The ultimate purpose of managing interpersonal conflict is to grow us emotionally in self-awareness, storytelling, emotional management, and moral and ethical character.
There aren’t any apps, searches, or other fancy technological shortcuts for the development of those traits in us.
Two things are happening simultaneously in our organizational cultures, our markets, and our personal lives.
We have established non-curiosity (“I don’t care how it works, I just want it to work”) as the new standard for engaging with the work, the ideas that interest us (or not) and the world of conflicts that inevitably surround us.
We have also decided that we don’t have the time or emotional or mental bandwidth to care deeply about a topic, person, or idea, and thus we have jettisoned that character trait (caring) as well.
At the same time, for anyone who is interested enough to look, there has been an explosion in the ways that people are explaining what they do, why they do, and—most importantly—how they do it. From videos on the Internet to long-form blog posts, to intentional curation via your email, to documentaries streaming on your over-the-top video player, there are more people taking more time, to explain what they do, to more interested (curious) and caring audiences than ever before.
These two cultural occurrences represent a split and a niching down into time, attention, caring, and curiosity that is dividing audiences, and may well portend a future of less curiosity and caring at mass, and more curation, curiosity, and even care, at the edges of the conflict universe.
The things that matter, the solutions that “stick,” the statements that are meaningful, and the audiences who will care about the impresario’s show, are not going to be found in the immediate, speed driven, bite-sized, mass market.
They will be found at the edges, slowly, over time, and they will be hungering for you to arrive, with your deeply thought out solutions to their most pressing problems.
There is a story (probably apocryphal) that the comedian Louis C.K., burns his jokes, his stand-up material, and his writing after successfully delivering it at the end of each year.
This story reads like a corollary to the idea (popularized through the constant repeating of the alleged actions of the explorer Hernando Cortez upon arriving in the New World) of burning the boats on the beach.
This idea of creative (or not-so-creative) destruction, as a motivator to either exploring further (because there is nowhere else to go) or rebuilding (because everything you built before is destroyed), can be scary for some.
Even for those who believe that they’ve already burned the boats…and the jokes.
What’s never talked about is developing the will and the courage to look at what you have accomplished in the past (i.e. a successful negotiation, a big project, a positive relationship) and ask the two following questions:
What about this could be better than it is now?
Who here will have the courage to change in order to make this thing better?
Having the will to destroy what’s already been created in the pursuit of a better future is the first step toward realizing that better future.
There is value is putting on a show for some audiences.
Without the show, there is no connection. Without the show, there is no invitation to participation. Without the show, there is no permission to be vulnerable in ways that will create value and impact.
Connection.
Permission.
Participation.
Vulnerability.
These are the ingredients for the show to work. The dilemma of the impresario is that she must perform a sacrifice of herself every time she steps up to put on the show.
Without the impresario, there is no show. Without the impresario, there is no opportunity to become a sacrifice for the audience. Without the impresario, there is no on to take responsibility and to be accountable in the event the performance fails.
Opportunity.
Sacrifice.
Responsibility.
Accountability.
The path to becoming an impresario looks wide, but it is really narrow. The road to putting on the show looks easy but is in actuality quite difficult.
Many of us are watching many others put on a show, be impresarios, and then wondering, if only for a brief moment, why we can’t do the same thing.
The path to being an impresario is open and the road to the show is available to any and everybody.
But you have to commit to the work.
No great change happens without conflict.
Not one.
And every great conflict generates resistance.
Every time.
So, since you know both things, decisions should be comparatively easy to make about change.
Right?
Making noise, making a point, and making a difference are different actions.
Where we run into trouble is when we conflate the results of all three and then use those results (and that conflation) to determine what our story will be to the market.
Telling a story to the market that resonates with certain individuals in the market requires three acts:
The first act is to be intentional. Just as we are intentional with our peacebuilding efforts, we should be intentional with our storytelling efforts.
The second act is to be incisive. Being incisive requires being self-aware enough about our own story to do some critical surgery and to cut out what doesn’t matter so that we can focus on what does matter—for the audience hearing the story.
The third act is to be persuasive for others rather than to be persuasive enough to convince ourselves that we’re right and the market is the thing that needs to change. Being persuasive is hard because it’s a skill that requires empathy (which is underrated), self-awareness, and intentionality to be operating all together at the same time.
