Methods of conflict management

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:

  1. separate the people from the problem
  2. focus on interests, not positions
  3. invent options for mutual gain
  4. insist on using objective criteria
  5. 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.

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