899: Scaling Civil Discourse - with Michelle Sobel, President, Unify America

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to Ed Up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is your special guest host, me of course, Dr. Laurie Shanderson. And I'm actually the host of EdUp Accreditation. I'm taking some time off today to speak to a very wonderful guest that we have here today. Our guest today is Michelle Sobel and she is the president of Unify America. So thank you for joining us, Michelle.

Michelle Sobel: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I'll tell you why I'm so excited to speak to you. I'm fan crushing over here because, in reading your bio, I see that you were part of Jellyvision creative team, and you helped launch the first You Don't Know Jack game. Do you remember that game? We still play versions of it.

Michelle Sobel: I know it's been added to the portfolio of the Jackbox games and we have a nice clean Jackbox game. You know, when I saw your bio, I called my brother and he was like, "Well, the founder of Unify America is the founder of Jellyvision and subsequently Jackbox games." So he came from that world and created all those entertaining, engaging, enjoyment experiences, and brought all those skills and talents to the solutions that we're trying to work on right now for the issues around toxic polarization.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Your journey is very unique to me. You spent 20 years improving patient experience with digital health solutions and you co-founded Emmi Solutions and Analyte Health. How did you do that? What was the actual thing that you did relative to health solutions?

Michelle Sobel: My career, as we live long enough, we have what I call a squiggly path. Mine has been a squiggly path. When I was working at Jellyvision, working on You Don't Know Jack, my husband was starting medical school. And he said to me, "You know, the process of informed consent is broken. There's got to be a better way for patients to really understand what to expect before, during, and after having a medical procedure." He said, "You know how to create experiences that are engaging and help people understand complex things and make them simple. Can you help me figure this out?" And we started this company called Emmi Solutions. 

I spent years working in the field of patient engagement, patient experience. What I've learned from that, I've brought to civic engagement. The through line is how do I make something complex, simple? How do I make something engaging? How do we learn from experiences? Those are the skills and talents that we bring to this problem set.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I like that approach. To me, it's more about simplifying it for the consumer. They have to be educated so they can make informed decisions. Relative to making informed consent and those types of decisions, I had a situation where my sister had been given a few options and we couldn't make out any of the different things that she was being told. It was just so convoluted and very difficult. So I appreciate your work in that area.

Michelle Sobel: We used to say it takes four years of medical school and three years of law school to write a really confusing consent form.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Michelle, we talk about the squiggly path from Hollywood film editing, digital health solutions, and now leading Unify America. Can you share with us how each of those experiences shaped your current approach to fostering unity and collaboration? And also, what motivated you to transition from improving patient experiences to digital health solutions addressing polarization and civic engagement?

Michelle Sobel: Like many of us in this country, I have struggled with political division. We have it sometimes in our own families, in our communities, sometimes in our workplaces. It's always been around, but it has gone very acute for all of us in the last four or eight years. I was feeling very pessimistic, hopeless, dark. I think I was probably contributing to the problem myself when Harry Gottlieb called me in January of 2020 and said, "Hey, what are you up to? I have this idea and I think we ought to work on bringing a little bit more hope."

Harry took a road trip in 2019 that was transformative for him. He drove around the country for a few months just because he was in an echo chamber in Evanston, Illinois, a blue bubble. He thought, "We're all talking about political division and everything's getting very toxic, but I need to just see for myself because I think we probably have much more common ground and much more unity than the media and others, who we now call conflict entrepreneurs, would lead us to believe."

He did what we all don't have time to do. He had just gotten his Honda Odyssey and he went on an odyssey. He traveled all over parts of the country that he hadn't spent a lot of time in, primarily the Southeast of our country. He met hundreds of people and started to put together a survey that was designed around high-level goals for the country. At the time there were maybe 50 issues that they were covering. 

As he met somebody, he would have a conversation, learn about them, get to know them and say, "Would you mind taking the survey? Because I think that when it comes to healthcare and immigration and the economy and all kinds of issues, maybe on some high level, we all agree about things. It gets complicated when we get to how we solve it, but let's just start at the goals."

