The DASCorps Survival Guide: Conflict Navigation

There some who say that this topic should be called ‘conflict resolution’. Others say it ought to be called ‘conflict management’ since conflicts almost never definitively resolve. Whatever you want to call it, you’ll no doubt be in the thick of it throughout your VISTA year.

Unfortunately there are no formulas or equations that will guarantee successful conflict management/resolution/etc. However, there are some good ways to approach conflicts that will usually result in more open communication, less pent-up frustration, and better results for the task(s) at hand.

What Are Some Common Conflicts for DASCorps members?
Each organization, workplan, and supervisor is different. However, there are some common and specific areas where conflicts arise across the board:

• Lack of defined Role(s) for VISTAs and others within your organization
• Lack of understanding of individual responsibilities
• Workplans radically change throughout the year
• Lack of clarification on what ‘the work’ actually is
• Entrenched ideas and ‘the usual way of doing things’ coming up against new ideas and ‘new ways of doing things’
• Mitigation of VISTA importance and role
• Frustration with organizational management
• Poor communication
• Misunderstanding VISTA recommendations

This section will go through some basics of how to work your way through conflicts via negotiation as well as some other tried and true methods.

Negotiation
In life and in business, very rarely are we the highest or only authority: parents, teachers, bosses, coworkers, spouses. When we need something, either the good of ourselves, or the organization, or the relationship we need to communicate with others and receive their permission, or buy-in or support. We do this through negotiation.

TIP: Great negotiating is not about power or cleverness (though they help); instead, the secret to good negotiating is preparation, listening, creativity, and being able to see through the other person’s eyes. Above all, good negotiating is about turning confrontation into cooperation: converting conflict into creative problem solving.

The following 6 Step Method is adapted from William Ury’s “Getting Past No: Negotiating your way from Confrontation to Cooperation”. In addition to the following framework, it also contains many more methods and advice for recognizing obstacles and overcoming them.

1. Don’t Rush In: Prepare
The secret to negotiating is mapping out the lay of the land: both your positions and theirs. Many people think that they can wing it; but that often results in failure.
Knowing what you want, want they want, and how far each of you are willing to go to achieve it can determine the outcome of a negotiation before it even begins.

Using the attached Negotiations Preparation Worksheet will help you organize the following principles of preparation:

Interests are the reasons you’re negotiating in the first place. They aren’t what you want, but why you want them. If you’re asking to create outreach brochures, your interests might be to gain new participants, attract a certain demographic, or raise awareness of the organization in the community. Because negotiations are a two way street, you want to figure out their interests as well: maybe they don’t have the money or maybe they prioritize a different project.

Options are pieces of agreements. Maybe you can’t get money to print up complete brochures, but you can place a full-page spread in the next newsletter; maybe you could get another necessary purchase donated and thus free up some funds. Negotiating is about pushing the boundaries and being creative: how many different ways can you achieve your goals.

TIP: When thinking about options, Invent First, Evaluate Later: suspend your judgment and list out all ideas that come to mind. You might find that even wild ideas can be made rational.

Standards are your measures of success in negotiating. Avoid negotiations where the only standard is a contest of wills: someone wins and someone loses. Instead, good standards are Return On Investment (“if we reach out to 1,000 new people, we’re guaranteed to get 10 new volunteers”), fairness/equal-treatment (“the other program has an outreach budget”), or the way an issue has been resolved before (“the program manager has always set budget priorities”)

Your BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement) is your optimum walkaway alternative. Knowing what you’ll do if you can’t reach agreement is your leverage to be kept in your back-pocket. Most BATNAs fall into three categories:

• Go On Strike (“I can’t move forward on this project unless we get more volunteers”).
• Go To War (“The other program managers are behind me on this.”)
• Bring in a Third Party (“This was one of the goals submitted to the Transmission Project. Let’s see what they recommend.”)

Knowing the other side’s BATNA is just as important as knowing your own. They may need you moving forward with the project more than you think. The goal then becomes developing an Option that is better than their BATNA—and leading them towards it.

Proposals are options that satisfy your own interests, are better than their BATNA, and based upon fair Standards. It’s best to have three proposals in mind:

• What do you aspire to? Don’t offer a tepid proposal just because you are afraid of failing. What would genuinely satisfy your interests and meets enough of their basic concerns that there is at least a chance that they would agree?
• What would you be content with? What proposal, though not perfect, would be good enough.
• What could you live with? Based upon your BATNA, what would be marginally better than that. During negotiations, use this as a reminder to ensure that you don’t accept something even worse than your BATNA.

2. Don’t React: Go to the Balcony
The first step is not to control the other person’s behavior. It is to control your own. Instead of hotly reacting to attacks, step away from your emotions and into a coolly objective mode.

