The Uses of Conflict

I may sometimes fancy myself as a contrarian, challenging the “conventional wisdom” but, temperamentally, I am not cut out for confrontation. The blog occasionally refers to my growing up in a bit of a class-less “No Man’s Land” in which I became painfully aware of the power of conflicting group loyalties; and keen to search for ways beyond polarised simplicities…

And these are very polarised times – with people apparently unable to resist the temptation to strike out at others.

We know that people argue very differently in different cultures – the French (and Romanians) are classic “disputationists”, with a perhaps apocraphyl guide being issued to British soldiers before the Normandy landing warning them that loud verbal disputes amongst natives should not be mistaken for conflict – it was just normal French conversation.

Japanese and other Asian cultures have much more subtle ways of conducting disputes which a delightful new book Conflicted – how productive disagreements produce better outcomes tells me demonstrates the distinction between Low Context (direct and explicit) and High Context (indirect and implicit) cultures. Although the English like to think of themselves as open and direct, the way they use language in negotiations and everyday conversation has sufficient aspects of High Context to confuse their interlocuteurs about the real meaning of their words.

I learned a lot from the book – which is useful not only for couples, families and teams but for more specialised work in reconciliation, hostage-taking and even addiction.

I generally dislike the psychology books which detail experiments to persuade us of their thesis but, somehow, Ian Leslie’s use of this device works. He weaves theory nicely into the text and then brings it all together at the end to leave us with 10 Golden Rules.

But before then, I had been bowled over by how he had dealt with what he argued had been a great decline in our argumentative style since Socrates invented his method of probing for clarity and truth. Disputation, he argues, has been institutionalised in medieval universities but people like Descartes ridiculed such scholastic disputes – after which Guttenberg and the Reformation made the pursuit of knowledge an individual rather than social matter.    

“For intellectuals, the purpose of reason was to gain knowledge of the world – but reason often seemed used to entrench whatever we wanted to believe, regardless of whether it was true. For the “interactionist” reason hasn’t evolved to reach truth but to facilitate communications and cooperation”

“The myth of the individual who can think his way through any problem in magnificent isolation is powerful….but misleading”

The book then goes into the more specialised field of conflict or dispute reconciliation and summarises what are, of course, complex issues in some interesting (if necessarily simplistic) injunctions  

Injunction	Translation
First connect	Look for opportunities to make a personal connection with the “other” in an argument, try to establish “trust”
Let go of the rope	Don’t try to control what the other person thinks or feels
Give face	Don’t engage in status battles. Make the other feel good about themselves
Check your WEIRDNESS	Probably the most important. Don’t assume you share cultures! WACO
Get curious	Show genuine interest in the other
Make wrong strong	Use mistakes to apologise
Disrupt the script	Introduce novelty and surprise into the conversation
Share constraints	??
Only get mad on purpose
Be real