It is natural to assume that the parties involved in a conflict should settle their conflict. It is their business. Their interests are at stake. They started it anyway.
Unfortunately, the parties involved in a dispute happen to be in the worst possible position to settle that dispute. That creates an awkward dilemma. It is as if the only person in the position to rescue a drowning person is someone who cannot swim. Or as if the only people motivated to be engineers are those incapable of doing mathematics.
There is one – and only one – situation in which the parties in a conflict are in the best position to solve it: the situation where resolution of the conflict is going to be through the exercise of sheer force. In every other situation the parties are at a disadvantage.
Two teams are having a tug of war across a fast-flowing river. The rope is wet so they have tied their bodies to the rope to get the best possible grip. Each team is pulling as hard as possible. For the moment the rope is stationary as force equals force. A great deal of effort is being exerted but there is no movement.
Neither side dares relax the tension because that side would immediately be dragged into the river. There is no communication between the sides. Even if there was communication there would be no trust. If one side suggested relaxing the tension the other side would regard this as a trick. There is a tension of hostility.
Two soft drink companies are spending a huge amount of money advertising their drinks. Each company knows that this huge expenditure is not increasing the market for the drinks. But neither side dare let up on the expenditure for a moment because the other company would immediately gain market share, which would be extremely expensive to recover. There is a tension of ‘hostility’. Even though both sides recognize the waste of money and effort they dare not relax for a moment.
The arms race is a parallel example.
Conflict in general is characterized by this tension of hostility. There is constant pressure. A military commander dare not relax for a moment or the enemy will attack. A boxer dare not drop his guard.
Because of this tension of hostility it is extremely difficult for a party in a dispute to undertake the exploratory and provocative type of thinking that is essential for the design process. There cannot be the give and take needed to design an outcome because the basic principle is that nothing must be given unless its surrender has been forced.
This unfortunate situation has nothing to do with the good will of the people involved – or their good sense. They are all acting in a highly intelligent manner according to their logic bubbles. It is the logic of the situation that demands this behaviour. The members of the two tug-of-war teams might dearly like to stop to have a beer and do some fishing in the river.
This is a direct part of the tension of hostility. We can imagine the captain of one of the tug-of-war teams yelling across the river:
‘I shall count up to three and then say STOP. At that moment we shall all relax tension.’
The other team would suspect that if they relaxed tension on the count of three they might immediately find themselves in the river.
It is natural to suppose that at every moment the other side is going to do something to gain an advantage. This is the perceptual context, and mood, in which any act is seen.
The days of chivalry in conflict and the Queensberry rules in fist fights are long gone. All is known to be fair in love and war.
In the Falklands War there were frantic efforts at negotiation through the Secretary General of the United Nations, through the President of Peru, through Alexander Haig, etc. Throughout these negotiations the British Government was conscious that time was passing and winter was coming on in the South Atlantic. The weather was getting worse and soon it might get too bad for the naval task force to mount an invasion of the Islands. So no matter how genuine the negotiation attempts might have been, they were always treated with suspicion as an attempt to gain a military advantage. So long as they could be seen in this way it does not matter whether this was or was not the case.
Psychological moves are an intrinsic part of normal conflict behaviour. In the Second World War the Germans were misled into expecting the Allied landings in Normandy at quite the wrong beach. This misinformation led to their massing troops at the wrong place. It saved a large number of lives.
It is hardly surprising that secrecy has been an essential part of diplomacy and negotiation as well as part of conflict itself. Without secrecy there cannot be deception and there cannot be bluff.
As I mentioned before, we are guilty of carrying over the idiom of conflict itself into our thinking about conflict. Our conflict thinking has just been a miniature of the conflict that might actually take place on a battlefield. So secrecy and bluff has been essential.
A well-known businessman who had just concluded a brilliant deal to buy up a certain corporation told me:
‘I wanted that organization very badly. If they had asked twice the price I would have paid it. But they didn’t. So I got it cheap.’
Is it surprising that secrecy is a normal part of our negotiating? If the man had declared his best available price he would have had to pay double for the deal. What poker player wants to play with all his cards face up on the table? What would be the point of contract bridge if all hands were exposed at the start? Yet the chess pieces are visible enough on the board. Is there some significance in the fact that traditionally Russians play chess and Americans play bridge and poker?
If one party knows that it is prepared to give something away in the negotiation then it does not want to give that away ‘for free’. The maximum price must be extracted in return.
We take such secrecy for granted because it is an essential part of our current idiom of conflict thinking. We could not operate the present idiom without it. In the new ‘design idiom’, however, there can be much more openness since desires and fears all need to be stated so that they can become design ingredients. The parties involved in the conflict will clearly not make such disclosures to each other. So we see the essential role of the third party in the process.
Secrecy is, of course, a lack of communication. But what I want to mention here is the simple absence of a channel of communication between the parties in a conflict.
Between the end of the Falkland hostilities in 1982 and June 1984 there was no direct contact at all between the governments of Great Britain and Argentina. This is a childish absurdity. In a later chapter I shall discuss the absurdity of nations behaving like teenagers: sulks, taking offense, cold shoulders, not talking to each other, etc.