He came back from that trip and said, "How can we give everybody this experience? Not everybody can jump in their car and do this." Amazingly, in March of 2020, we all know what happened - we had coronavirus, COVID, lockdown. We all learned how to do what we're doing right now, Zoom. So we said, "Great, we can bring people together through this technology." 

We started to do that and started to hone the survey and this concept that became this conversation guide. I started to feel more hopeful because I watched people face-to-face having conversations across geographic and ideological differences, meeting each other, liking each other, getting to know each other as people. They started to see something interesting: people are more complicated than we imagine they are. They hold lots of different contrasting points of view. When you're in a one-on-one situation, you're open and curious to new perspectives in a way that you aren't when you're in your tribes or on social media. 

We started to see this phenomenon and we thought, "How can we do this faster and reach more people?" It became this program that we call the Unified Challenge College Bowl. It really took off in higher education.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: The approach of going out and having this odyssey - first of all, I would be nervous to think I could just drive any place in this country and be safe all the time. But to have the courage to do that and to engage different people to get their perspective on things, I imagine how challenging that is. You're making it sound like it's very easy, but I see all the time on social media how committed people are to their perspectives. Even if they are shown facts or provided with facts, they still latch on to what their beliefs are. How were you all able to navigate that to get people to participate in a way that they shared their honest perspective on a topic?

Michelle Sobel: The goal isn't to persuade somebody. The goal is really, as Governor Spencer Cox of Utah has an initiative called "Disagree Better" - how do we learn how to disagree better? It's okay to disagree. I'd like to hear you out. The one instruction we give students when they're engaging in this program is "stay curious." We're not going to go in there and say, "Okay, I've got a list of facts and I'm gonna persuade the heck out of you." That's not the goal. 

The goal is to say, "I feel a certain way." And then we actually encourage students to do perspective-taking where, if you would say something to me about how you feel about a certain issue, I'll say, "Well, Dr. Shanderson, I think this is what I heard you say. Did I get that right?" Teaching those kinds of skills and habits is another way. We're in this rut right now of our tribes and our set of facts. Everyone has their own set of facts and we're just doubting past one another. It's really weakening the country and it's exhausting us.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I see your point now because the facts and the gotchas and the "you're wrong about this" - we are not focused on what we need to and we're not having productive conversations and we're not unifying based on the common things that we feel are issues for us as citizens. Tell me a little bit more about the College Bowl, because you connected over 10,000 students so that they can have respectful conversations. What are some of the College Bowl's most successful outcomes or success stories?

Michelle Sobel: I'll just explain how it works really briefly, because there are many organizations in this country that are doing what's called bridge-building work. You may have heard of Braver Angels, and we are sort of standing on the shoulders of many who have done this work, Living Room Conversations and others. We particularly love higher ed for several reasons. We have to equip young people with the skills and norms and habits and practices that we need to live in a pluralistic society. The younger generation must be equipped, and college presidents are uniquely qualified to commit to doing this work.

The way that this works is we partner with colleges, particularly faculty, and the program is assigned to students across disciplines. These might be nursing students from North Dakota who would be in a one-on-one conversation with a student who's studying aviation in Florida. They're not raising their hand to do this; they're being assigned. It is a requirement. I think that's really key because we have to provide an on-ramp for students who are not typically engaged. They are probably not protesting right now on campus. They may not be joining bridge-building clubs or on-campus debates, which are wonderful things. But there are so many students that don't raise their hand to do that.

We offer this event - it's intercollegiate, it's large scale. We use technology to do it because it lets us connect people across geography and it lets us scale really fast. Students show up. We do it in the spring, summer, and fall, two weeks at a time, multiple time slots throughout the day. Thousands of students show up. We go through a registration process where they tell us a little bit about themselves. Then through our algorithm, we pair them into one-on-one conversations across geographic and ideological difference. 