There are more opportunities than ever for people to make noise.
There are fewer meaningful opportunities for people to make a point.
There are the same number of opportunities there always were for people to make a difference, though not always at scale.
We should be sure we what story we are telling, to whom and why.
The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.
If you want to find the resistance to changes that need to be made in your organization, it starts with you.
If you want to discover why other people aren’t resonating with your story, it starts with you.
If you want to know how to empathize with others and their plights, it starts with you.
If you want to understand how to manage conflicts and how to be satisfied when conflicts can’t (or won’t) be resolved, it starts with you.
If you want to advance in your career, social, financial, or even in your community life, it begins with you.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4BQ83oIyVM[/embedyt]
The trouble, of course, is that understanding begins with you. And you think that you already know who you are and that you don’t need to go any further. Or even worse, you think that other people need to conform to you because you’re the one that knows the answers to their toughest questions, not them.
Self-awareness is the most underrated leadership trait, and that’s because on top it looks easy, but when you go deep into yourself, it becomes more and more uncomfortable.
Gaining self-awareness means going into your family, your friends, and even the systems and organizations you work in, make money in, and/or recreate in, and asking them the critical questions that matter:
Self-awareness should not be confused with behaving selfishly. Selfishness comes about when we seek to deny someone else’s humanity and pretend that the interaction is a zero-sum transaction. Self-awareness is the quiet, mindful, anticipatory work we do by ourselves, internally that positions us for success in relationships where the opportunities and possibilities can be expanded rather than retracted.
The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.
Dive in.
The two most difficult roadblocks to success in resolving hard problems are the presence of real trade-offs and considerations of power.
Most complicated problems and difficult conflicts have simple solutions. We often confuse what we believe is a hard solution with a complicated one. What makes solutions to hard problems not easy are the presence of trade-offs (scare resources in scare environments) and power.
In a world of scarce resources (the two scarcest being time and attention these days…even more than money) the trade-offs that must be made to create the space for solutions to your most pressing conflicts can seem insurmountable.
Here are a few (of many) trade-offs. Each one can either represent a zero-sum trade-off or an even exchange trade-off:
Conflict or Apathy
Attention or Ignorance
Awareness or Ennui
Momentum or Slowness
Going Along or Resisting
Reassurances or Courage
Change or Status Quo
Focused or Distracted
Power is the consideration behind most forms of fear. Either a lack of power or power focused in an area that doesn’t benefit getting to a solution. That power is often cloaked in reassurances and comes with a healthy dose of resistance.
We often confuse easy with simple in our own minds. Easy solutions to conflicts usually involve the kinds of solutions that favor whatever trade-off benefits us and validates our perspective.
Easy solutions also preserve our power (maintaining the status quo), or grow our power in each conflict situation. Hard solutions take away or diminish our power, as well as go against whatever trade-off we’d like to have honored.
What makes solutions hard to simple problems is that we are often blind to what is hard, and are aware of what is easy.
Be sure that you are making trade-offs you can live with, in a search for complicated solutions to hard problems.
There are 200 bad drawings inside every comic book artist.
Just as there are an estimated 1,000 bad words/turns of phrase inside of every writer.
And there are a certain number of below quality (or poor quality) teaching or training experiences inside of every teacher and trainer.
There are 1,500 bad jump shots inside every free throw shooter. As there are multiple bad layups inside of every basketball player.
In professional fields from comedy to athletics, the audience accepts that there is a curved path that the performer has to walk, from being inexperienced to being experienced.
What the audience doesn’t know is where the performer is at on the path from being inexperienced to being experienced, which complicates the audience’s judgment of the performance.
And can warp its feedback.
But the thing is, once the performer gets all the inexperience out of their system, and successfully works their way through the curve from inexperienced to experienced, the performer won’t care what the performance “looks like” to the audience.
The performer won’t care about the feedback about their performance from the audience either.
The resistance to needed changes in your organization is insidious, pernicious, persistent and determined.
And if you are committed to making changes by grappling with the resistance, your approach to resistant people, resistant systems, and resistant attitudes should be as well.