Listen to their initial arguments and identify how they’re reacting: are they attacking you (“You didn’t finish the last project you started! Why should I give you this money now?), stonewalling (“I can’t do that. It doesn’t make sense. No.”) or passing the buck (“I can’t make that decision without the board’s approval”). Instead of getting mad or getting even, focus on your goals.

3. Don’t Argue: Step to Their Side
Before you can really negotiate, you need to create a favorable climate. They’re expecting you to attack or to resist; so do the opposite. Listen to them and acknowledge their points.

• Put yourself in their shoes and get them in the habit of saying “Yes” by restating their opinions (“I see your concerns. Are you saying that spending the money now would mean that we wouldn’t have it in reserve for an unexpected cost?”)
• Acknowledge their authority and competence by asking them for help (“You’ve done really well managing the other programs and I have this problem and want you to help me solve it?”).

TIP: Change the nature of the discussion from you-against-them into collective problem solving: you are both working together to overcome the challenges that lie between you and your goals.

4. Don’t Reject: Reframe
Instead of rejecting their ideas (and causing them to dig-in against you), direct their attention towards the challenge of meeting both your interests. Take whatever they say and reframe it as an attempt to deal with the problem (“So you’re saying that our budget is really crunched this year. Why is that?”) Ask open-ended, problem solving questions (“Why is it that you want that?” or “What if we were to…?”). Change the dialogue from “you” and “me” to “we”.

Reframe their tactics:

• Go around Stone Walls (“Take it or leave it” or “I need to know by tomorrow”): ignore it; treat it as an aspiration (“We all have our aspirations, I guess. But we should be realistic. Why don’t you think this is a reasonable outreach budget?”); take it seriously, but test it—get called away at the last minute; turn it to your advantage (“To meet your deadline, I’ll have to set the budget higher since I won’t have time to fully research the cost of hiring a printer”)
• Deflect Attacks (“It wouldn’t be good for you to make a stink about this!” or “You’re irrational to ask this!” or “You’re always letting projects go overbudget!”): ignore it and move forward; reframe it as an attack on the problem (“We did go over budget last time. That’s why I’m asking for your experience in meeting our goals and our budget now. How can we do that?”

5. Don’t Push: Build them a Golden Bridge
At last you’re ready to negotiate. The other side, however, may stall, not convinced of the benefits of the agreement. You may be tempted to push and insists, but this will probably lead them to harden and resists. Instead, do the opposite—draw them in the direction you would like them to go.

Start from where the other person is and guide them towards a mutually beneficial agreement. Ask them for ideas to involve them in the process (“Building on your idea, I see…”).

Don’t discount them as irrational or crazy; instead, think of their human needs to save face or protect their authority by showing how the circumstances have changed (“The original budget was a good one, but we didn’t have the information then that we do now.”)

6. Don’t Escalate: Use Power to Educate
If the other side still resists and thinks they can win without compromising, you need to educate them to the contrary. Make it hard for them to say no but without threats or force. Educate them about the costs of not agreeing.

Ask reality-testing questions (“Do you think it’s realistic to create a program but not tell people about it?”), warn rather then threaten (“If we don’t do this, we may not have enough volunteers to run the program”) and demonstrate your BATNA (“This is integral to my being effective this year.”)

Use your BATNA only if necessary, and minimize their resistance to exercising restraint and reassuring them that your goal is mutual satisfaction and problem solving, not victory.

Putting it all together
Negotiations are a dialogue. Using these methods, your goal is to keep the lines of communications open until a mutually satisfactory decision is reached. By properly preparing, you’ll know what to expect and how to counter it. By framing negotiations as creative problem solving rather than confrontation, you’ll ensure your goals are met, even if they’re met in a different manner than expected. By concentrating on the process, you’ll ensure a happy outcome.

Some Other Conflict Navigation Methods to Try
In his management bible The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge argues that most conflict lies within the mental models people on all sides have but never explicitly say. These unsaid opinions, ideas, and concepts are usually the very things sabotaging communication and productivity. Here are two methods from The Fifth Discipline that might help open up communication and decrease tensions.

The Left-Hand Column
So you’ve just had the third in a series of unproductive conversations with your supervisor, but you can’t quite put your finger on why they are unfruitful. Sometimes, the issue may have to do with what you are talking around or not directly saying. Often the gap between what you think and what you say can be as wide as the gap between you and your supervisor.

Next time you have an unproductive conversation, try to script it out immediately afterwards like this:

• Supervisor: How’s it going?
• Me: Alright. Just doing some work on the afterschool curriculum.
• Supervisor: Did you get my suggestions on it?
• Me: Yeah. I’ve been looking at them.
• Supervisor: Great. Well let me know what you think.

