How can accepting conflict and lessons from Negotiation and Mediation frameworks help us make better decisions in life and work?
Conflict has always intrigued me. As a third culture kid, my ability to easily connect and code switch has helped me instinctively observe dynamics in conflict and apply conflict resolutions skills in life and work. I have just completed a Mediation class through UC Davis with the goal of getting State Certified and volunteering with local opportunities to help mediate in business, in family matters, and the judicial setting. I don’t expect a hard shift into a professional life of judicial mediation, but have a strong intuition that the skills and concepts learned will apply to many situations in life and especially to managerial and leadership skills.
The class was truly engaging, taught us theoretical frameworks, and gave us a lot of practical application with peers. It helped me grow on top of the intuitive and self-taught mediation skills I already developed through my leadership career. What struck me the most are the similarities between the Principled Negotiation concepts, frameworks for making major life decisions (where there is no negotiation with another party, but where there might be negotiation within ourselves with different competing goals or values), and frameworks and processes I use in technical problem solving and business decision making. I’m particularly interested in exploring and writing about this topic because it further reinforces my belief in and commitment to a collaborative problem solving approach to solving complex business and technical challenges, as opposed to pursuing a rigid, positional approach which I equate to top down management.
“conflict”: when one or more parties perceive a situation in a way that suggests their own goals are incompatible with the goals of another party.
I like this definition for conflict shared by our instructor. It’s broad and doesn’t frame conflict in a negative light. You can even frame the same definition to apply to yourself and a conflict-of-one situation – when one part of yourself perceives an important life decision in a way that suggests its own goals are incompatible with other parts of yourself.
Conflict tends to be seen as negative, sometimes even demonized. American society especially seems to want to instill niceness, avoiding the discomfort of disagreement and debates at all costs. My own culture in Italy thrives on direct, explosive, and passionate confrontation, but is often so explosive and emotional that it loses most objectivity and becomes psychologically (and sometimes physically!) unsafe; in fact, Italian conflict rarely touches on feelings or identity, the traditional christian patriarchal society avoiding vulnerable, deeper layers.
My own experience with conflict is a rocky, bumpy roller coaster. On one hand, I have loved to directly and passionately debate an opinion, and am not afraid of disagreeing and telling you why. On the other hand, vulnerability did not come easy to me and many of my younger years were spent acting and protecting my authentic self, avoiding conflict when it came close to touching vulnerable areas of my innermost self. As an energetic child unwillingly commandeered into projects under the stern tutelage (“top-down-management”) of my dad, I found myself experiencing another important type of conflict at a young age, now recognizing how experience, intellect, perspectives, creativity, and individual goals can often collide in the face of solving practical, technical problems.
A PROBLEM IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
THINGS AS DESIRED
AND THINGS AS PERCEIVED.
– “Are Your Lights On”
Conflict, problem solving, and decision making in business context are deeply interrelated and can benefit from a mediation-minded approach. Since those childhood experiences, and through years in engineering and managerial roles, I have come to appreciate conflict as an important indicator of latent opportunity. Problem solving as a process goes through several differing phases, each of which can generate conflict. Identifying the problem. Understanding and refining the problem. Creating ideas and options for solutions. And, Decision Making, where we evaluate options, optimize for what’s most important, and chose the one that best balances short- and long-term needs. Since solving problems and making decisions in complex technology and business landscape requires many expert functions and stakeholders, every step of the process presents risk (and opportunity!) for conflict, and for leveraging that conflict to iteratively work toward better and better solutions.
Where can conflict arise?
- Differing understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve. Different perspectives, different perceptions, different layers of the problem, different specific use cases for varying personas.
- Differing understanding of the overarching business goals and constraints. Every function and every level of leadership has a slightly different incentive and strategic goal that solving this problem might support.
- Differing understanding of the collateral impact of a specific solution. Maintenance, operations, sales and marketing needs.
As a leader charged with driving execution, then, mediation becomes a critical leadership skill that helps guide stakeholders through all that conflict, toward making better decisions that lead to more valuable, more impactful, and more efficient solutions. Skilled mediation, which the manager should drive but is not exclusive to managerial roles, will support individual stakeholders through those phases by:
- Helping dig through layers of meaning and varying perceptions of facts, stories, goals.
- Help uncover assumptions about the problem, about the goals, about the impact and viability of solutions.
