Stop Bitching! 6 Steps to Help Resolve Conflict

Hopefully you do not find yourself inconflict with someone or something but the fact it only happens occasionally means we are not well practiced in dealing with it.

So firstly we have to take some advise from someone who knows and deals with conflict regularly and has a logical approach to resolving or lessening the tensions.

The following steps are not necessarily easy to achieve but, as all good psychologists and councillors will tell you, you must really want to change. The Dalai Lama in his wisdom advocates that you 'be the change you are seeking in your life.'

With that in mind, here are a few key steps that may not resolve every conflict, but will certainly help to improve your interpersonal communications and ease your journey.

1. Drill down to find the real issue. 
If an when you get upset, you become flooded with hormones and emotions. Your mind can start to resemble a bee hive of activity, without clarity of thought and a lack of clear focus.

Your goal at this stage is to drill down and to really try to figure out what you are actually most upset about. It's not easy in the height of an emotional outburst, but your job is to keep drilling until you hit the core of what is most upsetting.

Once you get past feeling angry and thinking that your boss, colleague or friend is a jerk, you may find that there is something deeper that is really troubling you.

Are you upset that your boss called you out in a meeting when he knew you didn't have the answer or that you're really upset you weren't prepared?

Knowing the answer to why your emotions are triggered will have a profound effect on how you handle the situation.

2. Look for Positive Intent.
It's critical you do your best to determine the other person's positive intent. What's positive intent? Well, negative intent is when you attribute the other person's behaviour to them wanting to hurt you and do you harm.

When you are in the middle of a heated argument, picking up on 'negative intent' comes naturally. "Why is he/she doing this to me?" is a perfect example of assigning negative intent. The initial assumption is that someone is trying to hurt you or make your life more difficult.

It's difficult to resolve a conflict if you think the other person is hell-bent on doing you harm, it does happen but it's in the minority.

Instead, play detective and try to figure out their positive intent. What positive outcome were they trying to achieve? If all else fails, ask them!

Once you have uncovered this intention, understanding and empathy, if appropriate, can begin to flow more easily.

3. Step into their shoes. 
As with all these steps, it is easier said than done, especially when emotions are running high but if you really want to /need to resolve the disagreement or conflict, this is essential.

Pretend you are the other person and answer these questions: What are your goals? Which of the six human needs are you trying to meet? (See below)

1. Certainty – the need to be safe and comfortable
2. Variety – the need for physical and mental stimulation
3. Significance – the need to feel special and worthy of attention
4. Love & Connection – the need to be loved and connected to others
5. Growth – the need to develop and expand
6. Contribution – the need to contribute beyond yourself

What must I have been thinking and feeling in order to respond/react the way I did, remembering to continue to assume positive intent and that there is no truth, only interpretation.

The assumption is, when you can step into the other person's shoes you can begin to see and understand their interpretation which can help you resolve the conflict.

4. Focus on what you wish for.
Get clear on precisely what you need to have happen. Maybe at this point you realize it's not worth resolving the conflict, but make sure you are clear bout this.

Alternatively, you may decide that really need is to rekindle the relationship. Whatever it is, figure it out.

Stop focusing on what you didn't get and all the things that didn't work out and start focusing on what is possible and what you need to have happen now.

You may 'want' some penitent action from the other party, a heartfelt apology and a dozen roses, but what you should put this aside and think on what really is the minimum you need to resolve this conflict. Your answer will be your guide going forward.

5. Create a constructive plan.
You've taken a step back and tried to figure out the other person's perspective, now you want to cultivate a positive result. It's the time to determine the best course of action to get you what you need.

Should you send an email? A phone call? Call in a mediator? What can you do that will increase the chances you'll get your wish from step 4? Your game plan should focus exclusively on only those things you can control.

Sitting back and waiting for the other person to apologise is not an effective game plan because you can't control this.

So, what can you control?

• Scheduling a meeting? Yes. 
• Having a civil conversation about what happened? Of course. 
• Taking responsibility for things you would have done differently? Absolutely. 
• Do you see what's happening here? Of course.

You are controlling what you have control over to create an opportunity and an environment where an apology is possible, but more positively, a peace treaty, a ceasefire or a more collaborative relationship can be agreed.

6. Step UP and Step Forward.
Now that you know what you both, need and can you control, go get it started, no one else will get it done.

We have gone through this process with many third parties, and while some personalities and egos may still hurt and remain affected by what happened, they have a greater understanding and perception of the other party's "outlook." The success is seen when all parties get together to actively and openly participate in the dialogue.

Conclusion: Happy Ever After?
Resolving conflict is not a simple task, but by keeping these guidelines in mind, it can be less painful, more effective and less protracted.

For more information on the process and resolution of conflict contact me here at this blog.

Five Simple Steps to Better Decisions

Business processes seem to come in two flavors: those that produce transactions or content and those that produce decisions. The quality of decisions from the latter category often drives the trajectory of the business. Well-executed, insightful decisions can lead to superior results.

