly transformative dialogues on abortion and other controversial topics. According to Laura Chasin, PCP’s founder, the organization always begins “by identifying the communities’ existing ‘networks of effective action’” (Chasin’s term) (118). Coleman suggests that merchant groups, clergy, sports associations, women’s groups, and youth groups are such “bubbles of functionality in seas of hate and dysfunction” (118). Mobilizing such potential bridge‐builders is a common strategy used by peacebuilders working to mend relationships in formerly war‐torn societies around the world. Thus, it makes good sense that Chasin and Coleman identify this as a useful strategy for building up latent positive attractors in the U.S. political conflict.

In addition to building up positive attractors, it is necessary to work simultaneously to break destructive attractors. However, rather than address these destructive dynamics head on, Coleman writes that it is often more effective to work on the margins and on the peripheral drivers of polarization. Likewise, instead of trying to force unwilling people to change, he advises identifying sources of “resistance to change.” Is such resistance, Coleman suggests we ask, caused by a lack of skills, lack of knowledge of alternative approaches, fear of change, or something else? I would add that resistance to change might be caused by differing values and goals, such that one person’s “change for the better” is another’s “change for the worse.” It is harder to address values and goals with education and training than it is to address lack of knowledge or skills.

An additional technique Coleman recommends to break destructive attractors is to “reinforce repellers,” meaning to strengthen the factors that repel people from destructive behavior. He suggests, for example, that it helps to draw attention to taboos and the potentially dire consequences of breaking them; doing so can strengthen people’s animosity toward such behavior, thereby constraining it.

As I read Coleman’s suggestions for bolstering and breaking, however, I immediately thought of January 6, 2021, the day that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. They broke a fundamental taboo of behavior in the U.S. and immediately drew widespread condemnation. But did such condemnation bring about any changes in attitudes or behavior? It did not. Over time, most of the Republicans who initially had decried the actions of the protestors—and particularly Trump’s role in the event as it unfolded and immediately thereafter—fell into line, echoing the President’s view that this was a justified protest about a “stolen election.” The end result was a strengthened destructive attractor, not a reinforced repeller.

This is not to say that Coleman’s advice does not hold merit in some situations. But the red–blue divide in the U.S. appears, to me, to be so deeply entrenched that these recommendations, and many others that Coleman offers, are not sufficient to address the challenges we face.

Coleman starts by explaining that there are two kinds of complexity. One is “consistent complexity,” which is a positive‐feedback system in which many factors align and reinforce each other, mostly pulling in the same direction. This leads to a highly simplistic, ultra‐coherent view of us‐and‐them and the issues, which helps create destructive attractors.

The other kind of complexity is “contradictory complexity,” which is a negative‐feedback system of checks and balances that inhibit each other and are, therefore, less polarizing and less escalating. Contradictory complexity promotes more balanced and often more accurate views of us, them, and the issues. So, people seeking to diminish polarization need to embrace and enhance contradictory complexity.

A first step, Coleman says, is to acknowledge our own contradictions. This is a key step in Essential Partners’ abortion dialogues. The group asks participants to disclose their own “uncertainties or gray areas” when it comes to abortion or other contentious issues (Essential Partners 2019). This helps participants better understand the complexity of the problem, and begin to break down their overly simplistic us‐versus‐them views.

In addition, Coleman writes, we should seek out information from and viewpoints of the best representatives of people on the other side—not the “nut jobs on talk radio and cable TV” (152), but the thoughtful people who can illustrate the complexity of the issues and the legitimacy of some of the ideas typically held by the other side.

Coleman’s fifth step is movement—both physical and psychological. Movement helps us open up neural pathways and gets us thinking in new and creative ways. Coleman recommends walking outside in non‐urban spaces, which he believes is most beneficial for releasing creative thoughts. He also observes that physical synchronization, such as people walking together side‐by‐side, helps us bond and work together more effectively than when we are sitting across a table from one another. The same benefit can result from people making and sharing a meal together (as is currently being done by red–blue bridge‐building organizations such as “Make America Dinner Again”) or working together for any other common cause.

To create psychological movement, Coleman suggests “forward framing.” Instead of focusing on grievances, frustrations, and current problems, as most conflict resolution processes do, he suggests starting by brainstorming, asking “where you all ideally want to go” (170). If you were able to work your way through the current problems, what would your best‐case outcome look like?

I have long been teaching about this idea by asking students to do a future‐visioning exercise built off of a similar exercise that Elise Boulding used for envisioning a nonviolent world (Boulding 2002). What almost always happened, however, is that my students envisioned a beautiful world in which all their own liberal desires and values were fully realized. No room was left for people who did not subscribe to that vision.

I used to let my students “get away with that,” figuring that was understandable in liberal universities. But then I heard Ebrahim Rasool, the former South African ambassador to the U.S., give a talk at PeaceCon2020 (Rasool 2020). Rasool spoke about what South Africa’s experience overcoming apartheid could teach Americans trying to overcome systemic racism. He had several very important insights, two of which apply here. First, toward the end of apartheid, the (Black) African National Congress (ANC) announced that “Africa belongs to all who live here,” thereby making it clear that South Africa belonged to both Black and white. Second, he said, the key was “starting with the end,” meaning that they worked to develop a vision for the future based on the assumption that South Africa belonged to both Blacks and whites.