It is also an absurdity that warring nations do not talk to each other on a permanent basis throughout the conflict.
One of the roles for the organization I shall be describing later in this book (SITO: Supranational Independent Thinking Organization) will be to provide a forum for conflicting parties to be in permanent communication with each other – on a daily face-to-face basis.
I do not want to go deeply into such matters here. I simply want to point out that, traditionally, the parties in a conflict often lack any direct communication with each other. This is yet another reason why there has to be a third party.
In the bygone days of battle, commanders used to mark their position on the battlefield by means of their standards. These fluttering banners indicated to all who held what territory. These banners marked the positions reached at any moment. They showed achievement. They had a psychological value in showing the troops what was happening. They also had a very practical value in regrouping the scattered troops so that they knew where to rally and what points to defend.
Exactly the same thing happens in modern disputes. The leaders taking part need to signal to their supporters what is happening. They do this by means of banner statements. It would be quite impossible to describe in detail what is actually going on, so a few crisp slogans are used instead. Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader in Great Britain, declared that ‘not one pit will be closed’. The Russians declared that there can be ‘no further disarmament talks until the cruise missiles are withdrawn’. This is traditional position taking. It indicates both where things are at and also the positions that are to be defended.
Unfortunately, a position taken in this public and defined a manner is extremely difficult to back out of. Negotiators are always ‘painting themselves into corners’ because of this need to show that the battle is being fought.
There is a dilemma of communication that occurs in many other areas. The dilemma arises from the need to communicate to two different groups at the same time.
In its annual report a corporation shows how very well things are going. This is essential in order to retain investor confidence, to maintain a good stock market quotation and to retain a good enough credit rating to make borrowing money easier. Indeed, the more a corporation needs to raise money the rosier the picture it is going to have to show to investors. Of course, the annual report is read by the workers and their union officials. If things are so rosy then surely that delayed wage rise should come through at this point? The demand for higher wages then makes life even more impossible for the corporation that is already short of money. With a message that is inevitably going to be visible to both groups, it is impossible to signal to investors that all is well and to workers that things are so bad that they must tighten their belts.
Exactly the same thing happens in conflicts. A leader has to signal a position in order to maintain the support of his or her followers. At the same time this rigid position makes negotiation much more difficult. There is another aspect of the same phenomenon with national insult trading. For the sake of his home supporters a leader may have to appear belligerent. At the same time he may well wish to cool matters down as regards the other power involved. So he has to offer fierce insults and somehow simultaneously convey that these are only for ‘home consumption’. The excellence of modern communication makes this task increasingly difficult. What might have been said to a rally of political supporters is now immediately available to the rest of the world.
Because position taking is always accompanied by such suitable noises as ‘never yield’, ‘resist to the death’ and ‘no change in our position’, the parties involved in the dispute are never in the best position to explore the adjustments needed in order to design an outcome.
There is yet another aspect of public position taking. This is the ‘ritual dance’. It often happens in union negotiations that both sides are shrewd and experienced enough to know what the outcome is going to be. The matter could almost be decided at the first meeting. In most countries (other than Japan) this cannot be done. There is a traditional way of doing things: the ritual dance. There have to be excessive demands and threats and the breaking off of talks and the rest. All this is necessary for two reasons.
If there is no ritual dance then union members will never believe that their officials have done their job properly. The officials will be seen as weak and too ready to compromise. At next election time such ‘weak’ officials will be replaced by tougher ones.
The second reason is that the officials themselves cannot know they have got the best possible bargain unless they exert the maximum possible pressure each time. It is rather like the businessman who got the corporation cheap because the other side did not demand the highest possible price. There always has to be both a good case and ‘maximum possible pressure’. If you are seen to exert maximum possible pressure then you show to your followers – and to yourself – that you simply have got the best bargain possible. How else could you show it?
At various points in the book I have mentioned the problem of language and labels. Here I am concerned with stock insults.
If the opposing side is an ‘enemy’ and ‘evil’ then constructive talks are more difficult. If the other party is a ‘bully’ and ‘aggressor’ and a ‘dictator’ then even to be seen negotiating with that person is seen as a surrender of sorts.
Such labels are necessary in order to stoke up support for a cause and to enhance the righteousness of one’s case. They are also good or stirring speeches. The media love them and imaginatively display a variety of such labels in clever headlines.
We have here the dilemma of ‘public consumption’ and ‘negotiating consumption’ that I mentioned earlier.
It should also be remembered that there is another purpose behind these insults. They can serve to set the ‘mood’ of the negotiation. As I explained in an earlier chapter, a tough or obdurate mood may actually alter the concepts available to the other party. In other words, there is good reason to ‘browbeat’ an opponent.
There is an attraction and an enjoyment in conflict and crises. Politicians often love crises. This is in addition to the use of a conflict in order to rally support for an unpopular regime and to unite quarrelling factions by pinpointing an external enemy (or an internal one in the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany).
