chapter 4
THE MODEL: INTRACTABLE ATTRACTORS
IN THE INTRACTABLE CONFLICT LAB in Munich, Germany, we manipulate complexity. We are again running studies of polarizing moral conflicts, but this time instead of letting the participants wander off into constructive or destructive conflicts on their own, we are actually altering their levels of complexity beforehand. We do this with information. We again pretest all the participants on their attitudes about abortion (an issue particularly polarizing in Germany today) and match people with opposing views, but then we do something different.
First, each dyad is randomly assigned to either a low-complexity or a high-complexity condition. In the low-complexity condition, participants read information about abortion presented in pro and con categories (one side is always consistent with the opinion of the person and the other contradicts it). In the high-complexity condition, participants read a text that presents various positions and arguments on abortion from different angles, describing them in relation to each other. We do not only give the high-complexity dyads information that supports and contradicts their attitudes. What we do instead, which is consistent with what some dialogue groups do in conflict settings, is provide several different perspectives on the issue of abortion. Positions such as the moral responsibility of having a child; the moral status of the embryo; the rights, obligations, and autonomy of the woman and the embryo; the need to protect the mother and the embryo; alternatives to abortion; and the need to consider extreme cases of rape and disability. We conclude by writing: “In summary it can be said that the debate about the topic ‘abortion’ is very multifaceted and includes many aspects. All aspects have their relevance and their importance and should be considered and seen in relation to each other.”
Notice that while the amount of information and the basic content of the information are the same in both high- and low-complexity conditions, it is presented in fundamentally different ways: either pro and con or from multiple perspectives. The different types of information matter. In fact, the effects of presenting the dyads with pro-con information versus more complex forms of information are striking. This simple intervention leads to radically different conflict dynamics.
Compared to the dyads in the low-complexity condition, those in the high-complexity condition (who held important, opposing views from one another on abortion) were able to reach consensus on position statements more often and generate better-quality agreements; were more satisfied and cooperative; had higher ratios of positive-to-negative emotions over the course of their discussions; and their levels of cognitive complexity actually increased after the sessions. Complexity rules!

OUR MODEL

Our approach is a hybrid, a combination of social psychology and complexity science. It is also informed by important research on conflict from areas like anthropology, physics, political science, and international affairs, as well as other types of psychology. Our project team includes conflict specialists, social psychologists, an anthropologist, complexity scientists, a physicist, and experienced peacemakers. It is important to emphasize that we have not been hiding away in an ivory tower to develop our model; we have also been carefully studying real people in real conflicts. Mediators, negotiators, diplomats, peacemakers: conflict resolvers of all stripes.
From this fairly unique interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner primordial sea, a new model has emerged. It is based on the idea of attractors, the somewhat stable patterns or tendencies in systems that draw us in and that resist change. Like the forceful gravitational pull of a valley at the base of K2, they propel us down, down, down.
Here’s the basic story. Imagine a climber on a mountainside, as shown in the figure on the next page. The climber represents the conflict right now. While clambering around on the steep slope, the climber is constantly compelled to slide down the mountain and come to rest at the bottom of the valley. The valley (along with gravity) serves as an attractor for the system. Any attempt to move up and out of the valley and over the peak takes considerable effort and may even be fruitless.
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Intractable Attractor Landscapes
The picture also illustrates that a conflict system may have more than one attractor, in this case, two. Each attractor has its own width, that is, a set of states “attracted” by the attractor. Here, attractor A is somewhat wider than attractor B. On a mountain range, that simply translates to more real estate sloping down in the vicinity of valley A, which would compel you down that incline. Psychologically, the wider the attractor, the greater the range of thoughts and actions that eventually evolve toward its basin—the mental and behavioral patterns associated with that attractor. This means that even contradictory information entering into the range of an attractor, say, positive information about an enemy that contradicts the current negative view of them, is likely to be transformed until it fits the dominant perspective of that attractor and is perceived as negative. So I may hear about a kind or generous act that my enemy did for someone, but I will construe it as manipulative or cunning, and it will then further support my negative sense of them.
Attractors can also vary in their relative strength, shown here as the depth of the two valleys in the figure. Attractor B is a stronger attractor than attractor A. This means that once a climber is caught in the pull of this deeper attractor, it is more difficult for them to be dislodged, even when strong external influences make escape more likely (for instance, when a rescue team is on the scene). It is as though the climber becomes wedged into a deep crevice in the valley.
The psychological equivalent occurs when a disputant holds a strong, immutable conviction that makes it nearly impossible to change their mind-set. So it would take a much stronger force to dislodge the climber (disputant) from attractor B than from attractor A. That is the basic idea: attractor valleys and craggy, mountainous landscapes for 5 percent problems and the journeys people take across them over time. But here are a few other things, presented in the form of FAQs, that are important to know about this story.
 
1. Where do conflict attractors come from? They come from both our past and our current experiences. They are made up of many different factors that come together to help establish the patterns we tend to fall into when we get into a conflict. Recall Lewin’s constellation of forces: past encounters with people and groups, beliefs, expectations, social norms; how we have been taught and socialized; cultural influences. Of course, some things will matter more than others (a past act of violence committed by someone will be a stronger determinant of your future reactions to him than a less consequential encounter), but their effects on an attractor will always be in combination with many other factors. Here is an example of how attractors develop on the global scene.

