ORGANIZATIONS & INDIVIDUALS: CONFLICT & CO-OPERATION
Copyright 2008 Morris A. Nunes
Presentation for ALPS – October 29, 2008
Copyright 2008 Morris A. Nunes
Presentation for ALPS – October 29, 2008
Why can’t we all just get along?!? – Rodney King
Stovepiping.
Living in a Silo.
Interservice Rivalry.
“Not my job.”
Organizational Politics.
Lack of Bipartisanship.
The dysfunctions on this incomplete list are all related manifestations of the same kind of disease. Whatever it’s called, the effects are generally pernicious. Here’s why.
Organizations and alliances are instituted among men (and women) to accomplish one or more agreed common goals, whether the goals be governmental, commercial, military, charitable, professional, institutional or whatever other issues of human endeavor matter to organizations and individuals, including personal goals.
Such common goals may be noble, like the alliance in World War II between Britain and the U.S. (and ultimately others) to defeat the Axis Powers. They may also be ignoble, such as the combination of those same Axis powers. By its civilized progress, history demonstrates that the vast majority of such confederations are for progressive and beneficial purposes. They are exemplified by small business partnerships, treaties of cooperation, medical collaborations, agricultural cooperatives and marriages, to name but a fraction.
The pernicious effect of the dysfunctions is to subordinate the achievement of common goals to other perceived imperatives of the players. Such imperatives may range from ego to jealousy to greed to feelings of slight, insult, disrespect or betrayal to other motivations covering the gamut of interpersonal negativity to “purer” motives borne of different visions, perspectives, expectations or understandings. Whatever the etiology of the dysfunction, in the extreme the accord fractures, then terminates and the goals go unachieved, not infrequently with former partners engaged in recriminations and destructive behavior like lawsuits, denigration, interference, violence and wars.
Often (but not always) I think unbiased observers look at the participants and wonder to themselves, “How stupid are these people?” Such feelings are not unknown – some would say are prevalent – among American voters observing various organs of U.S. Government, most notably the Congress1, in which cooperative efforts are essential to achievement. Even if one party has a massive majority, as there are always factional divisions based on other identities, such as State, region, race, urbanization, etc., it seems to many (especially when it is their desired legislation that is log-jammed) that the common good takes a back seat to factionalism. Perhaps Henry Adams had something of an explanation of this phenomenon:
The effect of Power and Publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.
Why do these conflicts arise and why do these failures of cooperation occur?
I posit FOUR reasons:
Two of these we may dispose of quickly; two deserve more time.
MALEVOLENCE: Some allies are or become allies in name only. Their motives are not pure and they lie in wait for the opportune moment to turn their “insider” position into some kind of advantage to the detriment of their partner(s).
While it is true that provocations, real or imaginary, may generate such malevolence, the fact is that once attitudes of disunity are set in one or both parties, the alliance is doomed. The law statutorily recognizes this reality in partnership law with the words “wrongful dissociation”2 meaning that a partner acts in contravention of a statutorily defined fiduciary duty of loyalty.3 The law recognizes with those words that when a partner so acts, the partner is implicitly removing oneself from the partnership. Such a breach of duty is so serious that it legally fractures the entity of associated partners in a partnership and unless all the remaining partners agree, the partnership itself is dissolved.4 [Partners may elect to waive the wrongfully dissociative act, but such forgiveness is understandably rare where attitudes have hardened.]
INCOMPATIBILITY: Sometimes parties get together who do not belong together, or, alternatively grow apart over time. These are relationships where the parties are acting out of pure motives but have discordant interests. The discord is either unrecognized or hope triumphs over reality to lead the parties to politely ignore the discord. The parties proceed despite the signals that say “Stop!”
[Perhaps Ogden Nash recognized an underlying reason the parties may proceed: “I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.”}
Where the parties never should have connected to one another, the relationship is just a mistake, evidence of the imperfection of mere mortals. Where the parties grow apart one may take comfort in the fact that change is inevitable and the evolution that change begets is natural and concomitantly inevitable, even if sometimes disheartening. Sometimes the termination of the relationship is nothing short of merciful.
Let us pause for a moment to define success of the entity as achievement of common goals for which it was formed.
Hence, those two reasons cited so far, Malevolence and Incompatibility, make success impossibility.