A crisis or a conflict focuses the minds of politicians. Many politicians are ‘reactor’ thinkers. They are much happier reacting to something than taking the initiative in improving society through imaginative action. They are simply not creative and not designers. Besides, any initiative is risky since it may not work and may upset as many people as it benefits. Reaction thinking is much safer. You only do what you are forced to do. Any action – or even survival itself – is an immense achievement. Even ‘not giving way’ on a point becomes a triumph.
Because of this attractiveness and political utility of a conflict, the parties involved may not be the most motivated to solve that conflict. So they will not seek creative or designed outcomes for fear that, once made visible, such a suggestion could make the conflict difficult to continue. If there is an obvious solution it becomes difficult to pretend it does not exist.
The world is full of skilled and experienced negotiators in unions, in governments, in diplomatic services, in the United Nations and in law offices. Surely such people are better placed than anyone else to solve conflicts. Surely the skilled negotiators available within the ranks of the parties involved in a conflict are in the best position to solve that conflict through direct negotiation with the other side.
Not so. Even if they think so.
Busy journalists spend much of their life typing. They have great experience of keyboards and keypads. But many of them go through life typing with two index fingers. They peck away at the keyboard in a remarkably inefficient manner when compared with a junior office typist who has only a few months’ experience but has acquired the skill of touch-typing with all fingers.
Using a bad skill very efficiently does not make it a good skill. Practising a bad skill over years of experience still leaves it as a bad skill.
A tennis player or a golfer may have an inherent style fault which he or she is totally unable to correct. It needs an outside coach to come along to point out the fault and to set about correcting it. Practising harder without such fault correction will only embed the fault even more.
So experienced conflict participants or skilled negotiators or skilled dialecticians may only be skilful at the old conflict idioms of argument. They may have no skill at all with the design idiom. Skill and experience are simply not sufficient unless we say at what.
Let us be quite clear that experience in a situation may build up a sensitivity to that situation but does not necessarily ever develop the best way of dealing with it. Half an hour in a medical classroom may give better instruction on how to deal with a drowned person than 20 years of pulling people out of the sea (without any instruction).
It is a fatal mistake to assume that experience is the same as skill. It is a fatal mistake to assume that if a skill is used it must be the right skill. It is most useful to keep in mind the metaphor of the two-finger typists.
All those people who have built up skill in the old idiom of conflict thinking – where the thinking is an extension of the conflict – should not assume that that is the only or the best approach to conflict resolution. If we are content to leave conflict resolution to such people then this assumption will be made. And we shall remain stuck forever within an idiom that has shown itself to be inadequate.
We come now to the final reason why the parties involved in a conflict may be in the worst position to resolve that conflict. It has to do with perception.
In an earlier chapter I mentioned that, in the scientific method, once the ‘most reasonable’ hypothesis had been formed it became very difficult to see the evidence in any other way. This is because of the way perception works as a self-organizing system. Evidence is not placed neutrally on a ‘passive’ information surface but exists in the ‘active’ self-organizing environment of perception.
Exactly the same thing happens with conflicts. Each of the parties has a position. That position dominates perception and organizes the elements of the situation to support the position. The elements are simply not available for designing into a new structure because such a structure would at once seem inferior to the chosen position. This is not a fault of the people involved or evidence of their bigoted attitude. It simply follows from the logic of patterning systems.
In a perceptual sense you cannot haul yourself up ‘by your bootstraps’.
I shall return to this point later when I deal specifically with the third-party role in conflict resolution. It is a fundamental point.
There is also a related but different point. If you are too closely involved in a situation it is difficult to get an overview or to get a sense of perspective. That is another reason why those involved are not in the best position to resolve the conflict. As you pursue one road you may not be in a helicopter position to survey alternative roads.
What I have tried to show in this chapter is that the parties involved in a conflict may actually be in the worst position to resolve that conflict – except where the outcome is to be determined by force. I want to emphasize that I do not consider this due to ill will or greed on the part of those involved. It is the logic of the situation and it could not be otherwise. To expect from a combatant the heroics of complete disclosure and complete faith in the other party is to expect stupidity.
It is true that there are habits of thinking and habits of conflict behaviour (like calling each other names) which are not strictly necessary and which do make conflict resolution more difficult. We could improve thinking styles and get rid of the worst habits and that would improve matters considerably. Nevertheless, the very involvement of the parties and the fact that they have much to gain or to lose makes them incapable of providing all the thinking needed for resolution of the conflict.
This inevitable thinking inadequacy of the disputants in a dispute creates a dilemma. It is natural for the disputants to consider a dispute to be their business alone. In the complexity of the modern world, where everything affects everything else, this is rarely so and disputes tend to have a harmful effect on all those around. In spite of this, those involved in a quarrel feel it is their business to sort it out. This is because sorting it out is always conceived on a ‘trial of strength’ basis and the intrusion of others would unfairly alter the balance of strength. So the combatants are incapable of designing their way out of a conflict and yet are reluctant to have anyone else involved. This reluctance is a dangerous arrogance because for the design approach to work there has to be ‘triangular thinking’ and the involvement of a third party, for the reasons I have spelled out in this chapter.