Headshot of Skip Griffin wearing a black blazer, white striped shirt, and black polka dot tie.

Skip Griffin, a senior associate at Dialogos

Today’s guest is Skip Griffin, a senior associate at Dialogos and an expert on engaging in productive discourse.

Griffin was a plaintiff in Virginia’s 1964 school desegregation lawsuit; led Harvard’s Black students through the tumult of the late 1960s; and later worked in a range of community leadership roles in public schools, at Northeastern University, and
at the Boston Globe.

Griffin received his bachelor’s in government from Harvard and a master’s of education in organizational and social policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dialogos is a management consulting and leadership development firm that seeks to catalyze organizational transformations.

Griffin served as the first Food for Thought speaker of the fall semester. He spoke with Catalyze co-hosts Stella Smolowitz ’26 and Sarah O’Carroll, Morehead-Cain’s content manager, after his talk at the Foundation.

Modeled after the City Club of Cleveland, Food for Thought provides a central meeting place for members of diverse beliefs and opinions to participate in free and open discussions. The breakfast and conversation series is an initiative of Team Cleveland members from the 2022 Morehead-Cain Civic Collaboration program.

Listen to the episode.

Music credits

The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Sarah)

Skip, thank you so much for joining us. Stella and I really enjoyed listening to your talk this morning with scholars about how to productively engage in dialogue. What’s the most important takeaway you hope scholars got out of your presentation?

(Skip)

Yes, I think the most important thing is if you are the person or person convening a dialogue, you first have to be aware of who you are and what you deeply believe in. And you have to be aware of the things that trigger you and the ways that you react to statements or beliefs that are diametrically opposed to you. And to have effective dialogue, you have to be able to create a space in which views that are anathema or unpleasant to you, that you’re able to hear those, to explore them, and to try to understand them. The real purpose of dialogue is to understand and to be understood.

(Stella)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And your talk this morning was awesome. But we also know that you’re here to kick off the 2023 Dialogue and Discourse program at Morehead-Cain. And it begins with the retreat this weekend. 25 scholars have already signed up. So how do you hope in this whole weekend retreat, in this year retreat, they’ll grow, and what do you hope they’ll learn specifically?

(Skip)

Oh, wow. So the one thing is this morning was just a thing to get you curious and interested. I hope over the course of, from September through the end of March, that people actually develop, they develop a deeper sense and understanding of who they are, what their leadership style is, and how they function in various situations, and what would it take for them to be able and capable to function in multiple situations, especially where difference appears. The second thing I want people to do is to be able to master the skills that are needed to effectively lead a dialogue. Third thing is getting people to think more systemically about dialogue. I think that dialogue, good dialogues require a period of discovery or investigation or inquiry, and it requires you to design to be effective. And so I hope they can develop all those things. And third thing is, how do you, I mean, not third, I’m past way past numbers now [Laughs]. How do you build spaces that allow people to feel comfortable and safe enough to say something that they have been reluctant to say?

(Sarah)

So you have a very storied career in activism. How did you end up in this work on discourse now twenty years ago since joining Dialogos?

(Skip)

Well, at the core, what I discovered in almost every phase of my life is that the people who were able to have dialogue, the people who were able to engage with others or the other were able to discover ways to really shift people’s consciousness. So like, in the early civil rights movement, many of the interracial dialogues were done differently, and they were coordinated by people who really understood how to hold space for people. And in South Boston, doing the bussing in Boston, I mean, it’s like I discovered that the ability to not make judgments about the people in South Boston, but to engage with them in a conversation to find out why they believe what they believed and why they behaved as they behaved, and to see whether there was, in fact, common ground. And I don’t mean by that lowest common denominator, but I mean meaningful common ground. And then, I’ve looked at South Africa after the ending of apartheid with the Truth and Reconciliation, which is a kind of dialogue. And I think I realized that people who create lasting connections between previously competing constituencies make a real difference.

(Sarah)

Thank you.

(Stella)

Yeah. And you talk a lot about, like, you looked at South Africa, and I know from your talk this morning you’ve had a long career in activism, even when you were a toddler, when you were 14. So what was your first experience in dialogue about race and racism that you can remember?

(Skip)

Oh, when I was fourteen years old, a woman who was a Quaker, who worked for the American Friend Service Committee, was able to gather together different constituents. Well, she was able to gather together moderate whites, even some entrenched segregationists, to have a dialogue about what was going on in my community, which was one of the places where school integration was being tested. And I learned that power, I learned that I could be present in a situation like that and not be overwhelmed. I learned that I could listen and engage with people who had real differences, and it was really meaningful. And I think the American Friend Service Committee and the Quakers who get funny labels, I think they are really good at deep listening, both to others and to themselves and to sort of the invisible voice.

