Review: Dana Caspersen’s Changing the Conversation – The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution

This review first ran in the Feb. 2 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

Changing the Conversation: The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution

By Dana Caspersen

Penguin Books

$20

Scrapping the downtown bus lane was disappointing.

The blowback on social media was disconcerting.

Folks railed against the “flagrant disrespect for civic engagement” and the “pious hypocrisy” and “sheer foolishness” of Councillors “who seem to viscerally resent downtown residents.”

There were charges that “Hamilton has an autoimmune disorder that attacks and destroys the connective tissue of civic engagement.”

A local nonprofit decided to auction off Councillors without their consent.

There were calls to “make life miserable for these jokers for the next four years” and confessions that “I have no intention to be even polite anymore.” A few Hamiltonians even mused about pulling up stakes and moving to more transit-friendly cities.

It’s been just shy of two months since Hamilton’s newest edition of Council was sworn in. We’re looking at a long and unproductive four years unless we learn how to change the conversation in our community. We’re not going to build a better transit system for all if we careen down the low road.

Conflict mediator Dana Caspersen has identified 17 principles of conflict resolution that we’d do well to adopt in Steeltown. “The principles provide encouragement to see conflict as a moment of opportunity,” says Caspersen, author of Changing the Conversation. “They urge us to recognize that we have the ability to call up the curiosity needed to step away from cycles of attack and counterattack and to move, instead, with as much grace and skill as we can muster toward resolution.”

Here’s a quick rundown of Caspersen’s 17 conflict resolution principles:

1. Don’t hear attack. Listen for what is behind the words. “Cycles of attack, defense and counterattack often dominate the action in a conflict. Instead of hearing attack, listen for what people are really trying to say, even if they are saying it very badly.”
2. Resist the urge to attack. Change the conversation from the inside.
3. Talk to the other person’s best self. “Assume there is a part of the other person that is capable of moving with you toward a positive resolution – and talk as if that is the case.”
4. Differentiate needs, interests and strategies. “Frequently, in a conflict, we can understand people’s needs and interests even if we don’t agree with their strategies. This understanding can make it easier to find solutions. Resist the urge to keep arguing for your own preferred strategy or position. Instead, help the people you are in conflict with get a full picture of what is important to you in the situation and find out what is important to them.”
5. Acknowledge emotions. See them as signals.
6. Differentiate between acknowledgement and agreement. “You can acknowledge a person’s position or way of thinking even when you are in complete disagreement.”
7. When listening, avoid making suggestions. “Offering a suggestion can be a way of not listening, of trying to manipulate or ‘fix’ the other person. It may be seen as a way of devaluing the needs of the other person.”
8. Differentiate between evaluation and observation. “Keep the people in the conflict – both yourself and the other person – separate from the problem.”
9. Test your assumptions. Relinquish them if they prove to be false.
10. Develop curiosity in difficult situations. “In the tension of conflict, our first impulse is often to abandon curiosity. When this happens, we stop trying to understand the other people. To varying degrees, we begin to dehumanize the other people. We move away.”
11. Assume useful dialogue is possible, even when it seems unlikely. “Often people need reassurance that if they shift directions or back away from positions, they will still be respected and seen as credible. Focus on finding a pathway to resolution that doesn’t leave anyone embarrassed or with a lingering urge to even the score. Avoid personal attacks.”
12. If you are making things worse, stop. “Sometimes our reaction to conflict is so ingrained that it seems impossible to change. However, the way we approach and engage with conflict is not a fundamental part of our character, it is a learned behavior. We can change it.”
13. Figure out what’s happening, not whose fault it is. “Blaming obscures the mechanics of the conflict and keeps the focus on the past. It distracts us from finding out what happened and why, and makes it much more difficult for people to talk constructively about difficult things.”
14. Acknowledge conflict. Talk to the right people about the real problem. “Avoid the temptation to try to address the problem by ranting about the situation in general, complaining behind people’s backs or attacking them in indirect ways.”
15. Assume undiscovered options exist. Seek solutions people willingly support.
16. Be explicit about agreements. Be explicit when they change.
17. Expect and plan for future conflict.

Before we face the next Most Important Decision To Ever Be Made in the History of Hamilton, we’d do well to read Changing the Conversation.  While it delivers instant validation and adulation, ramping up the rhetoric on social media won’t get us where we need to go.  Caspersen’s 17 conflict resolution principles just might pull us out of the never-ending loop of attack and counterattack. Maybe we can even crowdfund to have Caspersen stage an intervention that gets us all on the bus.

@jayrobb lives and works in Hamilton.