So that brings us to the third and fourth reasons, which are potentially remediable:
COMMUNICATION: People with the best of intentions and purest of motives may still (and often) fail to communicate properly. Though anecdotal, I will exercise an author’s prerogative to say this: In over thirty years of practicing law, I have been involved in prosecuting or resolving disputes as a litigating attorney, a mediator, an arbitrator or an agency adjudicator (as a Virginia Supreme Court Hearing Officer or a member of the Virginia Board for Professional & Occupational Regulation). In my estimation, in at least half of the disputes of which I have first-hand personal knowledge the root cause was poor communication – misperception, mistransmission, paucity, surfeit or complete absence of communication.
Sometimes the fault in communication lies with the transmitter, sometimes with the recipient; usually by the time it has escalated to the point where “the lawyers” are involved, there is plenty of fault to go around. In fact getting “the lawyers” involved seems to usually exacerbate the dispute rather than ameliorate it, because lawyers are taught to counsel their clients to cease communicating directly with the fellow disputant and to instruct that all subsequent communication go through the attorney. The reason is the old legal saw that “Anything you say can and will be used against you.” [Yeah, that’s from the police shows, applicable to criminal law, but in fact the same logic applies in civil disputes as well.]
Nowhere is this lawyer’s shibboleth more destructive than in divorce cases, especially where the parties cannot afford to live apart or will not live apart for other reasons such as desire to care for children or physical infirmity. How in the world can any rational person ever expect a married couple to resolve their differences and reconcile if they cannot communicate with one another and do so in private? I would venture to say that in any case where they do reconcile, the spouses each place a degree of trust in each other, throw lawyerly caution to the wind, and find their way, albeit sometimes with the assistance of a social worker, marital mediator or other trained counselor, or even through the intercession of friends or family.
But in any event, until the air fouled by deficient communication is cleared, whether in divorce or any other kind of dispute, the progress of the associative relationship is impeded, or even halted. Clearing the air to restore understanding and trust through curatively precise communication, often leading to mutual or separate corrective action, is the baseline process for resolution of the dispute through which progress toward success can be revived or reinvigorated. Whether we label that communication process as negotiation, mediation, reconciliation, apology, admission, forgiveness, condonation or something else, it is still communication.
I have written before, a tiny voice in a tidal wave of others, of the importance for precision in communication5, exhorting and recommending (perhaps less than artfully precise communication) some simple proposals for betterment of the disease that Winston Churchill called “Terminological Inexactitude.” Rather than belabor this gathering with repetition of past presentations I have just adverted by footnote. Suffice it to say that if communication is the problem, there is perhaps the best chance for preventing a dispute from becoming an irretrievable rupture.
However, what those earlier works do say little about and what deserves substantial consideration is the impact that cultural divides have upon communication. It is not merely the cultural difference between, say, Pakistanis and Brazilians, or American Whites and American Hispanics, but as well the cultural divide between entertainers and doctors or between naval officers and army enlistees.
It is not merely linguistic differences that apply, but also differences in acculturated perceptions. One example I know too well is the cultural difference between lawyers and professional engineers. Ask a lawyer to read a statute and tell you what it permits and the lawyer will likely tell you what it permits and what it may permit as well as what arguments may be raised as to how it might be interpreted to permit or prohibit this or that. Ask an engineer what it means and he’ll likely give you a concise single focus answer that will accurately distill its principal thrust.
Who has answered the question?
Both of them surely have and both of them are right when viewed through their own prism. We’re all prisoners of our upbringing and training (a point to which I’ll return) and those processes, whether at the hands of parents, teachers, coaches or whomever, hardwire us right down to the point where the reptilian brain takes over.
The development of jargon, the flood of particularized acronyms, the au currant news within each specialized channel and the unavoidable imperatives of any field (from blue collar laborers to nuclear physicists) create differences in emphasis, risk perception, reward valuation, ratiocination and spontaneous impulse. The same may undoubtedly be said about cultural differences between those from Mongolia and those from Montreal.
So one recommendation to consider at this juncture is that if there’s a dispute between folks of different cultures, an early point on the checklist for getting to the root of the problem is to find out what the communications have been leading up to this point in the dispute.
Another is to see what terms in common have been given different meanings. Rather famously, Abraham Lincoln implicitly described this difference in meanings as a cause of the American Civil War:
We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing. With some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is by the respective parties called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny.
FEAR & LOATHING: “There’s a right way, a wrong way and the Army way.” – Anonymous
Disputes that arise from differences in beliefs, desires, needs, visions and intentions are the most intractable. Whatever our field of endeavor, whatever our background, we are trained to believe there is a right and wrong. As stated, we are all prisoners of our upbringings and our acculturation processes.