They get popped into a room. It's like Zoom, but it's our own platform where you also see a conversation guide, a written guide that's in the form of the survey. They start with an icebreaker and they get to know each other. One of the questions is "Who would be proud of you for doing this work today?" That kind of question.

It covers 16 different topics, including tough ones like mental health, abortion, guns, immigration, the economy, free speech on campus - really tough questions. We provoke with these questions. We ask them how much they agree and disagree with some of the statements. Then we actually start to probe if they would like to share personal experiences with one another. We have scenarios and we have other prompts. It takes about an hour. We don't turn off the lights. Students sometimes stay on for three hours with each other. They have really gotten into it. 

The impact is extraordinary. These are students from public and private four-year schools. About a third of the students are in community colleges. We have military academies, so the Navy and the Air Force, faith-based institutions, and HBCUs. We really want to make this something for everyone. We've been providing it until now as a free service because we didn't want to gate anybody from participating. Next year, we're going to charge a modest subscription fee because we have to cover our costs, but we don't want to exclude anyone. If a single educator wants to get involved, we will always offer it free to single educators. But when you start to go campus-wide, we need to actually start to charge a subscription fee.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I was going to ask about that - where it's embedded in the students' curriculum and is it a part of their experiential learning requirement? Is it a part of their cultural competence? Where do you find that most instructors incorporate the College Bowl?

Michelle Sobel: That really varies. Sometimes it's a professor who's actually teaching a course on political polarization and it's an assignment that makes sense. Otherwise, at the University of North Dakota, the president, Andy Armacost, made it available to all faculty and they had to demonstrate a learning objective. So a criminal justice instructor would want to say, "This is what I want my students to know and this is why I want them to do this." 

We make it super easy for faculty. They take five minutes to sign up their class. We make a custom toolkit. They get a landing page. We create everything for them. Then students get pushed out a link. They sign up, choose a time and a day, and they go. It doesn't take any work for the faculty to do this. It's something that happens after hours for students. And then we turn around and we provide all the data on a dashboard.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Can students participate more than once? And if so, do you track their responses to see if there's any growth, I would say, or any change in significant perspective after having this exchange?

Michelle Sobel: That's a great question. Right after they take the challenge, there's an assessment. 67% of students - and these are thousands of students, so this is an N of 6,000 from the last event - say they wanted to do this again. They want more opportunities to talk about these topics on campus. 73% said it helped them see a new perspective. 73% said they're more likely to share their own point of view on campus or in class after taking the challenge. So we're seeing most people say that they felt heard and not judged. They're having a positive experience. 

We did a longitudinal study. We do know that sometimes these intergroup or interactive contacts, these experiences, these interventions tend to have a decay factor of one week. We are seeing sustained impact at eight weeks right now. We're seeing students say they're feeling more confident. Confidence is an interesting thing to ask about. This is all self-reported sentiment. We do have a double-blind study that's coming out from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, which we're really excited to see - students who were provided the experience and students who did not take the experience, and we are measuring the difference.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: When we talk about the eight-week decay factor and students are really thinking about this for eight weeks, would this not be best implemented maybe at orientation? So now you're going into college and you're learning about your differences. You understand that there are other perspectives and you're not afraid to talk about them. As a former college president, I think that would enhance the learning that the students are about to begin. It gives them perspective as they go into their new courses and they meet new people from different places. It just seems like a wonderful thing to do as an early intervention.

Michelle Sobel: It's giving students habits and practice and skills that they need to be successful, not just as successful students, but also just as successful citizens. What's always tricky about intercollegiate events is managing everyone's calendars, which are all very different around the country. But traditionally, the fall bowl is the last week of September, the first week of October. The spring bowl is at the end of February, beginning of March. And then we do summer for those schools that have summer courses, though it's always a smaller crowd in the summer.

To date, we've had 13,000 students, 206 universities in 40 states, and we're growing. Weber State University is going to start rolling this out for the freshman experience. We encourage other college presidents to get in touch with us to talk about doing this. Our goal is for every college student to have this kind of practice.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: What is some of the feedback that you're receiving from the faculty? Once students participate, you send them their data. Are you following up to see what their impressions are based on the exercise?