Conflict Rules

They believed it would end quickly. At the onset of World War I, “the war to end all wars,” none of the major powers that entered into war that summer of 1914—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, France, Britain—wanted or expected a prolonged conflict. But they got it. Four years later, seventy million troops had been mobilized and nine million combatants lay dead in what was the second-deadliest war in human history. Why? Because the conflict took control. Sure, the leaders made mistakes in judgment. They believed in the possibility of quick victory, held outmoded assumptions about warfare and war etiquette, thought free trade among the countries would prevent the war’s escalation, and failed to consider the political backlash of their actions at home. But it was more than that.1
Essentially, the system was ready for conflict. An arms race between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century had spread to the other major European powers, which then devoted much of their industrial base to manufacturing weapons and logistical equipment for combat. From 1908 to 1913, military spending increased in this region by 50 percent. Then various conflicts sprang up, over competing territorial claims and growing nationalism in the Balkans, while the Ottoman Empire crumbled and Germany thrived and expanded. This combination began to tip the balance of power in the area, a balance that Europeans had relied on for stability for a century. All this began to unfold within a complex network of political and military alliances among the countries—formal and informal, public and secret—and within a context of imperialist foreign policies, animosity between states over past grievances, and a series of aggressive interstate maneuvers that caused further destabilization.
So when a young Bosnian-Serb named Gavrilo Princip lit a fuse by assassinating the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June of 1914, the conflict detonated almost overnight, and most of the major powers got sucked into the war within weeks. It soon polarized into two opposing alliances. As all these European powers had colonies abroad, the conflict quickly spread around the world. At that point, it was in charge. The options of each of the major powers diminished before their eyes as their constraints grew. The conflict ruled.
Of course, this war only lasted four years, so was it really intractable? It apparently seemed so at the time, because it was extremely destructive and lasted much longer than the major powers desired. It has also been argued that the conclusion of WWI, resulting in a rise in nationalism in Europe and the humiliation of Germany at Versailles, established the conditions for World War II.2 But that is another story.
 
2. Why do conflicts fall into attractors? Mostly because it is easier. We fall into these ingrained patterns of thinking-feeling-behaving because we are used to them, or because everyone else is doing the same thing, like in Europe in the early 1900s. And because it takes less energy to fall into them than to try to climb out of them or fight against them: to do something different. But we also fall into attractors because our current journey across the landscape, our more immediate experience of the conflict, has brought us into the vicinity of a destructive attractor and thus into its gravitational pull.
 
3. How do attractors become stronger or weaker? Through coherence and incoherence. When the different components of an attractor start to support and reinforce one another (when they all move in the same direction), then the attractor becomes stronger and more coherent. This is what we see in mob behavior at soccer games when competition, heat, alcohol, intergroup rivalries, politics, and the foolishness of youth combine into a violent cocktail. It is also what we saw emerge just prior to WWI. Then, the pieces of the attractor are said to be connected mostly through reinforcing feedback loops, where the various components simply fuel each other.3 But when some of the components go against the tide of the attractor (like when a sense of guilt or a law stops you from physically harming an opponent), then they are said to provide inhibiting feedback.4
Attractors with mostly reinforcing feedback loops connecting their different elements will tend to grow and spread, sometimes exponentially, and can become very strong and coherent. At some point, they may reach a plateau where they strike more of a balance between reinforcing and inhibiting feedback, achieving a new equilibrium. This happens when a conflict escalates to a given point and then remains there in a stalemate between the parties. However, this also happens when two people fall intensely in love, marry, and then live in a society where divorce is strongly prohibited. In both cases, you have strong reinforcing loops that are still driving the initial processes (conflict or infatuation) as well as strong inhibiting loops that are resisting change (deescalation of the conflict or divorce by the couple). These tend to induce states of high coherence. Weaker and less coherent relational attractors tend to evolve from conditions where there is initially more of a balance between reinforcing and inhibiting feedback in the relational context.
 
4. Why do conflict attractors become positive and negative? The specific types of behavior that can occur in a relationship between two people or between two groups are infinite. But usually after people have known each other for a while, their behavior falls into two or three general categories: positive (feels good), negative (feels bad), and neutral (eh). It is straightforward: the more severe and abundant the negative experiences and encounters that accumulate in a particular relationship, the stronger the negative attractor; the more positive experiences that accumulate, the more positive the attractor. So, between any two disputants with some history, there are likely to be these general kinds of attractors—positive, negative, and neutral. However, the relative width and strength of these different kinds of attractors makes a difference in shaping the landscape of conflict dynamics in any relationship.
 
5. How long does it take to grow a conflict attractor? It usually takes a long time to develop a strong attractor, an ingrained pattern of response to another person or group that resists change. Think of how long it usually takes for a person to develop a particular personality trait over his or her lifetime, or for a couple to develop strong patterns for how they fight and make up. It took decades to establish the war machine for WWI. So, even though people’s and groups’ behaviors may change rapidly and dramatically from one moment to the next, their pattern of consistent behavior, which is evidence of an underlying attractor, usually takes much longer to form.
 
6. How come some attractors are visible and obvious and others are hidden? During a conflict, the destructive thoughts, feelings, and actions evident in the disputants’ dynamics may represent only the most visible attractor for them. But if there is a long history of interaction between the disputants, there are likely to be other potential patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting between them, including those that foster more positive interactions. These are considered to be latent (hidden and inactive) until the situation changes and a more positive pattern emerges and shapes the overt conflict dynamics. This is what the world witnessed during the Cold War between America and the USSR. Hostile relations had been obvious for decades between the two countries, but after perestroika, their relations moved rapidly into a more tolerant and constructive attractor, which had been present but latent during the Cold War. During destructive conflicts, negative attractors are usually visible and positive attractors are latent. During more peaceful times, positive attractors are visible and negative attractors become latent.
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7. How do we move from one attractor to another? When a conflict system has more than one type of strong attractor, almost anything, even very small things or random events (a comment, a kind gesture), can shift the conflict from one attractor to the other. This is most likely to occur when the current state of the conflict is near a tipping point between two attractors. We see this when there is a tense cease-fire between disputants that reignites into war, or when a drawn-out conflict between battle-weary parties collapses into peace. And these changes are often dramatic. Such as when former enemies become lovers, or when former lovers become archenemies. These are big shifts between attractors. What is critical to know, however, is that when a shift occurs from one attractor to another, it does not mean that the latent attractor is gone. It simply means that, for now, it is latent. Conditions can change again and bring latent attractors back to life.
 
