Ask, don’t guess – Learn to build bridges through conflict

Clarifying assumptions makes all the difference in conflict conversations

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If you’ve been raised to be nice, kind and considerate, getting into conflict can seem like a personal failing. But before you start judging yourself or others for being prone to conflict, remind yourself that conflict is social, not individual, behaviour. This pivot helps you find constructive ways through and out of conflict.

Okay, so if conflict is social, not individual, and being in conflict is not failure, why does conflict seem to follow certain people wherever they go?

Let’s reframe that question. Why are some people’s conflict behaviours more noticeable and less effective at resolving conflict? We all experience conflict as an inevitable and frequent aspect of life in community and social groups, and in our interpersonal relationships at home and at work.

Most of us get little direct instruction in how to deal with conflict. We learn in the rough and tumble of the schoolyard, and from the dynamics of our family life. A lot of us grow up being scolded or punished for conflict behaviours. And those of us who on the surface seem to be less prone to overt conflict behaviours may still not be very adept at working through conflict. One thing we can all learn to do better is be open and clear about our assumptions. This is one of the quickest ways to build a bridge through the conflict.

Photo by Thomas Gaertner on Unsplash

The moral stigma of conflict

I spent a lot of my life priding myself on being even-keeled, unflappable, clear-headed under pressure. Those are all good qualities, but they meant I’ve always been wary of conflict, and wary of falling into conflict.

From some angles I see those qualities and my uneasiness with conflict as coming from the way I was raised to be nice, kind and considerate. Parents, teachers and other role models frowned upon fighting and loud emotions. That taught me to see falling into conflict as a personal failing, a lack of maturity and self-control.

There is some truth to that way of looking at conflict, but that only gets us to one aspect of what is going on when we are conflict. How we ourselves react and behave shapes the way conflict develops — and of course we need to take responsibility for our actions.

But conflict is inherently a social process, and we fall into conflict because of the contradictory challenges of social and organisational life. We seem to forget this when we try to deal with conflict. We lay blame and castigate individuals, yet too often fail to consider the inherent challenges of social interaction or the social and organisational context.

Beneath the surface of conflict

You can probably think of many situations and behaviours that seem to trigger conflict. On the surface, most conflicts appear to be contests over:

• whose idea will prevail in a decision process;

• whose needs will be met in an allocation; or

• whose version of truth will prevail in a debate.

There’s another angle we can take here. Framing conflict in terms of the interests or facts at stake is not the whole picture. Disagreements over the facts of something that happened, or over the direction to take or how to balance competing interests are everyday occurrences. It’s not the facts and interests at stake that put us into conflict, but how we communicate about them.

The challenge of communicating disagreement

When we’re in conflict, we tend to fixate on the concrete — our needs, our interests, our ideas, our hurts. That makes it hard to listen to what others are saying. It also makes it hard for us to express what we mean. We get so absorbed in our own story that we don’t notice that we’re leaving out crucial information. We might notice that we’re talking past each other, but are unlikely to recognise our part in that.

We tend to fall into conflict behaviours because of past miscommunication and slights. Once we’ve interpreted someone’s action or words as self-interested or hurtful we become less open to other interpretations. We start to characterise them in terms of those behaviours, and that erodes trust. Our interpretation of their behaviours can get coloured also by our experiences of other people in different contexts.

We all carry such baggage into our social interactions at home, at work and in other community contexts. It can severely impact our ability to manage disagreements, leading us to conflict avoidance behaviours — in the hope that disagreements and conflict will dissipate over time — or into hot and hard conflict behaviours that exacerbate the tension.

If we’re only partially aware of what sits beneath our individual response to conflict, what do you imagine is going on for the other person or persons? And what do we know about the contextual baggage they are carrying into the room? In the heat (or icy chill) of the moment, we rarely think to examine our contextual knowledge and assumptions or to ask the other person or persons about theirs.

Stop the guesswork — uncovering assumptions will transform how you experience conflict

When you’re in conflict, it is hard to listen and it is hard to articulate clearly what’s on your mind. Your own logic may be clear to you, but how it sounds to someone else is usually very different. It’s missing crucial information. What brings us into conflict is largely miscommunication. What keeps us in conflict is the guesswork we’re doing to make sense of what the other person means. And they’re doing the same kind of guesswork on us.

One of the keys to mediating conflict is helping the disputing parties get clearer about what they’re saying and what’s important to them. Mediators use reflections so each person can hear back what they’re saying. This helps them see where they need to bring context and assumptions into the open. Meanwhile, the other person or persons are listening in and hearing the context and assumptions which they could only guess at before.

You can open up a conflict conversation immensely just by asking yourself a simple question and then acting on it: What does the other person need to know to understand where I’m coming from? By offering up some of your own context and assumptions, you are making it easier for them to hear you.

The concrete rights and wrongs and interests that you probably thought were at the heart of the contention are probably far less important than you think. Working through your differences may still not be easy, but once you open up the conversation by sharing context and assumptions, it at least becomes possible.

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If you are struggling with a conflict situation that is already entrenched, you should consider seeking the assistance of an independent mediator.

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Why I write about conflict management.

I have always been curious about the social and cultural processes through which people in communities define, share and dispute aspects of their group identities. That led me to a PhD in anthropology and training in linguistics, transformative mediation, user experience design, the Deep Democracy facilitation method, and the collaborative action process of Strategic Doing.

I am an accredited mediator (NMAS/AMDRAS) and provide workplace dispute mediation services.

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You can find me on

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-pilbrow

Medium: https://medium.com/@tim.pilbrow