Based on that notion, I reworked my visioning assignment to insist that—regardless of the conflict they were addressing—students start with the assumption that the country they were looking at “belonged to all who live there.” That means, in terms of the U.S., that the country belongs to liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. We need to develop a vision of how we can all live together in peace, without subjugating one side or one side’s views to the other.

All people, Coleman explains, are extremely bad at solving complex or “cloud” problems. We tend to act without adequate information or analysis. We fail to anticipate side effects or long‐term consequences. We assume that our responses to challenges were successful if there were not any immediately obvious negative effects. We advance our pet projects and ideas to the detriment of other needs. We tend to blame others when our solutions fail, and we tend to double down on failing solutions, instead of trying something different.

All of these errors are caused by treating cloud problems as if they were clock problems. As noted above, clock problems are finite and predictable, while cloud problems are infinite and largely unpredictable. In cloudy situations, the best response is to be flexible—to try many different things, watch the results carefully over the short and long term, and be ready to adjust to unanticipated outcomes.

Coleman lists five “complex adaptive competencies” that help people deal effectively with cloud problems:

• The first is tolerance for ambiguity. The more one is able to tolerate—and even thrive under—ambiguous conditions, the more one will be able to respond effectively to complex, unpredictable situations.

• The second is cognitive and integrative complexity. Cognitive complexity refers to the ability to understand disparate pieces of information; integrative complexity refers to the ability to process such disparate information effectively to inform decision‐making.

• The third is emotional complexity. This refers to one’s ability to recognize nuances in both positive and negative emotions—one’s own and others’, and to handle these emotions without becoming unbalanced.

• The fourth is behavioral complexity. This refers to one’s ability to take on different roles at different times, depending on the needs of the people and the situation. This is the antidote to what Guy Burgess and I call “Hammer’s Law,” whose name comes from a saying familiar to most Americans: “to a hammer, all the world is a nail.” Relevant corollaries are “to a lawyer, all disputes should be litigated,” “to a mediator everything should be mediated,” “to a diplomat, everything should be negotiated,” and so forth.

• The fifth and last competency is a consideration for future consequences. People who can balance short‐term demands with long‐term outcomes and visions are better able to engage effectively in complex systems than are people whose sole focus is the immediate situation.

Coleman adds to this list another strategy for dealing with cloud problems that I first learned from Rob Ricigliano in his book Making Peace Last (Ricigliano 2012). Both Ricigliano and Coleman advise expecting to fail—Coleman suggests failing quickly and often—but learning from each failure about how to do better. This is, essentially, what Coleman calls “adaptive decision making,” which requires the following:

1. thinking critically about your own decision‐making processes,

2. identifying your “north star,” your goal toward which to head,

3. seeking divergent sources of information,

4. making lots of little decisions, monitoring the results, and adapting accordingly,

5. taking multiple paths to achieve the same goal, and trying multiple tactics to address the most difficult problems,

6. identifying obstacles and addressing them first, and

7. generating hypotheses about effects of actions and testing them out before committing—asking “why” often to determine causal chains, and structuring and prioritizing your actions to best effect.

All of this, Coleman explains, is what is required to work in complex, constantly changing environments. It is far different from the methods traditionally employed by decision makers and people engaged in conflict, according to which a problem is defined in simple terms early on, a competitive or combative course is set, and both sides head forth—no matter the effects— without looking back.

Coleman has many other such suggestions for accomplishing all of his six required steps for finding our “way out”: think different, reset, bolster and break, complicate, move, and adapt. Many of his suggestions are similar to those made by myself and many others in various publications focused on constructively addressing intractable conflicts. All of them struck me as useful guidance for individuals who are in difficult conflicts with family members, coworkers, neighbors, and others.

The big disconnect, for me, is how all of these suggestions can be scaled up to meet the challenges of the society‐wide level conflict that is U.S. political polarization. Coleman’s solutions must be scaled up if they are to provide the “way out” that he has promised his readers.

In complex adaptive systems (and, especially, complex social systems), system components (people) act in unpredictable ways based upon their own individual rational and nonrational decision rules. These individual decisions then interact with each other in a complex and poorly understood web of social relationships, often involving thousands of people and a multitude of organizations, laws, and other components. Taken together, the system as a whole can behave in desirable or undesirable ways from the point of view of any one individual actor. Moreover, any one person’s ability to influence the entire system is usually very limited. Occasionally, particular people will have outsize influence, such as in the case of Donald Trump. And sometimes “ordinary” people will “luck out” and have a strong effect on the system because of what Coleman and others refer to as “the butterfly effect”—when a little input has a big output.

