Postscript on Sidestepping Conflicts
Going Meta
Introduction
This has turned out to be a very long postscript to a very short three-part article whose final instalment was published here in Change last week. It was written in response to a reader’s comment.
—The Editors
Postscript on Sidestepping Conflicts: Going Meta
You may have seen a comment on last week’s post from Jack Martin Leith of Newcreate, which said, “James, I feel a strong need for Part IV.”
Now Part III was the final part of this little article on sidestepping conflicts, and so I got in touch with Jack, a good friend who has known my work well for decades.
I explained to him that I had carefully composed the first three parts to ensure it said absolutely everything I had to say about resolving conflicts that anyone engaged in conflict resolution (all eight billion of us!1) needed, in my view, to understand. My response reminded Jack of the classic 2-minute Bob Newhart psychiatrist sketch.
He said he found Part IV a bit like “listening to a joke and waiting for a punchline that never came.” He added that he could tell how much work I had put into Parts I, II, and III, which is why he felt a bit up in the air when he reached the end of Part III. He added, “Sorry if this sounds harsh and ungracious.”
There was doubtless more to say beyond my little contribution to such a big and important topic. So I asked Jack what he would want to see in a Part IV that I hadn’t already said, because I’d simply run out of anything else to say about my take on resolving conflicts.
He asked what “the intended takeaway” was. “Is it something as simple as ‘stop thinking about conflicts as battles”?
Well, no. That was just one small point. Indeed, my honest reaction when he asked me for the intended takeaway was that the takeaway was everything encapsulated in the bare 2200 words making up the entire, modest little three-part article.
I felt that my remarks in that three-parter were so comprehensive and condensed that it did feel analogous to someone reading the little strip of paper in a fortune cookie, and asking what the takeaway from that message was meant to be.
I found myself sympathizing with ‘psychiatrist’ Bob Newhart in that video. I hadn’t exactly set out a cryptic message in Vedic Sanskrit; I thought I’d made things as clear and simple as I could in plain English.
Now some of you may be engaged professionally in conflict resolution, the practice of which is a highly skilled, nuanced, and complex business requiring many different kinds and levels of expertise. Like many of you, but unlike me, Jack knows some of the conflict resolution literature, including both the traditional practices and a number of newer, more innovative approaches.
Jack asked whether I was advocating something along the lines of some of these, where apparently “both parties put their cards on the table and see what they can create together, beyond declaring a truce, [and] use the conflict as a springboard to an ambitiously desirable state of affairs for each party.”
Well, honestly, I had no idea, but from that brief description it sounded like an approach conducted in a similar spirit at least, while going about things very differently from the way my colleagues and I would go about it.
For one thing, once there are “parties” with a table onto which to “put their cards” I would hope the conflict had already been completely resolved, and that they were all just there ‘round a table to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. That’s more what I was advocating. What Jack was referring to in the literature still sounds like a promising approach, but it wasn’t how I would ever go about things myself.
But Jack did get me thinking.
The reason I had, and have, no more to say on the topic of conflict resolution beyond those 2200 words, is that I never think about it at all. Not under that heading anyway. If you’ve read the first three parts, you already know everything I myself know about conflict resolution per se, and all I am personally interested to know about the subject.
In my experience, once we abandon the Collision Theory of conflict, as I said last week, we are left with only “a design problem and no more. The task becomes one of reconciling sets of design constraints, negotiating not issues, …but realities, as fragile certainties shatter and crumble.” That’s more in my own line of country.
Sure, for decades I have in my professional work helped decision makers rapidly resolve all kinds of major, intractable conflicts, but for me it was never about practicing “conflict resolution.”
They may well have come in the door with a conflict that needed resolving and may have walked out a few hours later with the conflict resolved. The resolution at which we’d arrived together could then be gingerly floated with the various stakeholders, testing the waters, tweaking the details as necessary. But nobody would sit around a table until the resolution to the conflict was oven-ready.
Nor was there ever any “shuttle diplomacy” involved, the hazards of which I’d already invoked in Part II.
And in my book, if conflict resolution involves laying cards out on a table, it’s a card game not at all like Poker, and probably closest to playing Patience (a.k.a. “Solitaire” in America).
