Conflict is, of course, a fact of life — in families, between racial and religious groups and countries and in business. In many cases, heroic efforts are made to resolve the problems, but — as continuing disputes in such places as the Middle East and long-running family rows demonstrate — they all too often fail.
The reason for failure, suggests Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler in a book published this week, is that when people try to deal with conflict they often create more of it. In the book, Optimal Outcomes, Goldman-Wetzler says that this “conflict loop” is characterized by what she calls “conflict habits”, including blaming or avoiding others, blaming yourself and relentlessly seeking “win-win” solutions even when other people refuse to co-operate. “And your conflict habits interact with other people’s conflict habits to form a pattern of interaction that keeps you stuck in the conflict loop,” she writes.
Having trained in negotiation at Harvard Law School and spent two decades working with business executives and Middle East leaders and conducted US government-funded research on counter-terrorism, Goldman-Wetzler says she has developed a method that helps leaders free themselves from recurring conflicts.
The Optimal Outcomes Method is a set of eight practices that people can use to free themselves from the habits and patterns that reinforce the conflict loop.
Practice 1 involves individuals noticing and abandoning the often unconscious habits that make conflict worse. These could include avoiding conflict until it explodes, acting in the heat of the moment in ways that are later regretted, people blaming themselves unnecessarily or relentlessly seeking to collaborate even when others are not willing to do so.
Practices 2, 3 and 4 are designed to help individuals step back from conflicts and observe them so that they can work out what are really causing them. This provides new insight into the situation and helps break the conflict loop by enabling the individual to take action that is different from what has been tried in the past.
In Practices 5, 6, 7 and 8, the focus is on imagining, designing, testing and choosing new paths to an Optimal Outcome. This sometimes is substantially different from what might once have been regarded as an ideal resolution. Goldman-Wetzler explains: “Though you might begin the process with firm ideas of how your conflict should be resolved, an optimal outcome will likely bring you greater personal satisfaction and more lasting harmony than your original goal ever could have.”
It sounds straightforward enough, but Goldman-Wetzler warns that making the approach work requires plenty of practice. She also stresses the importance, at every stage, of developing the capacity to observe and to take pattern-breaking action. She sees observing as involving a pause that — in keeping with the current emphasis on mindfulness — provides an opportunity for individuals to see a situation differently from how they might have before when caught up in trying to deal with it. Such a pause can break the pattern by itself. But it can also be the prelude to some form of action that breaks the cycle of conflict.
Goldman-Wetzler, who includes in the book many examples from the course on conflict freedom that she teaches at Columbia University, offers a compelling method for dealing with a problem that causes a great deal of trouble, not just in families, society and in geo-politics but in organizations, too. The challenge, though, is in convincing people that what she calls an optimal outcome is in the end better than their ideal result.