A part of those processes often includes dire warnings of the dangers of deviating from the standard, from the proven path. And often, each of us has found that, indeed, following the prescribed procedures in the proper order produces the anticipated outcome. We don’t mix the eggs into our cake batter after baking, nor do we substitute chicken fat for the eggs when baking a cake. It often seems just that simple, obvious and unassailable and anyone who cannot accept that is either to be feared or loathed.
So if some alien shows up with a notion challenging those truisms the common reactions tend to be either fear or loathing. The fear is that the alien will ruin the chance of achieving some objective or threaten some existing valuable construct. The loathing is that the alien, clearly untutored and unsophisticated (if not downright dumb) deserves to waste none of my time with such idiotic drivel. [A personnel officer would be appalled that an employee adding 2+1 gets 11! How stupid! Except that if the employee is a mathematician computer engineer, he will prove that in a base 2 number system it does add to 11.]
Fear and loathing are emotions. Courage is another emotion, but the intellectual courage to question one’s own beliefs, however closely held; to consider the possibility that there may be other valid viewpoints; to recognize that the world is not unidimensional; such courage is all too rare.
Even rarer the courage to compromise in the face of fear and loathing.
Pride is another emotion and it is a form of pride (one of those seven deadly sins) that having staked out a position it is somehow a sign of weakness to allow that the position may be suboptimal or worse.
How much time is wasted in meetings, conferences, negotiations and contests of one sort or another among people supposedly working toward the same goals over one-upmanship, blame placing and shifting, scheming, politicking and maneuvering because of such fear and loathing? And more importantly, why is this phenomenon a perpetual organizational black hole for so much energy and so much unrealized potential of ideas and personnel?
Here I must interject the listing, from an anonymous author, of the seven stages of a government project:
1. Conception
2. Enthusiasm
3. Implementation
4. Disillusion
5. Failure
6. Search for the Guilty
7. Punishment of the Innocent
No doubt, at the present, we are seeing exactly this with the financial markets meltdown. The result will surely be legislation restricting and devaluing those financial institutions that survived by doing the right thing as those that did the wrong thing in enthusiastically following the government lead of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for easier credit and expansive lending will largely have disappeared. Thus will be sown the seeds for the next financial crisis, just as seeds for this one were sown by the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley in punishing the innocent after the failure of Enron and its brethren.
But I digress.
Apart from the acculturation and perspective issues that often are the ingredients for disputes, I believe that the reason disputes and failures to cooperate yield failure to achieve goals is fundamentally a failure of leadership. Actually, a four part failure.
The first failure is in training:
Leaders in different fields, in different organizations (and I surely include the schools from the most unsophisticated of kindergartens to the most advanced of doctorate programs) do not to this observer seem to adequately train their charges to think in any but the most conformist, narrow, arrogant and even prejudiced modes within their concentrations. I believe that thought-habit is hard to break especially when everyone is of the same ilk. I believe that is at least a partial explanation for the storied battles of academics within their departments, the frequency of break-ups of professional practices (and as a lawyer I can say “you can imagine how contentious lawyers can be with one another”) and the monster battles of research scientists within the same discipline.
The second failure of leadership is one of direction:
That is leaders too often fail to instruct their minions to consider the opposite viewpoint. Worse, they often fail to lead by example, rarely inquiring for opposing opinions or walking a bit in a rival’s shoes. What is it about so many cultures that characterize such consideration as a sign of weakness? Nowhere is this regrettable outlook more apparent than in the ongoing “gotcha” war that the media and politicians relentlessly and pointlessly wage, though all presumably want a more perfect union. Instead of promoting measured public discourse and thoughtful discussions of options for workable solutions, this war, which both sides (or should we say “all sides”) energetically perpetuate, obstructs, distracts and detracts, fostering nothing so much as cynicism and distrust among the public.
The third failure of leadership is one of neglect:
Considering the alien alternative, walking a bit in the alien’s shoes, second-guessing oneself, testing the iron bars of hallowed doctrine is not incentivized. Thinking outside the box is often condemned and ridiculed as heresy or apostasy. To be fair, most academic institutions do seem to encourage (or at least permit) unconventional thinking – up to a point – which is to say the box may be bigger, but thought outside the box is subject to condemnation.