- Help navigate individual emotions that come up in each of the scenarios, openly or in 1:1 conversations.
- Help reach and commit to a decision between varying options.
It’s important to recognize the goal of collaboration through mediation is not to reach compromise. Rather, through helping improve inter-stakeholder communication and create a safe space for concerns and creativity, the goal is to reach Win-Win solutions that help achieve the best outcomes for all stakeholders, helping those stakeholders be part of the decision process and feel committed to the execution.
Beyond the work and problem solving space, conflict is ever present in our own lives. We’re often faced with complex life decisions that are difficult to navigate, even if we’re not having to negotiate with an external party. What we don’t realize is that we are in fact negotiating with ourselves – with different practical nuances between the various goals, or between different core values we hold dearly that are seemingly at odds with each other, or between multiple identities within ourselves. We get stuck making those decisions because we maybe lack information, but most of the time I believe we get stuck because we approach them from a Positional, Soft or Hard, framework and lose the ability to be creative, instead of zooming out and staying focused on identifying underlying interests, negotiating fairly with ourselves, and coming up with creative solutions.
How do we harness the conflict intrinsic in complex problem solving and channel it toward optimal solutions and healthy cultures?
- Become aware of how conflict surrounds us and how we engage in conflict through our unique conflict management style.
- Observe others’ conflict management style and learn to navigate differing styles.
- Study and practice various conflict management, negotiation, and mediation frameworks and develop your own process best suited to your organization.
- Consistently create opportunities in which conflict is welcomed, seen as an opportunity to create value, and practiced in a psychologically safe matter that creates deep engagement.
I will dig deeper into frameworks and safety in future posts, while wrapping this post up with a short overview of the conflict management styles to kickstart us on the first step of harnessing conflict.
The way we see and engage in conflict is influenced by our conflict management style. Measured on two axes, one for the level of cooperativeness and one for the level of assertiveness, there are five styles which we all express to lesser or greater degrees, within various contexts.
Competing. Highly assertive and uncooperative, we see the world as win-lose, and we fight for what we want regardless of collateral, often at the other person’s expense. This is a helpful style when resources are truly limited, when we don’t need or want to maintain the relationship, and when “winning” is clearly defined and critically important.
Avoiding. Low in both assertion and cooperation, we don’t deal with conflict at all, we withdraw. The outcome is often lose-lose, as both parties miss out on opportunities to benefit each other. This is likely the most unhelpful style and will lead to significant individual and organizational dysfunction over time.
Accommodating. Highly cooperative, but unassertive, we hide our true needs, following orders or giving in to demands often in pursuit of harmony in the relationship. This can be a helpful style if we need to protect ourselves in a power hierarchy or if maintaining the relationship is critical. It is unlikely to lead to the best outcome for either party.
Compromising. Compromise is often the worst of all worlds, splitting the difference, facing conflict but desiring to resolve it quickly without diving deeper into each other’s interests. Compromise often happens when neither party cares enough or has enough ownership and authority to drive better outcomes.
Collaborating. Highly cooperative and highly assertive, this style focuses on problem solving, finding common ground. This is the sweet spot of value creation, where differing perspectives and creativity can help drive outcomes that no one previously even thought possible. It is also the style that, when repeated over and over again in a safe environment, will lead to healing and strengthening of the relationship.
While there isn’t a single “best” style, there are styles that are better suited for certain situations, and I would like to argue that the Collaborative style is the most suited for complex decision making in environments of uncertainty and high impact (when we have the time and resources to pursue true collaboration).
Conflict is everywhere and there is immense opportunity in reframing it as a tool for truth and creativity. Humans are flawed, buggy, feeling machines that have evolved to think rationally. Even (and especially) the most rational among us have a limited view of the world, and often don’t recognize that that view is filtered by a lens of experience, beliefs, trauma, stories. We are rarely taught the introspective and communication skills to help us dig through our own stories, communicate our beliefs and perspectives in a healthy way that is likely to be heard and valued. Diverse backgrounds and perspectives, differing opinions, and live, interactive conflict based on constructive conversation become critical in the discovery of truth, continuous growth, and iterating toward the highest levels of performance. Let’s start seeing conflict as an opportunity, a source of truth discovery and value creation! The next post will go into how Negotiation and Mediation frameworks offer a set of skills to help individuals and teams in any context dig through important facts and beliefs and model healthy communication to achieve great solutions, together.
The Roaming CTO 
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