1. Focus on the Processes that Matter most to Your Business
Organizations improving insightful decision-making carefully pick the key processes and operational variables on which to focus. Clear alignment exists between a successful organization's market strategy and its processes and operating metrics to implement the strategy.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, in their groundbreaking book, "Blue Ocean Strategy," developed an interesting approach in which they recommend picking operational variables in the context of strategy development. They point to well-known examples of companies with clearly differentiated strategies, including Southwest Airlines and Cirque du Soleil.

In the high tech electronics industry, clients select variables that include forecast accuracy, order fulfillment rate and inventory levels. Making planning decisions on a weekly basis at the SKU level, based on insights across those variables, resulted in tremendous improvements in all three.

2. Stay Focused on Your End Goal
The improvements you target should be expressed as changes in the specific selected variables. For example, if the goal is to reduce inventory by 30 percent, the initiative should fit that objective clearly.

This kind of Deming approach of "you get what you measure" is well-documented, but it is surprising how many organizations do the first step without then taking the time to set clear objectives in the second.

Deriving insights from a business process requires a good balance of freedom to efficiently explore information and decision alternatives coupled with a clear idea of the objective.

3. Ensure Your Data Supports Your Insights
Taking into account the processes, variables and objectives selected in the first two steps, the third step in improving decisions is to determine the readiness of your data and infrastructure to support the kind of insights required.

Organizations often get caught in the trap of believing that their data or infrastructure are not up to the task and assuming that progress cannot be made without solving those issues. And yet, decisions must still be made, and it falls on business analysts to cobble together information manually and come to meetings armed with spreadsheets.

These discussions based on suspect data often lead to finger pointing and fact questioning instead of insightful decisions.

If the data is suitable to drive the required, but often ineffective, discussions, would it not make more sense to leverage the data in a smarter way to derive insights more systematically and in a way that improves over time?

One of these techniques is to provide analytic reports showing all variations of a particular data field along with their owners. The process designers indicate which field variant is authoritative for a particular value, and technology can be used to manage the communication with other owners as they align their data.

As alignment is achieved, the quality of the insights steadily improves. This "peer pressure" approach to data cleansing at the source is reminiscent of rating systems used for sites like eBay.

There is incentive to getting the information right at its sources because everyone sees the impacts of good and bad data downstream.

This technique is distinct from the traditional approach of creating large data warehouses that attempt to consolidate schemas and provide highly cleansed enterprise data from a central source for driving analyses and processes.

Many organizations have struggled with the data warehouse approach, in part because their businesses don't remain static long enough to even finish the warehousing project.

It is always beneficial to leverage warehouses that are in place, at whatever level of completion, and then use the peer pressure approach to fill in the gaps and address new gaps as they emerge.

4. Parlay Processes & Insights into Smarter Decisions
The fourth step is to design and engineer the process and business analytic capabilities required to produce the insights and execute the resulting decisions.

This work might seem straightforward, but it is fraught with subtleties and traps typically resulting from experience biases among the team involved in the work. For example, an IT team charged with deploying a company's business intelligence technology of choice would naturally focus on the reports required.

The reports are a critical part of deliverables, but if the business analysts still have to manually transform the information and engage in offline or disconnected interpretation discussions spanning a company's functions, driving insightful decisions remains difficult.

Alternatively, if the team is adept at business software development that supports transaction or content production processes, the tendency is to try to develop analytical processes using the same methodology. This typically results in elongated development cycles and solutions that still miss the mark.

Improving insight requires a careful combination of flexibility and context management in some kind of guided analytics environment, as opposed to an exact, step-by-step approach.

If the team comes from a process development or consulting background, the two traps I see most are biasing the work more toward the process than the result and producing one-time deliverables that may not transition well into an ongoing change vehicle.

While many of the skills of these teams are often highly valuable, agile development processes coupled with the right amount of business-focused domain expertise are more suitable for business analytics.

Getting capabilities in the hands of the process stakeholders quickly and then letting them evolve as the methods of gaining insights emerge usually adds more value quicker than locking down exact requirements and following traditional development methods. And it is equally important to ensure that the resulting process captures the entire insight loop, including planning, reporting, analysis, collaboration, decision-making and execution.

5. Use Your New Processes to Drive Improvements
The fifth step is to operate the new process and drive the targeted improvements. Here, it is important to make sure resources are provided for properly interacting with the process, data and stakeholders to facilitate the emergence of insights and decisions.

Initially, the new process might require more work than the old process, especially until the stakeholders get comfortable with the differences in the new decisions versus what they would have done in the past. This initial increase in work should be planned for, and if your program is successful you should soon see a much sharper net decrease in work versus the old process.

The best insight-driven processes eventually require tremendous effort to stop, as opposed to tremendous efforts to keep them running.

Even if you do not have all the skills needed to implement these changes, you don't have to go it alone or wait to get started until your team is fully in place. Business models and other resources are emerging quickly to help organizations holistically with these kinds of programs and will be of tremendous value as you develop your program.

As you move through the steps, you can define the gap between the resources you have and those that are needed and build your case around the target variable improvements that process insights will incrementally deliver to your business.