This is a 3-step process to de-fuse a situation, develop understanding, and find constructive solutions:
COOLING
CLARIFYING
CONSTRUCTING
What I am describing here is a self-help process. However, some people and some situations are so difficult that you would be wiser not to try and sort it out yourself. You might get informal third-party help from someone you both know and trust, or in really difficult cases, you may have to bring in and pay for a professional mediator. Hopefully, using the skills in this guide may prevent the situation getting that bad in the first place.
As with communication skills, there are plenty of good methods available, and whole books and seminars on the subject. Here’s a simple, effective approach that I have often used myself. It’s a sequence of three stages, intended to cool and defuse the conflict, achieve shared understanding, and then find constructive solutions.
Stage 1: Cooling
Conflicts are usually heated situations, which get worse and lead to serious problems unless they’re managed. Emotions are strong, and old patterns are running. So the first aim must be to calm things down. This usually involves three steps.
- Allow strong emotions to be expressed and heard: In the early phase of the conflict, it’s typical for both parties to feel they are not being heard. This may be literally true, if they are both shouting at each other. If you’re attempting to defuse a conflict with someone who’s very angry, try to choose a time and place where you feel relatively calm, and have some support. If a row suddenly blows up, and you are both really upset, often the wisest thing is to say that you’ll discuss it later, and get yourself out of the situation.
At some point, you need to make clear to the other person that you recognise they feel strongly, and that you are aware of their specific emotions, eg anger. Accepting someone’s feelings as valid doesn’t mean you agree with their point of view, simply that you can see that they feel very angry: just bearing witness about the other person’s feelings is usually very helpful to them. At this early stage, it doesn’t help to argue back, justify your own position, or even try to present the facts: when someone is upset, they are beyond reasoning. - Slow the situation down: conflict can bring up primitive instincts: what’s sometimes called the ‘fight or flight’ response. This means that when very upset, people often respond in one of two ways: they either become aggressive and threatening (fight) or they close down and walk away (flight). In this heated early stage of a conflict, dramatic threats or complete withdrawals are quite possible, but clearly unhelpful. You may be facing these reactions, or tempted to act this way yourself. Try to stay calm and clear, and to steer both of you towards a few facts. For example, you might say “look, I’m really sorry you feel like that, it would help me a lot if you can explain to me why you feel this way. Could you just take a couple of minutes to talk me through this from your point of view?”
- Make good any loss of face: much of the heat in a conflict arises because people don’t feel heard, and take this as a lack of respect, a loss of face. Feeling heard reduces this loss of face, and so does feeling valued. If you can tell the other person some positive things you appreciate about them or your relationship with them, this can restore their shaken self-esteem and help to put the current blow-up into perspective. Conflicts can be very raw, and bringing in some positives can start to restore some goodwill between you, and set the scene for the second stage.
Stage 2: Clarifying
The primary aim is to know and understand all the needs and issues of both parties, not to resolve them. It is best not to insist too much on structure at this stage: the priority is to get everything ‘on the table’, including emotional needs/issues as well as mental-level ones. It’s said that 90% of all conflicts arise from misunderstandings, so a basic aim in this second stage is to get some shared clarity on the facts, including underlying needs and issues which are aggravating the immediate situation. The strong emotions in the conflict are unlikely to disappear all at once: they may burst out again during the clarifying stage, so don’t be surprised if you have to go around the cycle between stages one and two a couple of times. There are four main tasks in this stage.
- Agree ground rules and boundaries: in many conflicts, one party feels threatened or unsafe. In fact, if the other party is making threats, it’s probably because deep down they feel unsafe too. So the first step is to help both parties to feel safe. For example, you may need to agree that you hear each other out and don’t interrupt. That you don’t raise your voices or swear at each other. Or that you stop making threats and ultimatums until you have at least got the facts out.
- Hear both parties’ account of the facts: telling your side of the story and being heard, is both cooling and clarifying. It’s usually best to hear each other out without interruption, and then ask any factual questions afterwards. Often, having both parties’ view of the facts shared between you will show you where misunderstandings and problems arose.
As part of this stage, it can be helpful to talk about how the conflict arose, and why it became as emotionally heated as it did. Ideally, at this stage both parties can recognise what are their emotional ‘hot buttons’, and what are the repeating patterns which were triggered by the latest events. - Understand the underlying issues: to do this you need to trust each other and feel safe to open up about your deeper needs and feelings, and it’s a vital step in getting to the root of the conflict. At this point, each party needs to open up about what has really upset them, what’s still bothering them, and what they need in order to feel this is resolved.
The term issues is used here simply to mean any points of conflict between the parties. Here is one way in which the issues can be sorted into categories:
1. Factual issues: Many conflicts arise or are aggravated because there is a misunderstanding or partial knowledge of the facts. For example, a bus driver does not report for duty because his car breaks down; because of a history of absenteeism, management regard this as the last straw, and take disciplinary action without exploring all the facts.
2. Interest issues: The benefits or outcomes which each party wants from the negotiation.
3. Power issues: This includes a sense of power imbalance between the parties, a sense that one has an unfair degree of power, or that each party’s rights need to be re-negotiated.
4. Value issues: Conflicts as to whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, based on differing beliefs and values.
5. Face issues: Emotionally-charged issues affecting the sense of self-esteem.
These categories are in increasing order of difficulty to resolve. Putting the issues into categories like this gives a mediator, or the parties themselves, some guidelines on the order in which to tackle them, as discussed below. - Recognise differences in values: it’s differences in personal values which create the intensity in many conflicts. We can’t expect that everyone will have the same values, but naming and accepting the differences helps us to live with them.
Stage 3: Completion
What it takes to reach a conclusion in this process will depend a lot on the situation and the personalities. People often talk about conflict resolution: this doesn’t mean that the original mistake or upset can be undone or magically removed. It should mean that both parties feel their feelings have been heard, their needs have been respected, and that they have some sense of reassurance about the future outlook. Typical elements in completing the process could include:
- Reparation for the past: This could mean simply an apology, acknowledgement of how someone feels, or actual compensation. Some way of drawing a line under what has already happened is often needed.
- Shared hope for the future: Ideally both parties can tell each other that their relationship is important, and reach a shared understanding of how to reduce problems and improve things for the future.
- Respecting deeper needs and values: The heat and pain in many conflicts arises more from how people relate to each other, than from the practical issues. If you can understand what helps each of you to feel safe and respected, and if you can see and accept your differences in values, you will greatly reduce the risk of serious conflicts in future.
- A solution–designing approach: It is more fruitful to get both parties working as a team to create a new approach which meets future needs, than to push along in linear, logical fashion, seeking a solution to each historic problem.
- Focus on interest and power issues: This is general advice, which would not apply in every situation. Jointly designing solutions to address future interest and power needs for both parties usually enables a constructive and collaborative approach to work, and usually produces a viable outcome to the overall conflict.
- Try-ons: This is another way to get outside the limitations of logic, and find creative solutions. A try-on means suspending or varying one apparently fixed constraint in the situation. In a wage negotiation, for example, some possible try-ons might be:
The existing job description doesn’t exist.
There is instant, infinite development resource free of charge!
Management don’t have to justify their actions to the shareholders.
- The suspension rule: As far as possible, conduct the construction phase on a mutual agreement that all preconditions are suspended, and there are no fixed blocks, taboos or assumptions to be considered.
For more useful resources from Alan Heeks, see his websites:
Natural Happiness: cultivate your wellbeing with analogies from organic gardens and farming.
Seeding our Future: how individuals and communities can raise resilience and face climate change and other big issues.
Soul Resilience: finding meaning and purpose in turbulent times.