8. What is a repeller? A repeller is the opposite of an attractor. It is a type or pattern of behavior rarely seen in a conflict situation (think of laws or norms or social taboos that prohibit certain types of behavior in disputes). And if such rare behaviors do occur, they are very unlikely to be repeated. However, at times taboo behaviors (like blowing yourself up) can become normative (terrorism), and then they can become attractors for particular groups. This type of transformation from repeller to attractor takes considerable time and a significant realignment of many forces.
 
9. And how does all this help us understand 5 percent conflicts? The 5 percent problem represents a special kind of hazardous attractor landscape for conflict that has its own set of unique dynamics and rules. These are landscapes with very strong and coherent current attractors for destructive interactions and weaker, less coherent, latent attractors for more constructive types of interactions. The negative attractors are made up of many elements, from feelings and beliefs to group rules for conflict to national holidays and institutions. These elements are all tightly linked through reinforcing feedback loops that intensify and spread the negativity and pull of the conflict over time. Additionally, they possess a set of loops that provides inhibiting feedback, which discourages or prohibits deescalation or other changes in more constructive directions.
When attractors develop considerable coherence resulting from an imbalance of reinforcing-to-inhibiting feedback loops growing and spreading over time, they can become self-organizing. This means they will continue to grow and spread, no matter what anyone tries to do to stop them. They become virtually impervious to outside influence. This is a relatively rare event, but when it does occur, conflicts cross a threshold into intractability. This is the essence of the 5 percent.
 
10. Why do intractable attractors endure? To outside observers, intractable conflicts are illogical. They seem to go against everything we know about motivation, like the fact that most people usually act in their own self-interest. After all, a conflict with no end in sight serves the interests of very few people, drains both parties’ resources, wastes energy, and diminishes human capital in service of a futile endeavor. Despite this, attractors satisfy two basic psychological motives. First, they provide a coherent view of the conflict, including the character of the in-group (good) and out-group (evil), the nature of the relationship with the antagonistic party, the history of the conflict, and the legitimacy of claims made by each party. Second, attractors provide a stable platform for action, enabling each party in a conflict to respond decisively to a change in circumstances or to an action initiated by the other party. These are not trivial things, especially for disputants engaged in exhaustingly difficult conflicts. So, in addition to the technical reasons for intractability (imbalanced feedback leading to exponential growth and self-organization), they also serve these two important psychological functions that make them even more likely to persist. In this sense they have logic of their own. A deep logic.
So that is our story of the intractability of particularly treacherous attractors we face on some of our more dangerous conflict expeditions. And that is essentially what came to pass between Kasha and Anthony, Domenic and Charlie, the pro-life and pro-choice advocates in Boston, and Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir after years of being estranged and deadlocked in their dispute. At some point, any random thought about the “other,” not to mention an actual encounter with them, would propel the disputants into the depths of the negative thinking, feeling, and acting of the destructive attractor for their relations—no matter what the other party actually did or didn’t do and whether or not the disputants really wanted to respond that way. It felt impossible to do otherwise. And when outsiders tried to intervene in these conflicts, it only made things worse.
The power of these attractors are bolstered by many different things, but our experience of them is simple: they are bad and we are good. At this point, our sense of options in the situation is extremely limited (fight or flight), and our responses tend to build an even stronger attractor for destructive conflict between us and them.

WHAT THE ATTRACTOR LANDSCAPE MODEL MEANS FOR ADDRESSING 5 PERCENT CONFLICTS

We are not helpless in the face of the 5 percent.

A Bronx Tale

A few years ago, our research team was asked to work on a problem of ongoing gang violence in a public school in the South Bronx in New York City. The school had been dealing with recurring cycles of vandalism, theft, and intimidation by gang members for years. The problem would come and go but was never completely gone. For example, the school had recently been given a new, fully loaded computer center by a corporate donor, but couldn’t use it.
When the center’s doors were unlocked and students allowed in, everything would get stolen. Violent incidents occurred daily.
At some point, tensions among some of the gangs got really bad, and the school was afraid of violent retaliations. It was a bad situation that kept getting worse. Families, teachers, and administrators at the school felt totally burned out and hopeless about it. So we started talking to people in the community to try to get a sense of the main causes of the problem, to try to map it. Our maps looked like this.
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Ecology of Urban School Conflict and Violence
Immensely complex. The more we talked to people in the community, the more overwhelmed and depressed our team felt. We too felt ourselves getting sucked into the dark sense of helplessness and despair the community was experiencing. We fell hard into their attractor.
Then we noticed something interesting. When we talked to people familiar with the violence, but not in it—the principal and the local youth officer, social workers and a priest who was involved—there was a clear sense of how complicated the problem was. It was not just one thing that drove these kids into gangs and violence; many different kinds of problems were leading to the troubles. These kids were poor and lived in miserable housing; they had too many brutal role models and violent video games; they had been around drugs since they were infants; they had grown up exposed to environmental toxins like lead paint, which reduces impulse control; and they were often exhausted from being up all night in the ER with their sick siblings, because their family had no other access to health care.
But when we talked to the people in the conflict—the youth themselves and the gang leaders and even some of the parents and teachers who had gotten caught up in it all—the problem was very simple. They were the problem. The others. They were the punks and idiots and murderers who made our life hell. They were crazy and sick and were the ones the cops and the school needed to deal with—or else. For these people, the ones in the conflict, it was all very simple. Our side was just responding to their hostility and craziness. We were just trying to survive a bad situation. That was the simple truth.
What we realized is that to some degree they were right. They were all right. These situations were very complicated and did involve many different problems that fueled each other and were getting increasingly more complex the longer they lasted. But it was also true that the more tense and threatening these situations became to the people directly involved, the more obvious it was to them that the problem was simple: they were the problem. We were simply victims of their hate.
 
WHAT WE FOUND at this school in the South Bronx is what we see in most if not all 5 percent problems. The longer they last the more they tend to spread and intensify, recruiting more and more people and issues, which in turn makes them last longer. And the more intense and threatening the 5 percent become, the more the people in them will tend to perceive them as simple; they will see all the complicating issues as linked to the real source of the problem: “them.”
Five percent conflicts represent a particular kind of systems dynamic, one that has been studied in other domains in order to help address particularly knotty problems. The attractor perspective offers a new way of thinking about and addressing these conflicts, as they are clearly more than conflicts of interest. Below, we present the implications of this new perspective as a set of basic principles for addressing the 5 percent. These principles summarize the main ideas and insights offered by the Attractor Landscape Model, and will set the stage for the practices outlined in the next section.