You don’t necessarily need “the other side” (as we pointed out) to take part directly, for as soon as we have “sides” it’s not a conflict as such any longer, but some kind of dispute, which is not something you want to have if you can avoid it.
Ideally you want to leave “the other side” out of it as much as possible for as long as possible, until you have a resolution you are fairly certain they will fall upon with glad cries.
That said, Jack’s remarks also got me thinking that we did say in the article that “[t]he greater the extent to which the conflict in question involves complex contending views, interests, priorities, and agendas, the greater our freedom of choice in how we look at it.”
And indeed, even in our own “solitaire” approach—which involves only ever entering into negotiations after the conflict has already been resolved as far as we’re concerned—we invariably find that more possibilities are opened up by first learning what you can about the various parties’ own design constraints, rather than making assumptions about them.
This is also, incidentally, why other people’s conflicts cannot be resolved by those who learn about them only by reading the newspapers or even by studying all the literature on the subject of the particular, substantive conflict. You need to know the territory intimately in great detail, or be working closely with those who do. Conflict resolution is neither a spectator sport, nor one for Monday morning quarterbacks.
And in case you’re wondering, it’s not easy, often impossible, to apply my own favoured solitaire approach to one’s own personal conflicts, and not least because it’s typically difficult and often impossible to see, let alone question, your own tacit assumptions, as we’ve often discussed here in the pages of Change. Questioning one’s own assumptions is also, as we saw some months back, overrated.
In consequence, need I aver, I’m no better than anyone else at dealing with my own conflicts. In fact, given the professional deformity induced by my preference for this “solitaire” approach to conflict resolution, sometimes I think I’m a darn sight worse than most people at resolving my own conflicts, not least through my tendency to overthink things and not just ask the other people involved for their own perspective.
The late philosopher Professor Elmer Sprague often intoned, “If you want to understand another person, the best place to start is to ask them what they mean by the words they are using.” I wholeheartedly embrace that principle, and I quote his advice all the time. But do I apply it when I’m off-duty? Not nearly as often as I should.
There are many other ways, I’m sure, of applying the fairly basic insights of Parts I, II and III about the epistemology of conflict, but what I’ve been describing here, for the sake of clarification, is simply the way my own colleagues and I happen to go about applying these ideas.
If you are curious to understand a little more in detail about some of the thinking behind our own particular approach, you can read some or all of the other articles published here in Change, all of which expand on that notion,2 and nearly all of which are relevant. That’s where I’d begin if you’re interested in “Further Reading.”
In any event, if what I had to say in Parts I, II, and III resonated for you at all, you will likely find your own way, or many different ways, of putting these ideas into practice. You might even invent a new way. That was precisely my intention. Everyone will have a different way of applying this small but significant epistemological shift to resolving conflicts.
This answer to Jack’s question has turned out to be nearly as long as the entire, three-part article. And this isn’t even a post about resolving conflicts by sidestepping them. It’s a post about my three previous posts on resolving conflicts by sidestepping them, and why I had, and still have, nothing really to add to that, and why if there were to be a Part IV, I’d be the least qualified person to write it. It’s a post about posts.
Perhaps there’s a moral in that. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about this week. You’ve probably heard the saying that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” While that’s true so far as it goes, my own rule of thumb is that “when the going gets tough, the smart go meta.” It’s a rule of thumb that has saved me a lot of trouble in my own life, and it’s one I recommend you experiment with trying.
All this “going meta” has, as an added bonus, already given me an idea for another article, one about “sides.” And funnily enough, if you insist on having a fortune-cookie version of the intended takeaway from the last three weeks’ 2200 words on resolving conflicts by sidestepping them, then maybe it’s this: “When in doubt, go meta.”
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Who, after all, is not engaged in conflict resolution at some point in their life, or indeed sometime each year, month, week, day?
However, it’s not something you can just read about and then go out and do. Far from it. No one outside my own firm has access to any of the proprietary technology required. But that shouldn’t trouble you. You can still benefit by getting your head around the ideas we present here in Change, which emerge from the selfsame epistemology, and which are all written to be of practical use to our readers, and not just of theoretical interest.
This is the best Part IV I could have hoped for. Thanks a million, James.