Now, add a left-hand column to that conversation where you plot out everything you were thinking at each point:

What was Thought:

• I am swamped and don’t have time to deal with you micromanaging me
• His suggestions don’t apply to our community needs and I’ll probably not include them. If only he understood local community needs better.
• How can I make him see his idea of community need is wrong?

What was Said:

• Supervisor: How’s it going?
• Me: Alright. Just doing some work on the afterschool curriculum.
• Supervisor: Did you get my suggestions on it?
• Me: Yeah. I’ve been looking at them.
• Supervisor: Great. Well let me know what you think.

By looking at the left-hand column, there are some tacit assumptions made such as 1. Your supervisor wants to micromanage you and 2. He has large misconceptions about the local community. By skillfully talking around the underlying issues, both you and your supervisor achieved zero progress and only escalated tensions.

But what do you after you acknowledge these thoughts and assumptions? Being a smart and rational person, you know that going directly to your supervisor and telling them that they micromanage and have gross misconceptions about community need will only make your supervisor defensive and further strain your working relationship. Also, as per the last thought, is resorting to manipulation to “make him see his idea of community need is wrong” the tactic you want to tactic?

To move the conflict toward a productive end, you may have to be prepared to meet a few requirements: 1. You are honest about your viewpoint and the data/evidence upon which it’s based 2. That the person you are butting heads with (your supervisor in the above example) may not have those same data or viewpoint and 3. The viewpoints and/or data on both sides may be incorrect.

To untangle this mess you need to be willing to guide those frustrating conversations and situations to productive ones where both you and the person you’re conflicting with (i.e. your supervisor) are learning from each other. It requires you to clearly state your views while also trying to learn as much about (in the above example) your supervisor’s viewpoints…which nicely flows into the next section Inquiry and Advocacy.

Inquiry and Advocacy
It can be easy to fall into a reinforcing loop of simply advocating your ideas over someone else’s. When you push for Idea A and someone pushes for Idea B, you push even harder for Idea A followed by an even harder push by the other person for Idea B and on and on. This escalation continues until the issue is postponed, both parties leave angry, or one or the other of you gets personal and blurts out one of those ‘leaps of abstraction’.

One way to combat this snowball escalation effect is to make sure you are asking the other person inquisitive questions such as “what makes you think this?” or “can you clarify your point further?” or “what data are you using to draw this conclusion?” But also be prepared to answer the same types of questions yourself.

Here’s a fairly easy way to measure the general health of your organization’s conversations and meetings: the next time you have or observe a conversation or meeting with, try to write down each time a question or inquiry is asked (rhetorical questions like “how clueless are you?” excluded). Hint: it’s a bad sign of few or no questions are asked.

Here are some basic principles (also taken from Senge) to keep in mind when you are trying to both advocate your view while also actively inquiring into other people’s views:

When you are advocating an idea:

• Be explicit in your logic and reasoning (don’t hold your cards close to you)
• Motivate those around you to poke and question your ideas
• Make sure others are contributing different viewpoints to your idea
• Inquire into others viewpoints (what data are they looking at? How did they arrive at their views? Define those views)
• Commit yourself towards arriving a situation where all parties learn and collaborate as opposed to wanting to ‘win an argument’

When you are inquiring into other people’s ideas:

• Explicitly state all your assumptions about other people’s views and make sure that you say that they are merely assumptions
• Bring and actively reference any and all data related to what you are advocating
• Only ask questions if you are genuinely interested in the responses (people can generally pick up on whether you are just being polite or trying to posture)

If progress stops and people do not want to inquire into their own views:

• Ask them what data, evidence, or reasoning would be needed to change their views
• Ask if conflicting parties could collaborate on an experiment to provide new or refined evidence or information

When people do not want to state their views or inquire about their own or others’ views:

• Directly ask what is making communication and openness difficult
• Ask to collaborate on ways to mitigate these communication blocks

Why the VISTA Role is Fundamentally Inquisitive

As VISTAs, your role is to be the one within your organizations to balance and facilitate inquiry and advocacy. You should view yourself (to a certain extent) as a consultant whose job it is to build organizational capacity. You need to poke and prod and figure out all the how’s and why’s of your host organization so you can find out the best avenue for your VISTA work.

It is highly recommended to use both inquiry and advocacy to further your work. Even if there are no conflicts, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ask questions to better your understanding of what will be most effective for your organization.

When Nothing Works
So you’ve tried all methods of working through your conflict and you’re still hitting your head up against a wall…now what do you do?

This answer is thankfully both simple and definitive: Call your VISTA Leader! They are there for just such occasions. They have training on conflict mediation/management so they will have the resources and experience to help out.

Further Resources
Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. Double Day Business, 2006.

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