WHEN FACED WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE CONFLICT

1. Respond to dynamics, not events. Five percent conflicts are complicated, interlinked, evolving problem sets that change over time. Typically, when we are faced with such problems, we tend not to respond to the flow and pattern of the changes unfolding; instead, we respond to different stages of the situation, especially when it is in crisis. In other words, we are guided by the presenting situation and blind to the dynamics unfolding across its different phases. This is like trying to understand the arc and theme of a movie by viewing a few still shots taken from the most dramatic moments in the film.
At our school in the South Bronx, the authorities were often back on their heels, reacting to each incident on a case-by-case basis. In addition to being largely ineffective, this strategy occluded their understanding of the patterns unfolding at the school, and of how their responses might have played a role in perpetuating them.
Our mapping of the many aspects feeding the violence at the school in the South Bronx provided a collage: a snapshot of different perspectives on the many interrelated problems unfolding in the community. These evolving problems were affecting the levels of violence at the school at different times and at different timescales. In other words, some of the troubles bubbled up daily, others were evident once or twice a week, and other more severe incidents simmered for months before erupting. When we approach such fluid, multilevel problems in a reactive or piecemeal fashion, the impact of our actions are often counterintuitive and surprising. No wonder we got depressed!
Remember that the direction a 5 percent conflict takes is largely influenced by the internal dynamics of its elements. It is self-organizing. When we intervene, we are not directly inducing change; instead, we are perturbing a system that has its own strong dynamics. The conflict may react to our efforts by (1) not responding at all: completely resisting the action and maintaining the status quo; (2) overresponding: showing an exaggerated response to a seemingly insignificant action, although the response may be in the desired direction; (3) freaking out: evolving in a completely unpredictable, even opposite, direction seemingly independent of the intervention; or (4) responding predictably: behaving in a manner consistent with and proportional to our actions and plans. Any of these effects are possible and may be too strong, too weak, or even spawn entirely new dynamics and problems.
It is important to learn to recognize and respond to the dynamic flow of conflicts occurring over time, not just to discrete events.
 
