If you want to make a difference you better be willing to embrace conflict. In fact, you better be creating and demanding it. How you deal with conflict is where the magic happens.
Here are some key points from Morton Deutsch’s “Cooperation and Conflict (pdf)”
“When it takes a constructive course, conflict is potentially of considerable personal and social value. It prevents stagnation, it stimulates interest and curiosity, it is the medium through which problems can be aired and creative solutions develped, it is the motor of personal and social change.”
Some benefits of cooperative relations:
- Effective communication.
- Collective and inclusive solution making.
- Cross functionality.
- Shared vision.
- Building on each others strengths.
- Mutual respect.
Negatives surrounding competitive relations:
- Personal agendas.
- Mistrust.
- Silo building.
- Hostility.
- Power hungry.
Deutsch’s Twelve Commandments of Conflict Resolution:
- Know what type of conflict you are involved in.
- Become aware of the causes and consequences of violence and of the alternatives to violence, even when one is very angry.
- Face conflict rather than avoid it.
- Respect yourself and your interests, respect the other and his or her interests.
- Distinguish clearly between “interests” and “positions”.
- Explore your interests and the other’s interests to identify the common and compatible interests that you both share.
- Define the conflicting interests between oneself and the other as a mutual problem to be solved cooperatively.
- In communicating with the other, listen attentively and speak as to be understood: this requires the active attempt to take the perspective of teh other and to check continually one’s success in doing so.
- Be alert to the natural tendencies to bias, misperceptions, misjudgements, and stereo-typed thinking that commonly occur in oneself as well as the other during heated conflict.
- Develop skills for dealing with conflicts so that one is not helpless nor hopeless when confronting those who are more powerful, those who do not want to engage in constructive resolution, or those who use dirty tricks.
- Know oneself and how one typically responds in different sorts of conflict situations.
- Conflict avoidance/Excessive involvement in conflict
- Hard/Soft
- Rigid/Loose
- Intellectual/Emotional
- Escalating/Minimizing
- Compulsively revealing/Compulsively concealing
- Finally, throughout conflict, one should remain a moral person, ie: a person who is caring and just, and should consider the other as a member of one’s moral community ie: someone who is entitled to care and justice.