But usually that does not happen. Usually, most individuals’ actions are like raindrops on the ocean. Taken alone, they have very little effect. Taken together, they can become a flood. The goal of those trying to address an intractable conflict problem is to improve the ratio of desirable to undesirable behaviors, in the hope that the system will trend toward more desirable outcomes. But it is going to take an enormous number of people acting constructively to push the U.S. political system out of the attractor in which it is now deeply mired. Even big shocks, such as Trump’s election and COVID, did not do it. It is going to take a massive effort by a lot of dedicated and collectively influential people to find a “way out.”

Coleman seems optimistic that a large number of people will engage in the constructive behaviors he recommends—enough to move the system out of its attractor pit. I wish I were as optimistic. I fear that most people are not willing to take the steps recommended by Coleman in The Way Out. All of the steps take considerable effort, some take considerable skill, and many require guts and a willingness to take substantial risk. In addition, all require people to recognize that taking such steps is worth doing.

I have been surprised and disappointed to see how many people in the conflict analysis and resolution field do not seem particularly interested in taking many of these steps. Rather, they seem to be taking advocacy roles, working to further the aspirations of one side (usually the progressive Left) rather than trying to bridge divides between the Left and the Right.

Of course, this is not true of all conflict resolution professionals. Many, such as members of The Bridge Alliance, are doing dialogues and other divide‐crossing activities. But if such work is not ubiquitous in the conflict field, we cannot possibly expect it to be ubiquitous outside the conflict field, particularly among people who are strongly aligned with one side or the other.

So the key unanswered question is how conflict resolvers, civil society leaders, government leaders, and particularly, the media, can take the ideas presented in The Way Out and scale them up. I say “particularly the media” because in my thinking, the media is perhaps the best vehicle in today’s hyper‐connected society for reaching a vast number of people very quickly and effectively. Indeed, it is probably the only way—almost all the information that people use to determine what they believe and what they do comes to us through mass media and social media.

Unfortunately, the people whom Guy Burgess and I refer to as “bad‐faith actors” (Burgess and Burgess 2021b) currently seem to have a much better understanding of the media, and success with using it to influence people’s opinions and behavior, than do the people we call “good‐faith actors.” Bad‐faith actors have successfully scaled up their “pitches” to influence the attitudes and behavior of millions of people. Good‐faith actors—people who want to diminish polarization and begin to heal America and other countries similarly torn apart—need to expand their tools from those that are “table oriented” (such as dialogue and mediation) to ones that are society oriented—reaching much wider audiences rapidly and in compelling ways. While a few peacebuilding organizations have been doing this for a long time (Search for Common Ground’s soap operas are a good example (Dickey 2017)), most dispute and conflict resolution organizations have little, if any, experience with such broadly targeted processes.

I would submit that this should be a new and rapidly growing subfield of conflict resolution. Just as ADR went from being rare to very common and successful in the 1960s–1980s, we need to develop and promulgate a similarly new approach—perhaps called LSCR (Large‐Scale Conflict Resolution)—to take the ideas in Coleman’s book, along with many others, to the scale that deep‐rooted political polarization requires.

I should note that Coleman should not be faulted for failing to propose this new approach. Few individuals and organizations have taken this route, including (as noted above) Search for Common Ground and conflict journalist Amanda Ripley (2021). Other organizations adopting this approach are Build Up^, which is starting “The Commons Project,” whose goal is to “depolarize the United States through strengthened, healed, and humanized relationship‐building online” (Build Up^ 2021); and the Solutions Journalism Network (2021), whose “Complicate the Narrative” project (started by Ripley (2019)) encourages journalists to cover the complexity of political conflicts instead of framing them in the more common good‐guys‐versus‐bad‐guys narratives.

Two early peacebuilding/conflict resolution concepts suggested this approach but were not built upon, particularly in regard to U.S. political conflicts. One was John McDonald and Louise Diamond’s notion of Multi‐Track Diplomacy (Diamond and McDonald 1996), which was very much focused on international peacebuilding efforts. The other was William Ury’s notion of ten “Third Side” roles (Ury 2000). Both of these early efforts stressed that society‐wide conflicts cannot be solved by individuals sitting around a table, but that many people, playing many different roles simultaneously, are needed in order to bring about systemic change.

At Beyond Intractability, we have developed a related approach that we call “massively parallel peacebuilding”—a concept based on “massively parallel computing,” a strategy for using large numbers of computers to work simultaneously on different aspects of particularly challenging computational problems. Guy Burgess and I assert that we need a massively parallel peacebuilding effort in the United States and elsewhere that mobilizes thousands—or even millions—of people to engage in a series of mutually reinforcing, but independent projects designed to de‐escalate and depolarize our big conflicts. Our “action list” overlaps with Coleman’s in many ways, but also includes scaled‐up social, economic, and political actions, in addition to social‐psychological actions such as those recommended by Coleman in The Way Out (Burgess and Burgess 2020, 2021a).

In sum, The Way Out does an excellent job of describing the problem we in the U.S. are facing with respect to political polarization. It also has a lot of good ideas for improving interactions and relationships at the interpersonal level. The challenge is how to promote and realize these ideas widely enough to address polarization at the full social‐system level and to identify and undertake the additional actions required to address problems that are systemic rather than individual. These are topics for Coleman’s next book, perhaps?