Tag Archives: conflict

Small mountains

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We’ve all heard the term, ‘Making mountains out of molehills’, and understand what it means. What we don’t realize is how often we do it. It’s easy to see when someone else does it, but not us. No, our escalated concerns are little mountains. They aren’t mole hills. Other people do that, not us. Our concerns are real… or rather really big.

Except they are not.

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Being a school principal involves a lot of deciding how big to make an issue. Dismissing a problem is only allowing it to get bigger. Overreacting to a small problem can bring too much attention to it and make it bigger.

Being overly supportive of one side of an issue can make the other side escalate the size of the issue. Being neutral can equally exasperate the issue and create a mountain out of a molehill.

An insincere apology can be worse than no apology. Too harsh or illogical of a consequence can be as harmful as being too easy. Because to kids, to young adults learning to navigate the world, their mole hills are little mountains. To them the issues are not small.

But if we’re honest, we think our mole hills are mountains too… and that’s an important point to keep in mind when we get a little frustrated wondering why these little issues seem so big to everyone else.

The difference between a mountain and a mole hill might not be the size of the problem, but simply a matter of perspective. And that’s a perspective worth keeping in mind.

Unnecessary conflict

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When expectations of outcomes are different, there is often unnecessary conflict.

When people are faced with unknowns that worry them, there is often unnecessary conflict.

When there is misunderstanding, there is often unnecessary conflict.

When there is disappointment, there is often unnecessary conflict.

When there is disagreement, there is often unnecessary conflict.

Things don’t go as planned, people don’t always see things from the same perspective, goals often vary from person to person. This is just part of life. Conflict is often built up unnecessarily. Conflict is created by seeing things from just one viewpoint.

Conflict is often optional. A choice. A defence mechanism. Not necessarily desired, but brought on from holding a perspective that is biased or fixed.

At times, conflict is also necessary. And in these rare cases it should not be avoided. Running away from a conflict can create a greater conflict later.

But more often than not conflict can be avoided… it is unnecessary. It results not from need but from misunderstanding, or lack of awareness. Seek to understand, not to be right. Ask questions before making statements. Listen with intent to understand, not to defend a viewpoint. And look for common ground rather than reasons to disagree.

Conflict is often optional.

Assuming the worst

It’s reactive rather than thoughtful. It amazes me how many issues today are immediately an 11 on a scale of 1-10. Let’s just bypass the normal scale and make the issue beyond the norm.

There is no room for ‘ooops’. There is no opportunity to reduce the conflict or issue, it’s just a direct inflation to anger and upset. Retribution trumps resolution. The disagreement itself is an offence and the only solution is complete surrender, full admittance of wrongdoing, no opportunity for negotiation or mutual understanding.

People don’t interact with other people perfectly. Communication is an imperfect art. But interactions get worse when the worst interpretations are assumed. When there is an immediate high voltage response to an issue, the conversation continues to stay charged longer than it needs to. Sparks fly, and no one comes out un-singed.

It’s reactive rather than thoughtful. It is a jump to the worst conclusions. And it leads to no one coming out unscathed, unhurt, or even feeling like the resolution was rewarding.

How much could this change if we believed everyone was doing the best they could? If we chose to assume the best? If we started from a place of compassion rather than getting ramped up? If this is where we started I think, I know, a lot of situations would escalate to a 3/10, and never get to an 11/10.

Wouldn’t that be a better place to start?

Blind spots

I’m dealing with an issue between two students right now and the challenge is that both of their opposing views are valid. The challenge isn’t the points of view, it’s the current climate that makes one view insensitive to the other view. There was no intent to harm, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t harm. Poor communication is another issue, and it might seem like therein lies the problem more so than the stances themselves. However this just amplified the problem.

I can get the students together to eliminate the communication issue, but first I needed to show one of them how their perspective could be perceived differently than intended… I had to show this student how their perspective came from a place of privilege. I shared how I was once blind to my privilege and I think the student understood. Was this student’s statements ‘wrong’? No. Was this student’s statement insensitive? Yes. Could the other student have approached the concern differently? Yes… but here’s the thing, I don’t think it would have been settled any better if the issue was addressed in-person rather than publicly online. When a concern is in your blind spot how are you expected to see it?

Privilege creates blind spots. Politics creates blind spots. Religion creates blind spots. Gender creates blind spots. Anger creates blind spots. Culture creates blind spots. Language creates blind spots. Wealth creates blind spots. Trauma creates blind spots. Power creates blind spots. Ignorance creates blind spots… and the list can go on and on.

We can’t know that we have blind spots until they are shown to us. We don’t see them unless we can be shown things from a different perspective. We need to be empathetic. We need to be open to alternate views. We need to understand that our blind spots don’t inherently make us bad people, but when we are exposed to our blind spots our egos, our sense of right and wrong, need to be tempered.

When we are faced with a perspective that was in our blind spot we need to be open to seeing things from a perspective that’s not our own… and here’s the hard part, not to be judgemental but to be compassionate, empathetic, and willing to see the bias we hold. This is a big ask. But it builds character and helps us grow.