Michelle Sobel: Yes, we love data. We ask professors not only how this went for them, but what we can do better. We really understand that we cannot add to any administrative burden on faculty. So we take on the heavy lifting and make sure that this is very easy to implement. What we are now seeing is that they would like us to integrate into the learning management systems so it fits into the workflow. That's something we're going to start to provide. 

Right now, they can see who attends. If it's an assignment, we make sure that they have that information. We also provide all the data afterwards, both qualitative and quantitative. We have high scores. 100% of the professors said they will recommend this to other colleagues.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I can see how incorporating or embedding this into the LMS would be extremely helpful, especially with regards to administrative tasks. But then I wonder where in the academic journey this would fit best. My opinion is at those freshman experiences, those first days. But if not, there are plenty of other opportunities to incorporate something like this that can be used on each campus to help improve dialogue.

Michelle Sobel: We want to make it as flexible as possible so it makes sense for departments and deans and provosts and others to roll it out in student life as they would work for them in their event calendars. We're also rolling out a second experience. If we say that there's an impact that's sustained six to eight weeks, we want to have a second experience at that point. 

We just developed one called the Deep Dive, which is about one topic. The first topic that we have, students have been - we did a beta that was very successful this semester on gun ownership and gun safety and gun violence. Students who are gun owners and students who have also been affected by gun violence are working one-on-one together to talk about scenarios and solutions and just gather each other's perspectives. They really enjoy that because they get to dig in.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I love that. And I think the one topic focus, when you think about the healthcare disciplines and how much they would need to know about the interdisciplinary nature and the interprofessional nature of the other roles and how they complement one another, you know, to help mitigate bad patient outcomes. Just to be able to focus on the patient experience and understanding those differences. Something like this, I think, would be awesome in that respect.

Michelle Sobel: That's interesting. So you're thinking before for like pre-med and for nursing students?

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Absolutely. You know, here's the diversity of the patients. Here's how they'll present. Here's how they interpret their definition of health and wellness and what that means across cultures. And if you saw someone who said, "I don't want a male practitioner, I prefer a female," how do you interpret that? Like, what do you think that means? How do you leverage this information to benefit the patient in their most compromised times?

Michelle Sobel: That's interesting. You know, we haven't thought about some discipline-specific scenarios, but you're just now opening my mind to this. There's so much extensibility.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I think that the constructive dialogue that you're creating with the Challenge College Bowl is great for the students. So what kind of feedback are you receiving when the faculty participate?

Michelle Sobel: It's good that you say that. We are going to be doing faculty. We've had a lot of requests for a Faculty Bowl. We are going to do one in November. We haven't set the date yet, but the Institute for Citizens and Scholars has asked us to create a faculty bowl. We will invite faculty to participate. I think that's a great idea. Now they can see what students are actually experiencing, experiencing that for themselves. And we invite all faculty to join. Once we have that date, I'll let you know.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I think that's so important because I think it's lost on many of us that depending on where you are trained regionally, your perspectives are different and how you practice and how you relate are different. Now you may then get a job on the other side of the United States or someplace else that might be rural if you came from someplace that's urban, but where you were trained really tells a story relative to your values and how you practice.

Michelle Sobel: Right. And also what you're saying on campus - all the campus protests that we have seen this spring has been disproportionately challenging for campuses across this country. It would be fascinating to have faculty discuss what campuses should and should not do to protect and encourage free expression, even when there are attacks on certain groups. There are really meaty subjects that I think faculty can actually learn from one another, and we would love to provide the way to facilitate those conversations.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Teaching critical civic skills, I know is the cornerstone of Unify America's approach. So what specific skills do you focus on and how do you ensure that they're effectively imparted to the participants?