(Sarah)

You and your sisters were plaintiffs in Virginia’s 1964 school desegregation lawsuit, which, of course, was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. And you were sharing about how when we think of Brown versus Board of Education, we think of maybe one case, but you shared that it’s really five cases that we’re talking about. But can you share about just what it was like to go through that as a young person also within a family of activists? Your father was a pastor at the local church, and so you are surrounded by people who were really locked into these issues?

(Skip)

Well, I would say many things. One thing I would say is that I have a lot of compassion and empathy for people who are not certain that they want to get involved in movements. I was talking with some Jewish people, I was in Israel, and a guy I know said, “We really admire Moses, but I’m not sure I want to be Moses’ kids.” And I would say that one of the things I know, my father was all in. And it takes a lot to be committed to the kind of movement like that. And it takes away from family life, it takes away from the presence with your children, and it requires a lot of you. And then to learn, when you’re young, you think change comes immediately. One of the things that I learned from all of that and from talking with him is patience and appreciation for long-term changes. Things take a while.

(Sarah)

Yeah, I’m sure that is a big part of your work in thinking about these issues. And they feel so abstract sometimes, where how do we solve discourse in polarizing times in the United States? I mean, what a mammoth of a question. So how do you, in your work, try to make that less abstract? And what are some orthodoxies or examples from organizations you’ve worked with to combat that?

(Skip)

That’s a great question. So let me just say that we have an advantage when we work with an individual company. It’s contained, the parameters are reasonably well defined, their mission is well defined. Or they’re trying to come up with a new vision for their company because the old ways don’t necessarily provide the economic rewards they want. I think that I have learned that you have to figure out what the problem is, how it works. You have to love the problem. For instance, I think many people come up with methodologies. I have a way of doing X, or I have a way of doing Y, and they pull it off the shelf and take it to a situation. I don’t think that—you get improvements at the margin, but it doesn’t get a fundamental improvement. I think you have to go in and hold the problem. I mean, literally hold the problem and then look at it, and figure out how does the problem actually work? And then you design and you start to ask questions and design sessions so that people come to better understand how do we get to where we are, how does this really work, and what are the high leverage points?

(Stella)

You’ve talked a lot about the problem and holding the problem on kind of this abstract level, but there’s a lot of people who are listening right now who maybe do have a problem and have held it for a long time, but are looking for what are the next steps after you’ve held that problem? How do you start a discourse with someone who maybe doesn’t agree with you and you’re worried that this is not going to be a productive discourse? What would you advise people listening for? What are those next steps?

(Skip)

Yeah, so the first thing is, I was working at a newspaper during the time when color was introduced to newspapers, and the traditional newspapers, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the “Gray Ladies,” thought that color was anathema. It was for comic books. But the people wanted, the public wanted color. So they were trying to figure out how to convert printing presses so that they could at least get color on certain pages, if not all the pages, because the printing presses were very expensive, and it was already clear that maybe the newspaper industry was being challenged. There was disruptive technology. And so the consultant was brought in to speak with the people. The consultant asked all the “suits“ to leave the room, and then he had some kind of conversations. He came, and he submitted his report. I learned from that, that within every system, the knowledge is in a system. The experience, the knowledge is in the system. If you develop a way of, if you treat the people with respect and you bring all the stakeholders, all of the protagonists into a room and get them together, you have a much better chance of a) understanding how the problem works, and then being able to craft solutions.

There’s a great movie made by an, I think it was in Raleigh or Durham, North Carolina, that was late to integrating the schools and the fire caused them to have to integrate. There’s a great movie called something like The Best of Enemies, where this black activist woman and the Klu Klux Klansmen ended up being co-chairs of an effort to make this integration work. And some of the black leader’s followers didn’t want to talk. And I said in my talk today, she was the one that said, “If the racist ain’t in the room, there’s not going to be a solution.” So that takes it down to when you encounter a problem. You can do an analysis and figure out who are the important stakeholders, who are the people who matter to this problem, and who are the people who, in the 60s, we used to say, “You’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution.” What I have discovered over the years is if you ain’t a part of the problem, you ain’t going to be a part of the solution.

It’s not something that you impose on people by experts. In the end, the knowledge of how to transform many systems is within the system. They sound abstract. Go talk to the people, they’ll tell you what’s wrong. And they’ll tell you what they like to see, and then you have to figure out whether that’s possible or not.

(Sarah)

You shared with scholars this morning that sometimes the enemy is you, not who you think is the perceived offender. What did you mean by that?