2. Think in loops, not lines. Understanding 5 percent problems as evolving systems means we have to suspend our cherished linear cause-and-effect thinking about problems and solutions. Instead, we must see how different components of conflicts are linked together through loops.
Most thoughts, feelings, actions, and outcomes in a conflict will tend to either stimulate and/or constrain other components of the conflict through feedback loops. These are process loops connecting the different elements that either stimulate or inhibit one another in an ongoing manner. It can be compared to the way the network of the human nervous system operates, through a constant flow of energy among nerves and tissue to compel and constrain behavior. So instead of thinking about how someone’s action in a conflict caused a reaction from someone else, it is important to start thinking about how various aspects of the people and the situation mutually affected one another over time to increase or decrease the likelihood of a certain outcome from happening.
In other words, it’s vital to go from this . . . . . . to this:
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This is nonlinear thinking. Although it looks scary, all it means is that instead of thinking that X caused Y to happen, it helps us to understand how many other factors linked together to influence both X and Y in the conflict. This type of thinking not only increases the accuracy of our understanding of the situation but also gives us more options for initiating change. Instead of just addressing X to change Y, we may be able to work with S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y to change Y.
Nonlinear thinking has many implications for rethinking conflict dynamics, but here we’ll stress just a few that are directly relevant to the 5 percent: the role of balanced feedback in conflict, the difference between incremental and catastrophic change dynamics, and the importance of initial conditions in complex nonlinear systems.
Balanced feedback matters. Effective conflict instigation and conflict regulation involve a combination of reinforcing and inhibiting feedback loops. In a reinforcing feedback loop, one aspect of a conflict supports another along its current path. More leads to more and less to less. It is an important mechanism for generating and maintaining an initial conflict action, like when a series of negative encounters with someone mount up, eventually leading to overt expression of the conflict. Without this reinforcing process there would be no overt conflict, no learning, innovation, or personal or social change. In an inhibiting feedback loop, one element constrains, stops, or reverses another. It is necessary for terminating action once the conflict becomes sufficiently extreme, like when a parent steps in to stop a fight between siblings that is about to become violent.
As long as a conflict system includes both reinforcing and inhibiting feedback loops, instigating, mitigating, and terminating conflict remains possible. Conflicts can therefore be temporary and constructive learning experiences rather than unnecessarily tense and destructive ones. But conflicts escalate to uncontrolled levels when reinforcing feedback between destructive thoughts, feelings, and actions grows too strong at the same time that inhibiting feedback between these elements recedes. The regulatory process is then reversed and situations spiral out of control.
Our internal moral sense of right and wrong typically acts as a source of inhibitory feedback for us. It restrains our overly aggressive impulses and reactions to our opponents in conflict. But if our opponents begin to employ more aggressive, or even “immoral,” tactics against us in conflict, the constraining influence of our moral sense can diminish and may even reverse. This phenomenon has played out recently as U.S. policies for interrogating terrorists became less constraining and more aggressive after 9/11. What had been an inhibiting feedback loop limiting coercion became a source of reinforcing feedback supporting aggression. Once such an increase in aggression is perceived as immoral by one’s opponents, as seen in the Muslim world after photos of prisoner abuse in Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, it completes the reinforcing loop—and catastrophic escalation may ensue.
Five percent conflicts typically evolve from conditions where strong networks of unconstrained reinforcing feedback loops among different hostile elements fuel destructive behaviors. This was clearly the case with our school in the South Bronx. There, many of the elements included in our map reinforced one another, leading to a quagmire of fear and violent conflict. The more reinforcing feedback loops instigating destructive conflict and the fewer inhibiting loops mitigating it, the higher the probability that the conflict will intensify and spread exponentially. The destructive conflict attractor in these situations becomes particularly strong and coherent.
When the conflict reaches a state of high coherence, bolstered by a combination of reinforcing feedback driving the conflict and inhibiting feedback prohibiting deescalation, the higher the likelihood that it will become self-organizing—virtually self-perpetuating. Thus, feedback loops are crucial to the architecture of conflict attractors. These loops are key targets for intervention and change in the amelioration of 5 percent conflicts.
Incremental versus catastrophic change. Some conflicts escalate slowly and steadily over time. Others burst open like a volcano. Why?
When conflict systems are made up of weakly linked elements with a relative balance of reinforcing and inhibiting feedback, they exhibit very different types of behavior than those with more tightly coupled, predominantly reinforcing feedback loops. The former conflicts are more complex and incoherent; the latter are less complex and therefore more coherent.
In a more complex attractor landscape, conflicts will tend to escalate gradually in an incremental fashion, with disputants responding proportionally to their opponent’s tactics. This is because there is enough reinforcing feedback (like the opponent’s provocations) to drive the conflict, but enough inhibiting feedback (common goals with the opponent, a sense of personal ethics) to limit the severity of response. In more coherent conflict landscapes, where other parties are either clearly with you or against you, conflicts will increase in intensity at a relatively slow rate (when others are seen as with you) until they reach a tipping point into a destructive attractor (when they are instantly seen as against you). Once this happens, the intensity shows a dramatic, catastrophic spike. This is evidence of nonlinear dynamics.
For example, this type of nonlinear shift from one attractor to another was observed in the dramatic outbreak of genocidal violence that occurred in Rwanda in the 1990s, where almost one million people were killed in a hundred days. This followed years of more gradual increases in interethnic hostilities between Tutsis and Hutus, which had primed the system for catastrophe. Once conflict has evidenced such a radical shift in intensity, decreasing the forces that drove it to such a state is unlikely to reduce the intensity to its original level: Not until another threshold representing a considerably lower level of forces is reached, which can propel the system back to the initial, more complex and constructive attractor.
This kind of incremental-versus-catastrophic escalation has been explored in the Intractable Conflict Lab as well. Under conditions promoting weak linkages between cognitive and affective elements of a conflict (the ties between participants were weak; they shared few associations in beliefs or feelings regarding each other), there was a linear relationship between antagonistic behavior from one person and the other person’s antagonistic response. The participants responded in a proportional manner to antagonistic actions directed toward them, and the escalation and deescalation of conflict intensity happened slowly and incrementally.
However, in conditions promoting stronger reinforcing feedback loops (strong interpersonal ties between participants, which fostered close links between their thoughts and feelings regarding each other), participants experiencing antagonistic behavior from another at first chose to ignore the conflict and responded in a relatively mild fashion. But after a critical threshold of antagonism was reached, they responded in a highly aggressive manner. The transition from one type of response to the other was abrupt and extreme. These are the kind of change dynamics typically seen in more coherent (low-complexity) 5 percent conflicts.
Beginnings matter most. Research on conflicts in complex, nonlinear systems (in other words, conflicts in important human relationships) consistently shows that they are particularly sensitive to the initial conditions of the system. What does this mean? It means that beginnings matter.
Intractable Conflict Lab studies have found that how people feel during the first three minutes of their conversations about moral conflicts sets the emotional tone for the remainder of their discussions.5 John Gottman has found similar effects: the first few minutes of a couple’s emotions in conflict are up to 90 percent predictive of their future encounters. 6 These initial differences in emotional dynamics can be the result of various things: strong attitudes of the people coming in; how the conversations are set up and facilitated; history of the disputants’ interactions together. But what is clear is that the initial encounters tend to matter more than whatever follows.
Computer simulations of these conflict dynamics go even further in their claims. They suggest that even very slight differences in initial conditions can eventually make a big difference.7 These might consist of minor differences in the mood of participants, or their openness to dialogue, or the level of complexity of their thinking. The effects of these small differences may not be visible at first, but they can trigger other changes that trigger other changes and so on over time, until they pounce and have a huge impact on the dynamics. If these slight differences in mood and openness matter so much, just imagine the type of impact major differences in mood and affect—influenced by poverty, chronic illness, and rage—could have on initial conflict dynamics in a place like the South Bronx. The lesson for the 5 percent is clear. Tread carefully (or at least with intention) in the beginning stages of conflict.
 