In the student issue I’m dealing with the onus to make things better lies on the person who was blind to their privilege. If that student can’t see the other perspective, if the blind spot remains, well then we have a disagreement that won’t be settled well. But if that student can see the other perspective, then maybe we can come to a satisfactory conclusion. We can focus less on intent and blame, and more on making things better. We can have an honest conversation about how our statements could be seen as insensitive and biased, even though that wasn’t the intent. There was no intention of harm, but harm was done, and if that harm is recognized, well then we can move forward. It becomes a learning experience and not an issue of right versus wrong. That’s one less blind spot, and one more opportunity to help us all get along a little more compassionately.

‘Making it work’ mindset

This was in James Clear’s weekly 3-2-1 email newsletter:

“One type of person approaches a situation with the mindset of, “How can I make this work?” 
Another type seems to approach each circumstance with the mindset of, “What are all the reasons this wouldn’t work?” 
Both people will be forced to deal with reality, but the first person will only have to solve problems that actually occur while the second person will often avoid taking action entirely because of the potential problems they have dreamt up before starting. 
There will always be reasons to not do something. Be a problem solver, not a problem adder.” – James Clear

It’s not just enough to have the right mindset when you have to work with someone who has the wrong mindset. You lift an idea up, and it gets knocked down. You make a suggestion and three counter examples are brought up. I believe there are times and places that this counter argument can be healthy and even promote better solutions, but when you are still looking for solutions and you have someone knocking the ideas down over and over, well then the problem or problems become unsurmountable. It’s not just your own mindset that matters, it’s the whole team’s.

I remember working on a team where this one person seemed to undermine almost everything I suggested. Even when I went to her in advance to see what the roadblocks were, she’d still undermine my meeting with new problems after I thought we’d exhausted reasons it wouldn’t work. What I didn’t understand was that this wasn’t just about being stubborn and not wanting to change, it seemed more just a mindset of “This isn’t working, and that won’t work either.”

I left that job before ever solving the mystery of how to work with this person effectively, but that experience taught me that it’s not just important to have a solution-focused mindset, it’s important that the people you work with do as well… or that you plan meetings such that ideas are allowed to be developed before there are opportunities to knock them down. Because it’s easier to knock ideas down than it is to build them up.

The cost of it all

The cost of war is measured in many ways. Of course the cost of human life is the most obvious. Then there is the sheer cost of paying for the tools of war, and the damage those tools make on buildings and infrastructure.

But in todays globally connected economy, the cost of the war in the Ukraine is being felt around the world. Gas prices, food prices, and a deflated stock market are stripping away the profits of the rich, and the spending ability of the middle class and poor.

All this over borders… imaginary lines in the sand. We aren’t the only animal species that fight over territory, but we are by far the most violent. And, we’ve done this since the dawn of civilization. How many ‘civil’izations have been lost, conquered, displaced, enslaved, disenfranchised, annihilated?

Will there be a time in the future where we truly learn how to coexist? Where we spend more on sustaining relationships than on weapons of war? Where the cost of war is just too high to be a way to resolve conflict?

How high a price must we pay before war is finally seen as too high a price?

The unseen casualties to come

I am saddened by the physical destruction, and especially the death and disruption of innocent lives happening now in the Ukraine. But I think (and hope) this will end soon. However, this war will affect far more than the Ukrainian people. As US President Joe Biden said,

“It’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia; it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” Biden said. “Both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

This will have a massive impact on the world’s poor. Many reading this will feel the financial cost of increased prices, but that burden can be absorbed. We simply will have less buying power and less options of things to buy. But we won’t go hungry. For people living at or below the poverty line, and especially in developing countries where limited food choices become both expensive and scarce, it’s a different story. People will go hungry. People will revolt. People will die.

Since WWII many of the global conflicts have been about oil. The conflicts of the future will be about food and water. No matter what the reason, global conflict affects us all more and more in the interconnected world we live in. It’s one thing to look at the horror of lives lost in a conflict like this, still another to know that more casualties are coming.

Misinformation machine

Yesterday I shared this tweet:


Daniel Funke shared a thread of images that are NOT from the current invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, but are being spread in social media as if they are from the current battle.

Today I read an article that stated, “Facebook has blocked Russian state media outlets from using its advertising platform or using other monetization features in response to the invasion of Ukraine.”

Its amazing that propaganda is so prevalent today when there is such easy access to information. But we are not living in an age where facts travel at the speed of fiction. Lies spread faster than truth. Sensationalism trumps information, and upset or outrage create the perfect venue for the re-sharing of fabricated stories that go viral.

Facts blend with fiction into a narrative that is anything but real news. What stories do the news stations in Moscow share with their citizens? How different does the news sound in neighbouring Belarus, compared to China, compared to news here in North America?