(Skip)

So we can get up on a moral high ground. We can say that this person is homophobic, this person is sexist, this person is racist. And one of the things that we discover in working with people, I work with somebody and they say, “Well, the leaders of this company, they’re bad. They do X, Y, and Z. They work with their people this way.” And I leaned over, I said, “Let me try something. If I go and talk to the people that you supervise, what would they say about you?” And much to people’s surprise, they say pretty much the same things about them that they’re saying about the people that lead them. So it’s a cultural norm within the system. So what I mean is, we like to get on, including myself, we like to get up on a moral high ground and say how others are wrong. And I don’t mean this, I grew up in the church, so whenever I start to talk about this, I hear one phrase where Jesus says, “Before you can get the splint out of your neighbor’s eye, you need to get the log out of your eye.” And so many people, they don’t look at themselves. The problem is out there. But the problem sometime exists in you. I’m a man that grew up in a traditional society. Some of my early views about women were shaped by that society, not necessarily the best views in the world. When I talk about equality and stuff like that, I realized I might be part of the problem. I hadn’t thought about equal pay for equal work. We were just talking about the race question. What do I really think about that? I hadn’t thought about child care. I hadn’t thought about, I go ask women to come downtown to a meeting and stay till 10:00, and then they have to walk to the garage and get in their car. I’m big, nobody’s going to mess with me. I mean, they might, but the probability of messing with me as opposed to a woman that’s 5 to 100 pounds lighter is a different thing. I never thought about stuff like that. So if I’m going to have a conversation about how to make this more inclusive and how to make this a friendly place to work, so I was a part of the problem.

(Sarah)

I’m also thinking of when you ask questions of someone you like and enjoy being with or vice versa, it feels like it’s coming from a place of trust and creates more trust. Whereas if you’re asking questions from someone you do not like or distrust, then it feels like you’re on the defensive. And so it seems like that was also part of your talk with scholars about the self awareness piece and doing the analysis and discovery process.

(Skip)

Sometimes the conversation you have to have is what would it take for us as a group to have a conversation about this subject? So people say, “Let’s have a conversation about race.” But the better way, I think, to approach that is to ask people that they want to, “What would it take for us to have a conversation in this community about race?” And you listen for that and you design the dialogue differently. Just throwing people in a room, good luck with that. I’m not a big fan of many diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. I’m a big fan of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I’m not a big fan of many of their programs because they’re rules based, “You should do it this way, you should do it that way.” I think that’s a recipe for disaster. And I would say to people— because all kinds of— they’re unwilling to ask certain questions. Like, I think it’s a reasonable question to ask about qualifications. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. And I think it’s a reasonable expectation that it’s going to take time for different people to learn to live together. It’s not just going to take time for men to learn to work with women. It’s going to take time for women to learn to work with men. There’s an assumption that we have not dealt with that the women or the Blacks or the Latina, we have a different notion, that Asians have almost become stereotyped in another way, that they’re not qualified. And I think about several examples. I mean, Major League Baseball was all white, and they said people weren’t qualified. Now, since 1947, if you look at the record books, even if you take out the people who use steroids, most of the records are held, or at least in the top ten, they’re Black players. So they weren’t not qualified, they just had been excluded. If you take the movie Hidden Figures, it’s clear that the American space program would not have worked without the women mathematicians who worked in the Tidewater area of Virginia. So they weren’t like, unqualified. There’s a man who grew up in my community, James Maceo West, a black man who went in the military, came out and went to Temple and worked for Bell Labs, which is still probably America’s greatest creative hub. And he holds 250 patents, including the microphone on the phones we use. Okay, and so he’s not unqualified. And so we have to challenge some of those. We use the case and say, “Oh, you should make special consideration.” Maybe you should and maybe you shouldn’t. But the argument that every Black, Latino, or woman, or other kind of student is not qualified is a myth. So I think that there’s a different way to approach diversity, inclusion, and equity. I’m not a big fan of any rules-based approach.

(Stella)

As a last question, what is one piece of advice that maybe you haven’t talked about yet or haven’t touched on that you would like to give to scholars or any other alumni who are listening?

(Skip)

Well, it may sound trite, you know, but I think the first thing is understanding your value and your worth. There’s a long story about a place in China, I suspect in Tibet, where they had a golden Buddha. The community was under attack, so they covered it up with mud and leaves and everything. Fifty yea rs later, somebody important was coming to visit that region, and they started to try to just clean it up, and the thing cracked and all the mud fell off. And they discovered the golden Buddha. I think many of us have a golden Buddha, so to speak, metaphorically inside of us. And my first thing is to discover and appreciate your value and worth. Most of us are worth much more than we even know, and inside, we are much more golden than we’ve been taught to believe.

(Sarah)

You shared a memory of your grandmother telling you you’re a child of God. Is that a phrase that has kind of defined your thinking on this?

(Skip)

Oh, absolutely. And basically what my grandmother was saying, she said the follow up to that is that God was satisfied with all of his creation. He said, “This is good, and I am much pleased.” And so God is as pleased with me as he is with the richest billionaire. He’s as pleased with you as he is with the greatest athlete. You might be a great athlete. I don’t know that [Laughs]. But you know what I mean? It’s like, God is pleased with me, and God is pleased with you. And I don’t care what you think about me. I know what my grandma thought about me, and she said God feels this way about me. So that’s yes.

(Stella)

Well, thank you so much for being here. We really enjoyed talking to you today.

(Sarah)

Thank you, Skip.