It is most interesting to the point of being instructive that three of the great commercial success stories of the last 25 or so years are companies that reputedly were explicit in encouraging and incentivizing iconoclasm, open doors and freer thinking – Apple, MicroSoft and Google. Perhaps this will be the wave of the future, though these organizations seem much more the exception than the rule. [And we must note that IBM did much the same thing with its research arm in the Post-World War II era, yielding untold benefits in products, services, profits, advancement of science and economic activity.]
The fourth failure of leadership is in dispute management:
Too often leaders look not to sources of conflict but to dealing strictly with the conflict at hand and moving on to the next one. Conflicts are in many cases, I submit, a symptom of a disease of the relationship (between individuals or intra-organizational). Leaders who do not consider the possibility that conflict may suggest something is amiss to the point of systemic dysfunction, perhaps in the leader’s own performance, are indeed failing to perform. Leadership means solving problems, which requires accurate problem identification and forthright problem confrontation. Symptoms are problematic, but ipso facto they are not the problem.
CONCLUSION – EGG DROP SOUP
So if a leader does identify the disease and is willing to confront it, what should the leader do?
Train, Direct, Incentivize and Manage!
Easy to say, but how does a leader know how to do this.
And more importantly where we will find such revolutionary leaders?
To no small extent, sociologically we face a chicken and egg problem. If the solution is leadership, where are the leaders to come from when the system of acculturation directs training away from the emergence of the very types of leaders we need and the organizations themselves are so punishing of “heretical” ideas? We need leaders to produce leaders. In the words of Walter Lippmann,
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Most Chinese restaurants offer an appetizer of egg drop soup. The two key ingredients are chicken broth and eggs6 The soup can be pretty tasty when the right spices are added. There’s a lesson here:
Nobody who enjoys the soup cares which came first in making the soup, the chicken or the egg. And if you read the footnoted recipe you can see that you can prepare either half first but what makes the soup is their combination – with the right admixture of spices.
Similarly, it’s up to all of us to be thought leaders within our own circles and to encourage others to exhibit similar leadership, focused on the common goals, with less concern about who gets the credit (e.g. for being first). Focusing on common goals should also mean fair consideration for unexpected and even challenging points of view.
There is a caveat here, because every rule has its inevitable exceptions. (Recognizing that the challenging idea may represent an exception is itself an example of such thought leadership.)
The caveat is that extended contemplation of other ideas, a sort of perpetual management-by-committee, is potentially a sure route to nowhere as progress stops while leaders fail to make a decision. Sometimes, the unforgiving minute requires action for the common good and in such situations the best may well be the enemy of the good. In his brilliant work, The Ninth Wave, author Eugene Burdick recognized an axiom of leadership, “One person can make a decision faster than a group.”7 In those urgent circumstances, the leader must simply and decisively lead.
Skilled leaders know when this caveat is applicable. However, excellent leaders also know how to manage such a situation, effectively communicating the message that urgency is paramount to those who raise objections, but transmitting that message without punishing or discouraging future independent thought.
If you’ve ever played golf (or like me played at it) it seems that there are so many different things to simultaneously concentrate on and translate into physical action – grip, head down, eyes focused, knees bent, slow and steady backswing, arm stiff, smooth straight-ahead arc, hips swiveling, etc., etc. So it is with leadership, especially thought leadership. Just as a golfer (or any athlete) has to practice to create muscle memory, so, too, I believe leaders need to practice to create personal and organizational “brain-muscle” memory.
Vince Lombardi, the great football coach, may have said it best:
Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.
-o0o-
FOOTNOTES
1. See, e.g. Fox News Opinion Poll, October 8-9, 2008. Question: “Do you approve or disapprove of the job Congress is doing?” Approve: 13%; Disapprove: 77%; Unsure 10%; Similar results for NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll; CBS News Poll; CNN/Opinion Research Poll; the Harris Poll; etc. See http://www.pollingreport.com/CongJob1.htm
2. See Uniform Partnership Act, §601(5)..
3. ibid, §404
4. ibid, §801 and 802
5. Nunes, Morris, Truth & Consequences, A Theory of Miscommunication, ALPS, 1990.
6. See Recipe at http://food.yahoo.com/recipes/allrecipes/45515/restaurant-style-egg-drop-soup
7 Burdick, Eugene, The Ninth Wave, p. 65, Dell Publishing (NY, 1956; 4th ed. 1963)
N.B. All Quotations are from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
