Our Story

Late one night in a central-California hotel…

It’s 10:30 or quarter to 11 when a literal traveling salesman asks Jim Henderson + Jim Hancock if he can buy them a beer. Thanks, they say. But we’re ready to call it a night.

He persists. “Where you from?” he says.

Pacific Northwest, they say.

“So … Democrats, then,” he replies — satisfied he has, with a single question, all the information he needs to size them up as ideological opponents. He changes the subject to sports.

And this is the spirit of the age when, as a headline in The Onion summed it up:

“STEREOTYPES ARE A REAL TIME-SAVER”

Stereotypes are a real time-saver. Of course they are. Because, honestly, who has the time, let alone the need for real conversations when simpleminded stereotypes will do?

Who indeed….

The 3Practices emerged as an exercise in reverse-engineering. Over decades, we observed, and eventually described and named the habits of people who cross the difference divide — repeatedly and on purpose. Not only do these people have time for real conversations, they’ve decided they don’t have time for conversations that aren’t real.

All this crystalized for us in in 2016 when we made a documentary film about a rabbi, an imam, and an white evangelical preacher in Peoria, Illinois. As stereotypes, these three were perfect ideological opponents. In fact, they were the best of friends. They’d given up trying to convert each other years before we met them. They had spirited discussions about their differences on spirituality and religious practices, on society and politics, on morality and the common good … they watched ballgames together, introduced their spouses and children, taught a class together at a local university … they learned to laugh together and prank each other across their differences … they stopped blaming each other for the depraved acts of people who tried to justify their lust for power as a religious impulse … they started protecting each other and speaking up for each other in public — especially as anti-Muslim sentiments and hate crimes began to spike in 2016 … their friendship embodied what we’d come to identify as — and what Jim Henderson had to started calling — three practices for crossing the difference divide. We called the movie No Joke.

CLICK THROUGH FOR MORE ON THE NO JOKE PROJECT

The last half-hour uses the 3Practices as a frame for viewing the relational path of our three remarkable friends.

I’ll be unusually interested in the other

I’ll stay in the room with difference

I’ll stop comparing my best with your worst

Early in 2017, we started testing 3Practice Circles in Seattle, then here and there across the country, in an effort to prove it’s possible to have substantive, civil conversations with ideological opponents — the sort of conversations that have to take place before any of us can become true friends — or remain friends — with people who disagree with us. We wanted to find out if we could create spaces to work on operationalizing the sort of listening that helps people cross the difference divide repeatedly and on purpose.

We designed, tested, and redesigned rules for creating safe spaces to talk about unsafe things. We started calling ourselves Referees — not facilitators, discussion leaders, or moderators — because we came to understand that our task was not about the outcome of the game but about making the game safe and fair.

We refereed Open 3Practice Circles where anyone was welcome, and Private 3Practice Circles for businesses, civic groups, religious organizations, colleges and universities.

In August 2019, we trained a group of Referees in California’s Central Valley who helped us test the capacity for people others than the two of us to lead 3Practice Circles.

In February 2020, we experimented with private Zoom-based Circles for a distributed civic organization.

Then the Covid 19 storm hit.

By the time Covid shut down our in-person 3Practice Circles, we’d refereed half-a-dozen Zoom Circles. The transition to Zoom felt oddly normal in a time when so many things seemed chaotic and not normal at all.

Just like that, we went from two or three Circles a month, to two or three Circles a week.

In May, 2020, we trained the first online cohort of 3Practice Circle Leaders. By September 2021, we’d trained eight cohorts online — some open, some private for institutions and organizations — with more in the pipeline stretching into 2022.