William Ury is a grand master at resolving conflicts. Impossible conflicts. Ancient conflicts where the parties have been fighting for so long they believe it’s in their blood and can never be resolved.

“And I’ve seen, with my own eyes,” Ury says, “how these kinds of conflicts can shift and transform. I know from experience, from being present, that it is possible.”

That’s why, when people ask if he’s an optimist or a pessimist, he says, “I’m a possible-ist. I look for possibilities.”

When I heard him say that at a friend’s birthday gathering, I arranged to interview him about how to talk with friends, family, and strangers who are strongly opposed to what you passionately believe.

 I was particularly disturbed by a man I’ve been friends with since college, with whom I’ve agreed never to speak about politics. He refused to be vaccinated, then came down with Covid, but said that getting it was better than being harmed by the possibly dire effects of the vaccine. Well, I said, “What about the harm you could cause others by exposing them to Covid?”

He hung up. So I went to William Ury, who, at 68, has spent his adult life mediating between entrenched countries, groups, and individuals. After studying anthropology at Yale and receiving a PhD from Harvard, Ury co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project in ’79, and two years later, the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation. He co-wrote the best-seller, Getting to Yes, and five other books on negotiation.

Whenever I’ve seen him, Ury is smiling, always smiling, which makes his eyes crinkle up. He jokes that he was probably born smiling. And when he speaks, while negotiating, he circles his arms toward each other, as if gathering friends together.

When we met on Zoom, I asked how we could relate or just talk to friends who are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.

He knitted his brow. “It’s hard, really hard. It’s the hardest thing humans can do.” Then he smiled. “Who wants to sit with a person whom you violently disagree with and who’s pressing all your buttons?” I couldn’t help smiling back.

He outlined the process of negotiating, which starts with pausing, or what he calls “going to the balcony of life, where you’re observing, not participating. If we’re going to have the slightest chance of influencing someone, we begin by influencing ourselves.” We do this, he said, by “putting aside your moral certainty. The more certainty and moral judgment you wield, the more you’ll drive people away.”

Okay, I thought.

The second step is to “build them a golden bridge—make it as easy as possible to take a step in the direction you’d like.” You do this by listening, he said. “Give no advice. You can’t change another person’s mind. Forget it! But you can create a favorable environment in which they might in their own good time decide to change their minds.”

He said humans often don’t respond to reason. “We respond much more to emotion. So share from the heart, and be vulnerable.”

I’ve tried that, I thought. “What’s the next step?”

Ury said, “Bathe them in the love you have for them.” I couldn’t feel much love for my friend at that moment.

“Speak about your own experience,” he said, “and be patient. Usually, we listen from our point of view. Put yourself in their shoes. That’s the only way to build a golden bridge.”

I still couldn’t imagine this working.

“Sometimes we need to use the third side,” Ury said.

He said it takes two people to fight but a third to stop it. “The third side is the larger community, the extended family, colleagues at work, circles of friends. When the wider community is activated, I’ve seen it be effective so many times.”

When he was a grad student in the ‘70s, he said, there were three big intractable conflicts.

First, the Cold War with Russia. “All my professors were saying the Iron Curtain would always be there. It would never lift.”

Ury went to the Soviet Union 25 times, working to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war. “It could have been triggered numerous times by incidents few people know about,” he said.

One took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Almost three decades later, in 1989, the Harvard Avoiding Nuclear War Project sponsored a meeting in Moscow of the living participants of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “We wanted to learn what actually happened and what was going on in the participants’ minds,” Ury said. “It turned out that no one knew what the other side was thinking.”

At the meeting in 1989, they had, from the U.S.: Robert McNamara, who’d been President Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor, and Ted Sorenson, advisor and speech writer, “people who were right there with Kennedy, meeting round the clock for 13 days.” On the Soviet side, they had people who were there with Premier Nikita Khrushchev: his son, Sergei, Andrei Gromyko, Foreign Minister, and Anatoly Dobrynin, Ambassador to Washington.