Michelle Sobel: We are really big proponents of active listening skills. Conversation is half mouth, half ears. We've learned from one of the nation's leading scholars on listening, Graham Bodie out of University of Mississippi. He has a great title of Chief Listening Officer of Listen First Project. We developed a program called Sunday Night Listening. It's kind of a fun Jellyvision Jackbox idea of creating a game out of listening. There's kind of like a sportscaster who's the announcer of that. 

Listening skills are really important. How do we not be a topper where someone says something and somebody has to kind of respond by topping their story? How do we listen loudly? You listen loudly by having verbal cues. "Uh-huh, tell me more, say more about that." How do we not spin everything around so that it becomes about the talker, you know, about person A and not person B? So we're teaching people how to listen. Because if you don't know how to listen, it's a fundamental skill, right? And bridging divides and then disagreeing better.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: There's so much value that comes from this, that I'm seeing that's just beyond the conversations in discourse. There's so much value in terms of even the listening. How do you listen? What are you thinking about when someone else is speaking? And making sure that people know that listening is an intentional activity and not to be defensive or deflective. But you have to be reminded of that, Michelle. I think teaching that and making sure that the students or other participants understand that because you forget that and you don't think about it. You're just in your position. You're ready to respond to it. You're ready to top or to defend. And I think it is a skill that students should learn early.

Michelle Sobel: That's right. I mean, if you ask anybody in your life, "Do you think you're a good listener?" We're all going to say yes. But since I've done this work, I have learned that I'm an okay listener. You know, it's an intention. It's a practice. And I would say to anyone who's listening to this podcast right now, what you can practice is tonight with your family, try to do something called "hit the bullseye" and hitting the bullseye isn't just repeating what the person just said, but it's trying to listen for meaning signposts of meaning. Why did they just say that to me? Why do they say that to me like that? And then you say, "Well, what I'm hearing you say is this." Let me tell you something. This is going to get into woo-woo category, but listening is an act of love.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I totally agree with that. And you know, to your point, if you ask me, "Laurie, you are a good listener." I'd say, "Yeah," but I'm probably not, especially after the way you describe it, because I think you are supposed to be intentional in making sure that someone feels heard and that you understand them. But I think sometimes we get caught up in the words and not the meaning. I mean, you expressed that so eloquently a few seconds ago - look for the meaning in what's being communicated.

Michelle Sobel: Right, right. And this goes for your interpersonal relationships with your partners and your family and your children and your colleagues. If everyone can learn how to do this - and let me just give credit, Resetting the Table is a group out of California. They are really also the leaders in this category. They train trainers to teach people these skills and we learned from them and we are forever grateful for their leadership.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: We're getting close to the end of time and I have so many questions I didn't get to, but I do want to ask this. What's your vision for the future of Unify America? Are there any upcoming projects you mentioned some things, but anything that you want to discuss, expansions or anything that you're particularly excited about?

Michelle Sobel: Yes, thank you for asking. And by the way, thank you so much for having me today. If you are listening and you know of a school, an administrator, faculty who would like to learn more about this program, please reach out to me at michelle@unifyamerica.org. We would love to welcome you to the participation pool. It is incredibly enriching. It is really easy to incorporate. And our goal would be to provide this kind of experience and experiences and skills to every college student in this country.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I think every college in America, in this country, and even outside of our borders could benefit from something like this. And imagine when you take it internationally and now we're talking about cross cultures. I mean, this is really significant and I can see it will be extremely impactful. Thank you so much for joining me today, Michelle Sobel, the president of Unify America. It's been awesome having you on today and learning about what you do. This is really interesting work. And I'm so glad that I was able to have this discussion with you today.

Michelle Sobel: Thank you. A pleasure to meet you too, Dr. Shanderson.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Well, there you have it, everyone. You've just been Ed-Up'd. You can listen to any of the podcasts on the Ed-Up Experience series by just checking us out online. And there's so much for you to pull from there. I mean, there's accreditation, there's MarCom, there's EdTech. There are just so many opportunities for you to learn more about higher education, and we encourage you to do so. So thank you again, and it's been my pleasure.