3. Aim to alter patterns, not outcomes. It is almost impossible to predict any specific outcome in the complex, nonlinear systems of 5 percent conflicts, except that they are likely to persist. There are far too many variables interacting and affecting one another in unpredictable ways. As an instructive example, you need only recall the optimistic predictions made by several high-level Bush administration officials when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to get the point.
Fortunately, if we are able to observe a conflict over the long term, we are usually able to see patterns or attractors developing in the system, which we may then begin to understand better and even predict. Over time, almost every ongoing conflict system—be it in a marriage or a labor-management relationship or an ethnically divided community—will evidence some general patterns of interactions between the parties that are more predictable and stable than others.
From this perspective, we should be less concerned with bringing about specific outcomes in a conflict (generating particular insights, agreements, behavior change). Instead, we should focus on altering the parties’ general patterns of interaction in a more constructive direction. This requires a substantial frame change, away from a focus on short-term wins and toward transforming the more stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the system as a whole.
This frame change is hard because the immediate crises and pain associated with intractable conflicts tend to be considerable. They demand attention to the here and now. But it is equally important that we look at past behaviors and try to identify trends. We must try to anticipate how what we do today will affect what is and is not possible tomorrow. Unfortunately, crises rarely allow for long-term thinking, and today’s goals often work at cross-purposes with those of tomorrow.
To illustrate: Operation Impact was a tough, targeted response to school violence in New York City, introduced by Mayor Bloomberg’s administration in 2003. The program proposed a “bolstering of police resources” in schools and communities as the centerpiece of the plan. Although the application of security and deterrence measures to schools with poor safety records can be effective in the short term, such policies suffer from several drawbacks. They discourage accurate reporting of school violence; they oversimplify the problem of violence by focusing only on crime; they offer broad, general solutions to poorly defined, local problems; they highlight containment and deterrence while neglecting prevention, support, and care; and they emphasize short-term solutions to long-term (and shifting) problems.
Crisis responses to particularly dangerous school environments make good sense. However, they do not begin to address the types of systemic causes of violence and intimidation evident in our mapping of violent schools. Heightened surveillance and security measures are therefore a necessary but insufficient response. Too often, our political leaders are attracted to short-term, hard-line solutions to complex problems. The likelihood is that the solutions will show some immediate effect and signal to their constituents that they are in control of a difficult situation. However, such effects are only sustainable when they are accompanied by more considered responses that target the complex, underlying causes of school violence.
Consider, for instance, an alternative approach to community violence prevention. Fed up with piecemeal approaches to chronic patterns of violence and poverty in poorer neighborhoods in New York City, Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) have taken a different tack. Recognizing the complex ecologies of such intractable urban problems, they work systemically and comprehensively within a hundred-block radius of one neighborhood.
The HCZ approach is both simple and complex. First, the most atrisk children in the zone are identified by finding the lowest scorers on public school readiness tests. Then HCZ attempts to provide these children with everything. That’s right, with virtually everything they need—medical care, good nutrition, safety, tutoring, committed teachers, you name it—to make it from kindergarten through college. The theory is that if HCZ can rescue and support the most vulnerable kids, the ones that get trapped by the attractor of the streets and fuel the drop-out/ drug/violence/poverty syndrome, in time they will transform the community. This is a targeted but complex, long-term approach that is promising but still unfolding. Currently 90 percent of high school students who attend their after-school programs make it to college.8
From the perspective of the Attractor Landscape Model, it is critical to distinguish between short-term and sustained changes in the dynamics of conflict and violence. Short-lived oscillations in conflict intensity are likely to be observed in any relationship characterized by attractor dynamics, but they can provide a misleading sense of the trends of the conflict. They are not indicative of lasting changes as long as the underlying structure of the system remains in place. For lasting change to occur, the structure of the system must be modified in such a way that the attractor landscape is reconfigured. Such reconfiguration in turn requires changing the relations among system variables in a way that restores complexity and, in the case of the HCZ, hope.
 
4. Privilege emotions. Nelson Mandela once said that when trying to motivate people, we should speak to their hearts, not their heads. This is exactly what those who study the long-term dynamics of conflict have found. Emotions, although famously neglected in the scholarship on conflict, are not simply important considerations in conflict. They fundamentally are the issue, in that they set the stage for destructive or constructive interactions. In fact, research on emotions and decision making with patients suffering from severe brain injuries found that when people lose the capacity to experience emotions, they also lose their ability to make important decisions. Emotions are not only relevant to our decisions in conflict; they are central to them.
The laboratory research on emotions and conflict dynamics tells a pretty consistent tale: it is the ratio that matters. It is not necessarily how negative or how positive people feel about each other that really matters in conflict; it is the ratio of their positivity to negativity over time. Studies show that healthy couples and functional, innovative workgroups will have disagreements and experience some degree of negativity in their relationships. That is normal, and in fact people usually need to experience this in order to learn and develop in their relationships. However, these negative encounters must occur within the context of a sufficient amount of positive emotion for the relationships to be functional. And because negative encounters have such an inordinately strong impact on people and relationships, there have to be significantly more positive experiences to offset the negative ones.
Scholars have found that disputants in ongoing relationships need somewhere between three and a half to five positive experiences for every negative one, to keep the negative encounters from becoming harmful.9 They need to have enough emotional positivity in the bank. Without this, the negative encounters will accumulate rapidly, helping to create wide and deep attractors for destructive relations. At the same time, the positive encounters will dissipate and have little effect on future positive relations. This can result in a conflict attractor landscape with overwhelming negative attraction. In other words, intractability.
 
5. Think different. For a person in the throes of a powerful, long-term conflict, misperception and misunderstanding rule. The pressure to view the conflict and the opposing disputants through a narrow, filtered lens is great. The filters are bias, selectivity, short-term crisis focus, and the prevention of loss. These filters will largely determine what we feel, think, and do.
Remember, at this point our thoughts and feelings are likely to be self-organizing, essentially immune to new or contradictory information. Typically, once we have gotten to this stage, we have already wandered far from concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding the substantive issues in dispute. Instead, we are focused on defending our sense of the Truth and what is Right. These may of course be valid concerns. But when everything makes perfect sense in a complicated conflict, when who the good guys and the bad guys are is perfectly clear, we must be all the more vigilant.
Life, so full of contradictions and surprises, rarely ever makes complete sense. The pieces of the puzzle seldom fit together perfectly. When they do—beware. Know that the press for certainty and coherence is a basic tendency in life greatly intensified by conflict, especially 5 percent conflict. And it often contributes to our total misreading of events. This tendency of course is nearly impossible to be mindful of when we are caught up in a 5 percent conflict.
A similar challenge faces the conflict expert. Whatever the area of training—political science, social psychology, law, education, communications, anthropology, linguistics, public health, economics—each expert frames his or her work in a manner consistent with that training. Our frames help to organize our thinking, yet they also constrain our understanding of the full complexity of the situations in which we engage. In fact, one of the most compelling findings from cognitive science in the last thirty years is that our cognitive frames can become physically present in the synapses of our brains, resulting in a total disregard for information inconsistent with our dominant perspectives.10
While an expert’s reading of any conflict depends largely on the specifics of the situation, it is also usually heavily influenced by the cognitive frames he or she brings to the analysis. This is particularly true when the situations are difficult to comprehend: vast, complex, volatile, and replete with contradictory information. Like the 5 percent.
So what can be done to increase the accuracy of our understanding of the 5 percent? Get more information, especially different information. Recall that in our studies, providing people with multiple perspectives on the issues surrounding abortion led to more constructive conversations between people with opposing views.
Take another example from American history. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster between the United States and Cuba, President Kennedy realized that his cabinet members had fallen prey to chronic consensus in their decision making. There was too much similarity and coherence in their views. So in order to challenge this tendency toward consensus, he instructed his brother Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to take up the role of devil’s advocate in all their future decision-making meetings. This form of structured group dissent (inhibiting feedback) proved critical in fending off bad decision making and nuclear disaster later in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 11e
There are myriad ways to introduce different, contradictory information into important decision-making processes. However it is accomplished, it should be a primary responsibility of third parties and other interveners in order to keep the pull toward certainty in the 5 percent at bay.
 
