According to The handbook of Decision Making (Göktug Morçöl, 2006; Chapter 31: Participatory Decision Making, by Susan Summers Raines), there is a ‘holy book in the field of conflict management: Getting to Yes (1981, Fisher and Ury). After describing Sources of conflict, Psychological barriers, {the Cognitive barrier} Attribution bias, Trust and Procedural barriers, the Section 31.2.1 Methods for Group Decision Making kicks of with five steps to describe their basic problem solving and {group} decision making process:
- separate the people from the problem
- focus on interests, not positions
- invent options for mutual gain
- insist on using objective criteria
- craft the agreement
Sounds logical… Although at first glance ‘invent options’ seems somewhat a ‘context-less’ approach. In my opinion the previous step ‘focus on interest’ is more crucial: how to get people to share and open up interests, as part of an envisioned collaboration? A collaboration with a reason of existance that 1 level above the problem areas.
Interesting is the statement that
…when conflict escalates, people “dig in” to their positions … and personalize conflict …
By now, we now that visuals have the ability to de-perzonalize decision making: visuals are able to dampen ego’s. Assuming expecially the Dutch are more about ego than character -a coffee company wisdom, for now- , there is much to gain using visualization in conflict management. At least for the Dutch 😉
Quoting p600:
Specific skills to encourage positive framing can be learned in order to enhance the quality of communication and the likelyhood of positive outcomes.
I agree most people have difficulties to state concerns while being aware and overcoming attribution abias, casting blame or personalization of conflict. However, when learning to overcome these difficulties, I feel these skills should help framing both positive, neutral AND negative resonses. For instance positive responses can trigger constructive self-pride, neutral responses invite to problem solving and negative responses can trigger constructive conflict.
It is impossible to make every person a specialist in conflict management. We can provide tools to overcome basic gap though.
