Beating Conflict Manifesto; Reject Victimhood

In my conflict resolution book, Conversational Riffs; Creating Meaning Out Of Conflict, I discuss Karpman’s drama triangle.

The drama triangle suggests that when we are in conflict situations, and certainly when we retell those situations to friends and family, that we experience conflict as a narrative.  It is a  story of sorts, with characters, roles, plot and outcomes.

Karpman’s drama triangle suggests that character’s adopt one of three roles positioned at each corner of the drama triangle.

Very often we will position ourselves at the victim corner.  This can be highly desirable because victimhood carries with it a degree of blamelessness.  If we can position ourselves as the victims then we adopt a passive stance.  We are blameless because things are done to us, not by us.

We can see this victimhood being played out in many workplace conflicts as well as those in the home or conflict in schools.

The other two positions are that of villain – we cannot be a victim without casting someone into the villain role – and also that of rescuer or intervenor.

To get to grips with this notion look at any news story.  As I write this the civil service strike is being featured on the news.  Watch to see the various protagonists jostle for position as they compete to become the victim.  See who claims to be hard done by, who is casting who as villain.

When we fall into positioning ourselves as victims then we fall into unproductive positioning that goes round and round in circles.  People do not remain fixed in positions but whirl around this triangle as each person utters their latest retort.  We have conflict chaos and it becomes impossible to focus on the substantive issues that we need to address.

I am often asked what the answer is.  And the answer is to ask questions.  More on that later when we discuss curiosity.

I discuss the drama triangle with Les McKeown on his Predictable Success interview series.  You can find that interview here.

 

Beating Conflict Manifesto; Rejecting Blame

Rejecting blame is our third item on the Beating Conflict Manifesto.

Blaming shuts down dialogue.  We make it unsafe for parties to step into that dispute resolution space and explore possibilities.  Instead we create a need to become defensive.  We compel the other person to clam up, deny and, usually, go on the counter attack.

The dialogue focusses on who said what.  It gets hijacked by hormones and indignation.  We lose sight of the substantive matter that needs working upon and end up playing entirely conventional war games.

And so we must reject the temptation to blame within conflict resolution.

Brené Brown and Blame

I recently had the honour of being invited to present a full day workshop for the International Academy of Collaborative Practitioners at their annual forum in San Francisco.  They had also invited an excellent speaker Brené Brown.  Her keynote was wonderful, packed with learning and the most personal challenges.  You can catch one of her talks from TED here.

One of the points that she touches upon is the notion of blame – that we apportion blame to transfer our own feelings of shame.

My ears pricked up at this time. 

We apportion blame to transfer, to displace and protect ourselves from our own feelings of shame.

Where might that shame come from?

• Having made a mistake
• Having let someone down
• Having let ourselves down
• From simply not knowing the answer
• From wanting something or an outcome that we cannot have
• From feeling upset or emotional
• From finding ourselves in conflict once again

I wrote more fully on the shame in conflict here 

Brené Brown also gives an alternative response to shame, but I do not think you are going to thank me or her for the revelation. 

 The alternative to shame is real vulnerability.  And that is a whole new challenge.  But when we blame, to what extent are we consciously moving away from vulnerability?

This dynamic of attributing blame against the other person to protect ourselves from shame seems compelling.  If the other person is to blame then they are culpable.  They become the focus of the dispute and those inquisitorial eyes that we fear will reveal our own mistakes are taken off from us.  We are no longer vulnerable.

And so, as we continue to play with this idea of building the Beating Conflict Manifesto, let us challenge ourselves;

Next time we feel blame stirring within us, let’s see if we can hold it for a while and ask ourselves…

“What is this desire to blame telling me about how I am feeling about myself and this conflict?  And what would the alternative, namely vulnerability, look like and result in?”

I am not advocating that we go into difficult conversations proclaiming our vulnerability – that would be naive and unsafe.  But we should have our own vulnerability, shame and the blame we offer in mind as we prepare for those conflict resolution discussions. 

Who knows what we might learn.

Beating Conflict Manifesto; Recognise Your Contribution

I often hear the comment “It takes two to tango” when delivering conflict resolution seminars or keynotes.  It is usually said to suggest that learning conflict management skills is futile unless the “Other person” also learns them and commits to employing such skills themselves – if only they would change, right?

What we are slower to recognise, however, is that this mantra applies to the evolution of the conflict probably more so than it does to the resolution of it.

We ourselves contribute to the escalation of the conflict in which we find ourselves.  When conflict asks of us “May I have this dance?” we unwittingly say “Yes.”  Our subsequent actions, or inactions, will contribute to the conflict landscape and narrative that we then find ourselves in. 

Maybe we have avoided a difficult conversation for too long, chosen not to have given some difficult feedback, let matters ride or buried our head in the sand.  Have we somehow communicated that behaviours or problems are tolerable, even condoned?

Or maybe we have responded inappropriately, used rash, agressive words, or delivered careful words using the wrong medium.  Perhaps we fell into conflict’s seduction and really let rip, going on the attack and laying into the other person with exaggerations, threats and accusations.

When approaching conflict situations we should take some time to check ourselves and our own conduct so far;

• What have I done that might have contributed to where we are?
• What have I not done that might have contributed?
• What would happen if I made those actions and inactions explicit and acknowledged them? and
• Is there something I can do now to work on my contributions before setting about the other persons?  Perhaps, dare I say it, we might consider an apology?

When we consider these questions then we can identify our own conflict default responses and guard against them reocurring next time we encounter a difficult situation at home or in the family.  We might choose to get some conflict coaching to hold ourselves accountable and to help develop better responses.

What also happens is that we have the opportunity to approach our colleague or counterpart from a stance which says “I am not faultless in this situation AND I would like to resolve it.”

Careful positioning such as this moves us away from the attack and invites a more collaborative approach to conflict resolution.

You can imagine how the alternative plays, where we assume that all of the fault, blame even, lies on the other person’s part and that we are faultless.  You can imagine it because, currently, it is what happens almost all of the time.

Apologising is a very potent area within conflict resolution and will need a post or several of its own.  We can revisit that in future. 

Recognising our own contribution to conflict situations is the second of the Beating Conflict Manifesto points.  Coming up next we will be exploring the importance of rejecting blame.

 Neil Denny is the author of Conversational Riffs; Creating Meaning Out Of Conflict and an international speaker on conflict resolution skills and collaboration.  Neil’s contact details are here.

Beating Conflict Manifesto; Take responsibility

I  threw out an idea for the Beating Conflict Manifesto recently.

This – taking responsibility - was the first point on it.

When dealing with conflict at home or conflict in the workplace, commit to taking responsibility for your actions.

This has a couple of elements to it. 

We absolve responsibility when we say things like

• I had no alternatives left
• What else could I do?
• It’s not my fault
• If they had not done x,y z then I would not have to do this…
• I have been forced into this situation

Really.  Stop doing that.  

Be adult.

Remember the only person in a conflict that you can directly impact and change is yourself, so let’s concentrate on getting that straight first.

When we take back responsibility then something wonderful happens.  We grant ourselves control and authority over the situation.  As long as we are subscribing our actions to the conduct of others then we are enslaving ourselves to them.  I am not sure that is what we want to be doing, especially if we are in disagreement with them in the first place.  We jerk and twitch depending upon which string they pull or button they press.

We surrender our own agency, our ability to do anything about the situation for ourselves. 

When we take back responsibility then we take back the controls over our own actions and free ourselves to make decisions that will serve us better rather than simply fuel the conflict led escalation.