6. Know that conflict and peace coexist. Although most people feel pretty certain that peaceful relations are the opposite of contentious ones, research tells us that they are often simultaneously present in our lives. Even though we can usually only attend to one or the other, the potential for both exists in many relationships. In fact, they tend to operate in ways that are mostly independent of one another. In other words, conflict and peace are not opposites. They are two prospective and independent ways of being and relating—two alternative realities. This suggests that people can be at war and at peace at the same time.
Even during periods of intense fighting between divorcing couples, work colleagues, ethnic gangs, or Palestinians and Israelis, there exist hidden potentials in the relationships—latent attractors—that are in fact alternative patterns and tendencies for relating to one another. We see evidence of this when people move very quickly from caring for each other to despising one another, as happened with the work colleagues in the March to Silence case. Or when the opposite occurs, like the recent flip in Polish-Ukrainian relations, which had been mostly hostile since WWII; they transformed dramatically into one of solidarity during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. This boils down to movement from the current attractor to a latent one.
Our actions in a conflict can therefore have very different effects on three distinct aspects of the conflict landscape: on the current situation (the level of hostility in the conflict right now), on the longer-term potential for positive relations (positive attractors), and on the longer-term potential for negative relations (negative attractors). All three can have a life of their own.
This idea suggests that we need separate but complementary strategies for (1) addressing the current state of the conflict, (2) increasing the probabilities for constructive relations between the parties in the future, and (3) decreasing the probabilities for destructive future encounters. Most attempts at addressing the 5 percent target numbers one and three, but often neglect to increase the probability for future positive relations. They are aimed at stopping present suffering and avoiding future pain. But without sufficient attention to the bolstering of attractors for positive relations between parties, progress in addressing the conflict and eliminating future conflict will only be temporary.
 
7. See latent potential. Although our day-to-day experiences in impossible conflicts tend to be overwhelmingly negative with regard to the other side, and will often have very predictable scripts, we should pay attention to anomalies that occur. To things that surprise us. These cracks in the foundation of our understanding of the conflict and of the other parties are often important sources of different information: evidence that there are alternatives operating below our radar. These latent attractors, if we can spot them, may prove to be our best avenues for escaping or otherwise addressing the 5 percent.
For example, an unexpected finding of ours from a study we conducted with Palestinians and Israelis, during a high-intensity phase of the conflict in 2002, was the impact on participants of early, positive, serendipitous encounters with members of their out-groups.12 Just as early traumatic losses were etched powerfully into the minds of individuals, often leading to deleterious psychological effects, these positive, spontaneous encounters described by participants tended to have an equally powerful effect for the good. One participant recalled:
Now I met the first Jewish man in my life when I . . . like a real encounter . . . was when I was ten years old . . . it was in a Jewish moshave, a Jewish village, my teachers and students decided to go on toubashbat . . . it is a holiday of planting trees, we went to the neighboring Jewish village which is only ten minutes away from us . . . and what connects our village to theirs are the olive trees . . . we went there holding pine trees to go say hello to our neighbors . . . and that was the first real encounter and that was when I first realized that the Jews are actually not bad . . . you know . . . this man was very friendly who looked like we did and who wasn’t . . . he had a beard . . . he was lovely . . . he gave us chocolate-chip cookies . . . he was yeah . . . it was a pleasant visit . . . that I felt wow there is something wrong here . . . I heard that Jews always had guns . . . that guy didn’t have a gun. I thought Jews had horns . . . that guy didn’t have horns. The fact that he . . . I always heard that Jews are stingy . . . he was offering us chocolate-chip cookies . . . how better could he get . . . I was ten years old. You know, we played with their kids . . . we had a lovely visit . . . you could tell that man was warm . . . was very warm to us . . . so I felt something was wrong in the picture . . .
These encounters had a lasting impact, even during times of open conflict. The spontaneous nature of these encounters seemed to capture individuals when their psychological defenses were down, thereby allowing the experiences to impact them both emotionally and cognitively. These are not easy experiences when embroiled in conflict. But they can make a powerful difference.
 
8. Respect the logic of the conflict. The 5 percent should not be seen as aberrations, but rather as the result of mostly normal psychological processes. It is perfectly natural, for example, for people to want coherence (perceive patterns, develop generalizations, demonstrate confirmatory bias) and to defend their coherent views against contradictory information (selective attention, reinterpretation, discounting, suppression). The negativity bias operating in all threatening situations (“bad is stronger than good”) is also a natural and ubiquitous cognitive bias. The point is that bad outcomes (like unending conflict) do not necessarily reflect bad processes, just as bad behavior does not necessarily reflect bad character.
Often, for those inhabiting the world of the 5 percent, these conflicts are perfectly logical. In the South Bronx school, we met many dedicated but exhausted people who were caught in a trap fighting for their school, for their dignity, for a sense of belonging and voice, and for survival. These individuals and groups are often doing everything they can to respond to extraordinarily difficult circumstances. It is critical that interveners see this and do what they can to understand the local logic of any 5 percent.
 
