The following guidelines for managing interpersonal conflict follow the pattern of the Win-Win approach described in Interplay, Chapter12. You will find that I have elaborated on it based on my study and experience. The approach is logical, but you might say, also too simplistic. Well, you're right. It's not as simple as this. The other person needs to cooperate, and you may need to cycle through the framework a number of times, maybe even over years, to manage some of the deepest conflicts. But as partners continue to use it, they come to trust it and each other.
You will be able to be much more clear and assertive if you understand where you are coming from. Follow the Cycle-of-Experience to understand your awareness of the issue. It helps a lot to talk about it with friends who are not involved in the conflict. If someone confronts you on a problem before you have had a chance to think it through, you can assertively state that you need time to think about it.
Use the Cycle-of-Experience to disclose your own awareness and to ask questions to reveal the other person's awareness. All the elements of awareness are relevant to understanding the issue. You can begin the dialogue with a preliminary statement which confronts the issue:
Element of Awareness
Self-Disclosure
Observations and Actions: Describe your sense of what's happening related to the conflict. "When I try to talk with you about my day and you continue to watch television..." Meaning: Disclose your thoughts and judgments about the conflict situation. "I think your are not paying attention to what I'm saying..." Affect: Disclose your feelings and emotions with respect to conflict. "...and I feel frustrated and hurt." Motive: Reveal your wants (not as demands, but as information relevant to managing the issue). "I want you to turn off the TV for a while after I get home, so I can tell you about my day." The dialog can't progress beyond this point unless both people are able to freely disclose the important information about the conflict.
Clarifying the issues is important for focus. What is the issue that has to be addressed if one partner asks the other to turn off the TV when he or she gets home? Is it as simple as needing to unwind after work, or does it have to do with insecurities about being loved? If it's the latter, deciding to turn off the TV will probably have a minimal effect. Putting the issue into words also helps keep the dialogue from drifting into other issues.
If the dialog turns into an argument, it means that the partners are approaching the conflict with a cooperative attitude. They use strategies, rather than mutual self-disclosure. When you find this happening, it is helpful to define mutual goals, so that it feels like you are working with the person to manage the conflict rather than manipulating them to get what you want.
Most of us have been brainstorming since we were in kindergarten, but we still often evaluate the solutions too much during the brainstorming process. Some of the most creative ideas begin sounding unworkable and undesirable. If they were strictly common sense, we would have thought of them sooner. Brainstorming can also bring elements of humor into the discussion which is important is reducing tensions.
After you have eliminated the undesirable solutions and decided to adopt some combination of the rest, it is important to clearly state the commitment of each person to his or her own responsibilities for making the solutions work. Sometimes when people don't follow through on agreements, it is that they came away from the discussion with differing perceptions about what the agreements were: "Wait a minute, that's not what we agreed upon." It is best to summarize: "So I'm going to do this. What are you agreeing to do?" Stating the commitment also helps reinforce it.
We commit ourselves in good faith to a course of action, but we can't predict the future. We have a right to return to the discussion if the solutions are not working. It is fair to check with the other person periodically to see how it's going for them. Successful management of the problems has important long-term consequences concerning cooperation with other conflicts. This whole process seems artificial when we haven't had a lot of experience with it. But the creative agenda can begin to feel natural, the more success we have with it.
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Copyright 2001, Richard D. Rowley.
Last revised: August 12, 2001
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