Avoidance is a Worthwhile Strategy for Addressing Conflict

Avoiding a conflict is sometimes a strategic move.

We avoid conflicts for the obvious reasons that dealing with them makes us scared, threatens our sense of security, or we feel as though we don’t have the competency to address them in a way where the outcome will work for us.

But, then there are the non-obvious reasons to avoid conflicts.

One of which is to have the conflict in another way, in another way, with a party that has already been weakened emotionally by engaging in a previous conflict.

This is practicing avoidance as a negotiation strategy.

Another non-obvious reason to avoid conflict is that telling the story of avoidance has more resonance with another party we are currently embroiled with, rather than telling a story of resolution and success.

This is practicing avoidance as a storytelling strategy.

Still, another reason to avoid a conflict is that we don’t care how the conflict works out because the conflict “working out” is a short-term strategy that changes the balance of power for the other party in the conflict. And quite frankly, we don’t really care about how they work out their problems.

This is practicing avoidance as a long-game, future-oriented strategy.

The non-obvious strategies matter more in the long run than the short-term reasons we articulate, defend, and promote to other people, the other party, or even quietly to ourselves.

More deliberation—and articulation—of the long-term impact of avoiding a conflict as a strategic move, will serve to move the use of avoidance from a tactic we’re embarrassed to employ and lack the appropriate level of self-awareness to explain, to a strategy that has real benefits for ourselves and others.

Change One Percent at a Time if You…

…don’t have the courage to confront the ongoing, unresolved cultural conflicts and frictions in your organization.

…if the resistance to change at scale from the organization and even individuals is too hard to address.

…if your fellow employees who should be your allies, cannot be motivated because of internal, intrinsic factors that you can neither understand nor appreciate.

…if you are struggling with explaining to yourself how you continue to “fit” in the culture you’ve become used .

…if you attend in-person trainings, read books, try new methods and techniques, and still nothing changes.

…if you think that you have been patient long enough for change.

…if you have given up on changes happening and are now comfortable and familiar with the lip service that the overall organizational culture pays to change.

Then, you might be ready to take the courageous, risky step of changing the culture that you are in one percent at a time.

Change, driven internally by friction and conflict, always happens slowly at first (sometimes taking years) but then arrives all at once, to everyone’s surprise in your culture.

Scale Problems

Teutonic organizations believe that size makes up for persuasion.

Small organizations believe that persuasion makes up for size.

The problem in both organizations is scale, not properly understood.

Because your organization, your team, your personality, or your project is large, that doesn’t mean that persuasion is something to be abandoned. Persuasion at scale to get me to follow the rules, be compliant, or go along with the program, must not be abandoned in favor of the use of power and authority.

Because your organization, your team, your personality, or your project is small, that doesn’t mean that persuasion is the only thing to consider. Appealing to power or authority to get me to follow the rules, be compliant, or go along with the program, is sometimes a tool that works to ensure future engagement.

Be sure of three things to determine the balance in your organization:

  • Be sure of how your size (small or large) is perceived by others in the market.
  • Be sure of how your persuasion tactics have been effective (or haven’t been effective) in the past.
  • Be sure of how you have used (or misused or failed to use) power and authority in the past, and in the present, to move the market.

Otherwise, when your organization follows a rule or regulation to the letter, creates a method of persuasion that falls on deaf ears, or makes a move that benefits the organization but not your customers or fans, don’t be surprised when the push back is unexpected.

Anxiety, Worry and Hurry

Worry about things you can’t control and outcomes that are dependent upon other people responding (or reacting) is at the heart of anxiety.

Our modern struggle with anxiety comes from three areas: Our desire for immediacy of outcome (or resolution); Our lack of internal resilience; Our impatience with process as a method of accomplishing goals.

We narcotize our worry, or anxiety, with food, alcohol, drugs, violence (self-directed and other-directed) and even lately video games, social media, and coloring books.

The thing is, sitting with worry, and then learning to have faith and let that worry go, is the only way to find the peace that we are craving.

The process of getting from worry to letting go of worry can be mediated and adjudicated by meditation, prayer, and journaling (we forget past victories over worry unless they are recorded…memory is a slippery thing) but when we combine the desire for immediacy, control, and impatience, then hurry sneaks in.

And we are too busy to remember past victories. Too busy to engage in a letting go process. Too busy to do anything but worry.

The ways out of this are easy, but they require self-knowledge, self-direction, and self-regulation to work.

Not more distractions.

When You Won’t Need Validation

Recognizing that you once held a belief and that now this belief is changing, is the essence of learning.

And by the time you attain that essence, you won’t need the extrinsic validation from an “A” letter grade, a raise, a promotion, or any other validation that you believe extrinsically motivated you to learn in the first place.

To go a step further, you won’t care if the validation for the learning comes or not, from an external source.

And you won’t need reassurance about the actions you take to implement and execute on your newly acquired self-knowledge.