We were so close to nuclear holocaust, Ury said. “The C.I.A. thought they had good information, but they didn’t.” The Americans estimated there were 10,000 Soviet solders in Cuba. Actually there were 40,000 Soviet soldiers. The Americans thought nuclear missiles were arriving in Cuba on a ship and set up a naval quarantine. “What we didn’t know is the Soviets already had nuclear missiles in Cuba,” Ury said.

At the height of the crisis, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba and the pilot killed. The Americans thought this was a deliberate decision made by Soviet Premier Khrushchev. But at the meeting in 1989, they learned the decision was made by a general in Cuba, who saw the plane on the radar screen and gave the order himself, without authorization from Moscow. “When they heard about it in the Kremlin, they were horrified,” Ury said.

Kennedy and his advisers had already decided they would invade Cuba if one of the U.S. over-flights was shot down. “They were ready to attack,” Ury said, “not knowing they would face 40,000 Soviet soldiers, 800,000 mobilized Cuban soldiers, and nuclear weapons. Fortunately,” Ury said, “Kennedy did not authorize an invasion, which could have led to a nuclear strike. And none of us would be here today.”

Kennedy and Khrushchev came to an agreement that the ship loaded with missiles would turn back and the U.S. would remove its missiles from Turkey, which were in striking range of the Soviet Union. Ury continued to work with Soviets, and in time, he said “I saw the risk begin to lessen, and today, there’s far less concern about nuclear war with Russia.”

The second impossible conflict was apartheid in South Africa. “At its height, people said it’s a race war that will go on forever.” Ury flew to South Africa shortly before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. “In a short time, apartheid was terminated,” he said. “Months earlier, that had been inconceivable.”

Ury said this is an example of the power of the third side. “The whole society got activated: women, students, religious leaders, business people, trade unions, and they were supported by nearby countries, the UN, the world. They created the environment—the all-inclusive campfire—in which a race-based conflict got transformed into a majoritarian democracy.”

Ury spoke next about the Middle East, which he said was the hardest conflict he’s worked on. “Egypt and Israel had fought four terrible wars, the last in 1973. Then, in 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Israel, the first Arab leader to do so, which led to the Camp David accords in 1978.”

Ury said that in all three impossible cases, the conflict did not end, but it was transformed. “The risk of nuclear war went way down. The U.S. and Russia are still at odds, but it’s very different from when we were threatening each other with nuclear missiles,” he said.

He explained that it’s not about outcome, it’s about process. “If we focus on outcome, we’ll be disappointed. But if we focus on process, we see how impossible situations can shift. If those three enormous conflicts could shift— and I watched it, I was there—I know it can happen elsewhere. That’s why I say I’m a possible-ist.”

I asked what could possibly defuse the current strife between Republicans and Democrats. Ury acknowledged that this is the worst rift that’s existed in our country since the Civil War. “Last year, I dropped all my other projects to work on this.”

He said it’s a “huge problem with toxic emotions, rigid positions, and fierce fighting. Is it possible for us to transform it?” He paused.

“Absolutely.”

He said he’s seen worse quagmires. “And I’ve seen countries break through them. Apartheid was much worse than anything we have today. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had been in a cycle of killing each other for centuries and believed it would never end, until the Good Friday agreement in 1998.”

But breaking through doesn’t mean solving all problems and everybody’s in harmony, he said. “Progress is transforming it from destructive to constructive conflict.”

He said we were the first country to experiment with democracy, “which is a third side innovation. But it was imperfect from the start—it only applied to white men. Then it expanded to include women, African-Americans… We have to include all groups, no sector can be left out.”

Ury said the question for us now is how to make the circle even wider. “To activate the third side, we begin by reaching out to someone you disagree with,” he said. “In your home, at work, reach out to someone who disagrees with you on fundamental things, and listen. Put yourself in their shoes. Listen with curiosity, openness, and compassion. We need to teach listening at school, because it’s the key to resolving disputes.”