It’s easy to share narratives that match your own view, even if the source of the data is unreliable. We are living in an era when misinformation reigns. Social media has become an unstoppable misinformation machine, and every time we click a like, re-share, or forward a narrative that isn’t true, we become part of the machine. After all, we are the social in social media. We are cogs in the misinformation machine.

The best they can with what they’ve got.

I’m sure if I go looking, I’d find a similar post I’ve written before, but this idea is worth exploring (again) and it was inspired by Aaron Davis’ comment on yesterday’s Daily Ink.

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but it was decades ago, before I became an educator: “People do the best they can with the resources they have.”

This is such an empowering position to hold when dealing with an upset person. They are trying, they are doing their best, they are hurting and need compassion. This shifts the direction of the conversation, especially when your own buttons are pushed by the person or when they are showing their upset by going on the attack.

If you go into a conversation with an upset person believing they are only there to attack you, that leaves you only with a choice of being defensive or going on the attack yourself. If you go into the same conversation thinking this person is upset and doing the best they can, suddenly you can shift to helping them, even when their strategy isn’t ideal.

This isn’t always easy. Here is an example from a while back at another school: Student does something very inappropriate. Parents are invited in. Parent has heard the student’s ‘creative’ perspective on how they are not at fault. Parent comes in with metaphorical ‘guns-a-blazing’ to defend the kid.

Whether it’s a father or mother that comes in, I call this ‘mama bear’ behavior. Mama bears will do anything to protect their cubs. So, what’s the worst thing that you can do with an angry mama bear? Attack the cub in front of them.

The easy, but unhelpful reaction to hearing a parent defend a kid, who has fabricated a story to the parent about the innocence of their behaviour, is to call the kid out. The harder thing to do is to remember that the kid is scared and doing the best they can, and the parent is angry and doing the best they can. A counterpoint at this juncture can easily lead to an unhealthy argument. So, a softer approach is better.

It’s a matter of remembering that we want the same thing… to take care of a student who has in our eyes done wrong and in the parents eyes has been wronged. And so that parent is doing the best they can with the knowledge and resources they have.

This doesn’t mean that you let the kid off. It does mean that you can take an approach that is more aikido than karate, more deflective and less of a direct attack.

Without going into specifics, I talk about how more than one kid was involved in the situation. I talk about how intentions aren’t always known and that two people can see the same situation in different ways. I ask the parent to remember that the other kid has a parent too, and might ask what they would think of the situation if they were the parent of the other child (this is delicate and not something to do early on, only when the parent is less angry than when they came in to defend their cub).

It’s only when the parent can see another perspective that I then discuss their kid, and the approach is that ‘we both want the same thing’. Without saying it bluntly, the approach is asking ‘Do you want your kid acting this way?’ or more subtly, ‘Do you want your kid being perceived they way they are being perceived?’

In essence, it’s about giving the parent more information and resources than they arrived with, to deal with the situation better than an angry mama bear has defending a cub from danger. It’s about saying, ‘Your kid made a bad choice’, and separating their behaviour from their identity and the parent’s identity too. And then it’s about helping both of them get the strategies and resources they need to make the situation better.

It’s not easy. But when a mama bear sees that you want what’s best for their kid… and that’s really what you want even though the kid made a really bad choice… then the outcome becomes what you intended it to be. That same mama bear parent has, at times, even wanted to go harder on their kid than I do. If it comes to this point, they are still operating under the same pretence, they are doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

Start with Good Intentions

I like to think that most people come at life with good intentions. I give people the benefit of the doubt that they are positive, honest, and want an outcome that is favourable for themselves and others.

Upset? Intentions were not met.

Angry? Someone else’s intentions did not match yours.

Hurt? Someone’s intentions were blind to your injury.

When someone does these things intentionally, well then I have to question where this came from? Sometimes selfishness blinds people to the way their intentions can harm others. Sometimes there is actual malice. There are people in the world that enjoy inflicting harm and pain, people who derive joy from being a bully, or who don’t care about others. But this is a minority of people.

Most people want to have positive experiences, and share those positive experiences with others. Sometimes though, they don’t have a road map to get there. This gets tricky sometimes, especially when more than two people are involved.

Trying to meet the needs of three different people can be a bit like playing rock/paper/scissors with three people. Sometimes all three will agree, but often there will be either two feeling like they came out good, and one disappointed, or vice versa, and occasionally all three will feel like they have lost something.

A good example of this can be a parent, teacher, and student meeting where they are dealing with a concern. The positive intentions are for everyone to leave the meeting on the same page, having addressed the concern in a positive way. On some level, everyone at the meeting wants the same thing… for the student to have a better learning experience. But that intention can be lost. Instead, the it becomes a game of rock/paper/scissors with three participants.

That’s when it’s important to go back to good intentions, and to focus on what people want to achieve. If anyone is upset, angry, or feels hurt, then it’s time to realign intentions. This isn’t necessarily easy, but when you start from a place where you believe that everyone has good intentions, it does make things easier… and more likely to end with a positive outcome.