Building a Memory Palace of Lies

What happens when how I remember an event doesn’t match how you remember an event?

This mismatch in memory—and framing of those mismatches—leads to people constructing palaces to specific memories in their minds. These palaces are filled with feelings, ideas, thoughts, and conclusions that may not be objectively accurate.

And that may be viewed by the other party (who remembers events differently) as a palace of constructed out of lies.

One of the issue with outsourcing our memory of events (and even our memory of truth) to online algorithmically based programs, is that the program remembers quite accurately. But it remembers what its original creator (or “first mover” if you will) programmed it to remember.

And just about as accurately.

Here’s a deeper issue: When I appeal to an outside authority to adjudicate the disagreement between my memory of events and your memory of events, and when that authority has been programmed by a third party with their own attributions and biases, at what point do we stop appealing to authority?

And let bygones, be bygones.

The power of memory truly lies in allowing people to construct their own memory palaces in peace, to remember the past with nostalgia, and to forget (and be forgotten) not as an escape from consequence—memories provide plenty of that on their own—but as a way to experience grace.

Core Emotional Alchemy

Do you care?

This is the binary core question that we avoid asking out loud, or ask each other in unclear, murky, nonverbal ways, or just don’t ask at all.

This is the right question to ask before thinking of strategies to engage in the practice of emotional alchemy. The kind of alchemy that transmutes emotional labor into motivation in other people.

Alchemy has long been considered a joke, but in leadership, conflict management, and emotional labor, the placebo effect of emotional alchemy is just beginning to be part of a core conversation about how to motivate others.

But the fact is, no one knows (really) how to extrinsically, or intrinsically, motivate others, render them “unlazy,” or otherwise get them to do the work that matters at the level you would like them to do it.

And any article that proposes to do so, is selling a brand of alchemy all its own.

Captain of the Rescue Boats

The person who walks around while the Titanic is sinking, and calmly begins rearranging the deck chairs, organizing the evacuation, and gets everyone off the ship before it sinks becomes, by default, the future captain of the rescue vessel in the North Atlantic.

That person also becomes a new Noah.

Here is a list of 26 icebergs (non-exhaustive, your list (and mileage) may vary) where, as the Titanic ship of state known as global society collides with them and begins to sink, you can be the default captain of the rescue ships later:

  1. Climate change
  2. Fear of change
  3. Growing use of A.I. based technology
  4. Biodiversity disappearance
  5. Lack of sufficient explanations that people can understand for necessary changes
  6. Financial systems collapse
  7. Refusal to be held accountable
  8. Developing world debt
  9. Connection economy of the Internet
  10. Rethinking of Labor Value
  11. The electrical grid in the postmodern world
  12. Lack of access to creation on the Internet
  13. Lack of courage in individuals to take risks
  14. First world educational system
  15. Scarcity of emotional labor
  16. Child abuse and victimization
  17. Lack of true, courageous statesmanship
  18. Human trafficking
  19. Increased spiritual hopelessness among the old
  20. Increased spiritual hopelessness among the young
  21. Lack of self-efficacy
  22. Growing ability to hide from what matters
  23. Thinking harder about the answers to binary questions
  24. Lack of interest in self-awareness
  25. Lack of ability to emotionally care
  26. The increasingly intractable nature of conflicts

There are other ones out there as well. There’s no lack of icebergs. There is, however a lack of people calmly prepared to be captains in future rescue boats.

What Do You Do With Resonance

Resonance is underrated as a way of sparking change.

There are two things that happen when we hear an idea that resonates with us:

We admire the person who shared the message with us.

We file the message away in the back of minds.

Occasionally there are those people who take the idea that resonates and do something with it.

For those folks, the message (and the resonance) become a signpost on the billboard of their minds.

But there are not nearly enough of them, operating fast enough, with enough courage to make the kind of change that we need to see in the world.

Are you inspired, or are you admiring?

Need for Reassurances

Reassurances are the fuel on which feelings of safety run.

The overwhelming need for more reassurances often stops us from doing the courageous work that matters.

The resistance (the Lizard Brain) is driven by the need for safety, which is why reassurances are so useful as a tool to drive people forward to accomplishing work.

Or why they are so useful for dulling people toward doing work that matters; in essence, lulling them into a false sense of safety.

If a person is seeking for more reassurances that the path they are walking is the right one, or that the method of management of a conflict that they’ve chosen will “work,” or if they don’t really want to know the details….

Well, there will never be enough reassurance.

Which means you will never get all the safety you need.

Which means you’ll react with a posture of fear when a new idea, concept, or approach is brought to you.

Which means that all the tools and tips in the world won’t really work for you.

Which means that we’ll never get the emotional labor from you that we really need to make the changes that are necessary in the world.

Stop looking for more reassurances.

Start getting comfortable with the fact that there will never be enough.

Move forward courageously with whatever decisions you’ve made, without self-doubt, or fear.