I tried to imagine talking with my anti-vaxer friend. The only place we’re not in opposition is…his children. He has twin girls I’ve adored from the moment they were born. I go to their soccer games and dance recitals, and I feel warmth and joy when I see them. But that’s it.”

Ury seized on that. “But that’s perfect. The children—they’re the most obvious symbol for the future of our country.” He urged me to talk with my friend about what kind of future we’d like our kids to grow up in. “My guess is that 80 to 90% of what you’d describe would be the same.”

Ury said we always put the spotlight on our differences. “Spend some time where you actually do agree. And remember, it takes time and patience. It may take years—decades. And the first thing you’ll have to do is work on yourself. If you get triggered, it won’t go forward.”

About 15 years ago, he and several activists invited leaders of the most progressive and most conservative groups to meet for a dialogue at Gold Lake in Colorado. “We had the leader of the Christian Coalition and the leader of MoveOn, who both happened to be women,” Ury said. One month later, the two women testified on the same side at a congressional hearing on a bill to privatize the Internet. “When proponents of the bill saw that the two women, who’re usually on opposite sides, were both testifying against the bill, they folded their case.”

Ury and his team sponsored about six dialogues at Gold Lake. “We brought Al Gore together with climate deniers,” Ury said. “When some of them saw he was in the room, they wanted to bolt.”

They began the conversation by asking the participants to tell a story about themselves, to talk about what activated them “to come into the public square.” Ury said, “The hot tubs helped. We had the most unlikely combinations of people in those hot pools.”

How could meetings like that happen today? I asked.

“Start by thinking: who do you know in your circle that you could reach out to? Don’t try to change their minds, just listen, connect, and begin to knit. Because we’re starting to demonize, and then we don’t see the human being.”

Ury’s insights were deepened by a trip he made to Africa in 1989. He’d gone directly from the Moscow meeting with veterans of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Kalahari desert to meet with Bushmen, who’ve been living as hunter-gatherers for 20,000 years. He wanted to learn how they resolve conflicts in a way that’s allowed them to survive.

The Bushmen, also called “the San,” live much as they did in the early Stone Age. They live in small groups of about five families, with networks of about 500—the way our ancestors lived for 90% of the time there’ve been humans on earth, Ury said.

He found the tribe was in a similar situation as the Russians and Americans had been, when both parties could have destroyed the world. “The Bushmen have nuclear weapons in the form of poison arrows,” he said. “All the hunters have arrows poisoned with beetle dung, that’s fatal to animals and people, he said. “If you get angry with someone and shoot him with that arrow, he dies, but it takes 2 or 3 days.” Ury looked directly in my eyes. “In that time he can pick up his arrow and shoot you. In a group with maybe 5 male hunters, you’ve lost 40% of your hunting capacity and if more die, it’s like the effect of a nuclear missile.”

How do they prevent that, when someone gets enraged? I asked.

He said everyone in the community listens and pays attention, and when a person gets so angry he wants to kill another, someone gathers up all the poison arrows and hides them in the desert. The whole community gathers around a campfire—men, women, children, elders—and they all talk, give their opinions, argue, and at the end of the night, they engage in trance dancing, call out to the spirits for wisdom, and report their dreams. They use all modalities to transform the conflict. It goes on for days until they get some resolution. And if they can’t, they’ll ask some of the most triggered individuals to go off, visit relatives for a few months, until they cool off.

Ury said, “That’s what I call the third side—it’s the community. They hear from their spouses, mothers, grandfathers, “Cool it…we have to find a way.”

Ury said that’s what we have to recreate in the modern world if we’re not going to wipe out civilization.

But the Bushmen are an isolated group, I thought, enfolded in a strong net of family and tribe. I still could not imagine how, in our country, the vicious language, (“Rot in hell!” “Traitor!”), the death threats, hatred, shootings, and anguish of the soul—i.e., the new normal—could be transformed into a more civilized state.

Yet William Ury insists it could happen. “It won’t be done by governments alone, it will take all of us together. It’s hard, no one should think this is easy, but it is…” He gave his irresistible smile. “Possible.”

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