How do we get anywhere?

Dances with Penguins - 2
Originally uploaded by Fotomom

Isn't there some tool that we could use so that our meetings always get us a little closer to where we want to go?

If we're going to get anywhere, we need to learn how to talk to each other. That's a conclusion I keep coming back to. With all these people, why can't we solve our own problems?

So, I come back to the side-point Professor Gary Olson made in class one day. He said that white-boards were proven to be very useful for making meetings get somewhere, but he hardly ever saw faculty or administrators use one when they met.

This is on top of arriving without a clear agenda, and working without minutes being taken of what was said.

Well, that's curious. Why is that? I mean, white-boards are really useful in removing ambiguity and bringing issues to the front where they can be seen by everyone. They help you leave the meeting with a common understanding of what was agreed to and a clear picture of what steps who is taking next.

So, I have to suppose that faculty and administrators prefer to keep issues hidden, prefer to avoid revealing conflict, and are happy to let everyone go off with their own misconceptions of what was decided and who is doing what next. And, I guess, it's OK in their minds that people who weren't at the meeting are now missing part of the picture and walking around misinformed.

So, let's start the "Five Whys" process and see if we can figure out what it would take to overcome this apparent social dysfunction.

So far we have:

• We have major social problems that aren't being dealt with, locally, at a department or corporate level, regionally, statewide, and nationally, or being dealt with way too late to be effective
  
• which is partly because: people don't get anywhere when they meet
• which is partly because: they don't use obvious tools like agendas, white-boards, and minutes
• which is partly because: those tools remove ambiguity which clarifies areas of conflict which is disruptive and unpleasant
• which is partly because: people aren't good at dealing with conflict so they avoid it.
• which is partly because: what?

I think part of the reason people have trouble dealing with conflict is that they don't think of it as "apparent conflict" and assume that it is "real conflict."

Because they think it's "real" conflict, they also think that the only way to survive is to "win", which means that everyone else must "lose", so they hardly want to be open and honest about their motivations. Most people also assume that everyone else is just like them, so they assume the same reasoning and motivations are behind what everyone else is doing as well.

We get some guidance from the superb book "Getting To Yes", which is about techniques that let the Soviet Union and the US negotiate during the cold war, when they hated and mistrusted each other.

The authors use the example of an orange that two kids are fighting over. Each wants the orange and "needs it" and "must have it."

On investigation of what they would do with it if they got it, one wanted to squeeze it and get the juice to drink, and the other needed the outside rind for some class project.

So, it turns out the "it" they were fighting over wasn't ever made clear enough to reveal that there were two "its" and one orange could satisfy both needs.

So, one problem the authors found is that people tend to jump to conclusions about what they think is the "only way" to do something that could "possibly" work. The conclusions are wrong, but are based on unstated or even unrealized assumptions or different life experience.

When the people can back off of their "positions" ( "I must have that orange!") and go back upstream a step to their "interests" ("I need orange juice!") new solutions suddenly appear to what was an "unsolvable problem."

If you keep on tracking back upwards one step after another, you end up coming back to basic needs, that people need to survive, to eat, to have clothing and shelter, etc. I think any negotiation has to start with the assumption that the goal in life is not the annihilation of the other party (which would be a position), but to figure out how to proceed so that the other party doesn't pose an on-going threat of annihilating me (an understandable and predictable interest.)

Many international conflicts are generated by the belief that the only way the other party will stop being a threat is if it is annihilated entirely, and that there are no other possible solutions to reducing the threat.

I'll look at other properties of rational ways to deal with conflict in other posts. Where I wanted to get in this one was to follow the chain of causality upstream far enough to see hope along one axis. So far, we've found that many of the reasons to avoid discussing conflict and actually resolving it are based in misunderstanding, unspoken assumptions, leaps of judgment about the "only way" something can happen, and perhaps hidden assumptions that the "only way" to reduce a threat to myself is to sabotage or eliminate someone else.

The humility required is being willing to accept that it is possible that somewhere you have leaped to some conclusion and leaped right past another solution you didn't see.

The belief required is being willing to accept that your own survival does not automatically require the elimination of someone else.

In other circles, maybe the realization is that your own wealth, empowerment, and happiness does not automatically demand dis-empowering everyone else. There may be other ways to survive and thrive and be legitimately happy and wealthy.

In fact, as I'll discuss in other posts, both health and wealth are bio-social constructs and if everyone else died, the wealth would be worth nothing and physiological and mental health would be impossible. And, just like our body doesn't have a "super-cell" that all the other cells bow down to and "obey", the planet doesn't need a "super-man" that all other men bow down to and obey. The whole concept of domination is fatally flawed, and has no biological or natural analog. Ecosystems can't make themselves subservient to one component, and the emergent power is so much larger than any component's individual power that subservience would make no sense. There is no "best" part of a mutually-dependent ecosystem.

(credits - photo Dances with Penguins, by Fotomom,
click on it to go to that site on Flickr., "dinner time" penguin photo by
Uploaded by c-basser on Flickr)