9. Open it up. As discussed in chapter 3, research shows that more constructive conflict relations are characterized by relatively high levels of emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and structural complexity. High complexity is particularly advantageous when people and groups encounter new conflicts with others. Communities that maintain more complex, crosscutting structures and social networks have been found to be more tolerant, less destructive, and less violent when conflicts do spark. And they engage in a more constructive manner when conflicts become difficult. The same applies to people who hold more complex social identities and display more complex cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns.
Research also supports the idea that more constructive relations are often associated with an increased capacity for movement. 13 When people and groups get trapped in narrow attractors for social relations—whether in strong patterns of destructive conflict, oppressor-oppressed dynamics, or even in patterns of isolation and disengagement from others—their well-being tends to deteriorate and their level of resentment tends to build. These traps may be created by physical structures like segregated spaces and ghettos or by sociopsychological constraints like strong norms, attitudes, and ideologies. South Africa’s period of apartheid represented both.
When trapped in such a narrow well, people can be very creative at becoming ever more destructive, oppressive, or isolated. This acts to deepen the current attractor and makes it less likely they will be able to escape its pull. These patterns can become ingrained and dominant, so that when the situation changes it is difficult for people to adapt: to take up different patterns of behaviors appropriate to the various new situations they face. From this perspective, sustainable solutions to difficult, long-term conflicts require establishing conditions that allow for sufficient openness: complexity, movement, and adaptation.
This is essentially what occurred during the years of dialogue between the pro-choice and pro-life leaders in Boston. In time, the sense of safety provided by the facilitators of the dialogue allowed the women to move psychologically; to begin to see, feel, think, and act in ways that they hadn’t been able to for years. This increased movement didn’t “solve” their differences on abortion, but it did free them from the constrained, overly simplistic good-versus-evil dynamic in which they had been trapped. It opened them up to experience the humanity of their “enemies” in more nuanced ways.
 
10. Look for simple solutions informed by complexity. My colleague Andrzej Nowak wrote: “The discovery that complex properties may emerge from simple rules is one of the most important discoveries of modern science . . . If simple rules can produce complex phenomena, then complex processes and structures can be explained by simple models . . . [but] only if these rules interact with each other or with the environment.” 14 This is an idea Nowak calls dynamical minimalism. It suggests that very complex things, like epidemics, hazardous weather patterns, or mob behavior at sporting events, can sometimes be understood by a few simple rules that demonstrate how the basic components of a problem interact over time. The objective of this approach is to see through the complexity of a phenomenon to find the minimal set of mechanisms that can account for that complexity. Its goal is simplicity informed by complexity. In essence, this is the approach taken by the Harlem Children’s Zone in focusing its resources on a relatively small number of children in order to transform a very complex system: Harlem.
Obviously, identifying the few mechanisms or processes responsible for something as complex as intractable social conflict is no small feat. As we’ve seen, at one level the 5 percent are immensely complex, involving something like fifty-seven different variables all linked and interacting with one another and changing over time. But at another more basic level, these conflict dynamics are quite simple. We have found that intractability can be understood as essentially this: a self-organized, closed attractor landscape with an imbalance of types of feedback, low complexity, little movement, and insufficient positivity. The focus of our practical techniques will be largely on addressing these few factors.
 
11. Employ evidence-based practices. This principle is straightforward : use methods scientifically proven to be effective. Why? Because it increases your probabilities of success.
Virtually any method of resolution may prove effective in addressing one or two situations of conflict. But we often do not know why. It might be because they are sound methods, because the particular method happened to work well with a particular conflict, because the intervener was particularly skillful or artful, or because of random luck. Given the high durability of the 5 percent, stakeholders often suffer from intervention burnout: too many cycles of promises and hope that prove ineffective and disillusioning. This simply contributes to a sense of futility and hopelessness.
So it is simple: use methods that have been proven to work to address the current state of the conflict, increase the probabilities for constructive relations between the parties in the future, and decrease the probabilities for destructive future encounters.
 
12. Anticipate unintended consequences. The German psychologist Dietrich Dorner has conducted research on decision making in complex environments. His findings suggest that well-intentioned decision makers who set an early course for improving organizations and communities but fail to adjust their decisions in response to critical feedback not only fail, but often do more harm than good. The most effective decision makers in his studies were those able to continually adapt; they stayed open not only to feedback, but also to reconsidering their decisions and altering their course. The implications of this analogy for analyzing and responding to feedback in situations of ongoing conflict are straightforward. Anyone attempting to implement change strategies with the 5 percent must embody dynamics: that is, remain prepared to change strategies, tactics, key indicators, and even members of the intervention team as the system evolves.
 
THESE PRINCIPLES AND INSIGHTS into the 5 percent derive from the Attractor Landscape Model. Like the leap from structuralism to Gestalt psychology, or that of Newtonian mechanics to field theory in physics, this model represents a paradigm shift in the conflict resolution field. A shift away from standard micro, atomistic, short-term, mechanical perspectives toward more holistic and dynamic views of conflict processes and sustainable solutions.
To illustrate, let us return to the pro-choice versus pro-life conflict in Boston. The approach taken by Laura Chasin, Susan Podiba, and the Public Conversations Project (PCP) was very much in-line with our Attractor Landscape Model. The PCP members were all local actors familiar with the context, major players, and issues in the case. They consulted with local leaders about the value of conducting top-level talks before reaching out quietly to several key leaders and inviting them to engage in something different. They explained that the process they were proposing was not business as usual; not a lawsuit or community meeting or even mediation or negotiation. It was a very different type of experience where they would not try to “solve” the abortion debate. This would be a new journey. They were all guaranteed safety, anonymity, and confidentiality and informed that they would only be asked to meet four times.
Then the process began. It was essentially a gradual process of disentangling fears, assumptions, misinformation, and faulty beliefs from the facts on the ground—and from the deeply held values of the women, values that had collapsed into one monolithic worldview. It was a highly emotional set of encounters involving two processes: breaking down negative assumptions, beliefs, and feelings regarding the “other,” and building up new constructive, compassionate, cooperative relationships. Discretion and clear, respectful ground rules for the discussions were critical to success. After the fourth meeting, the participants agreed to extend their sessions to the one-year anniversary of the shootings. Subsequently, they chose to extend the sessions again. In all, it took six years. The meetings were all conducted in secret to protect the members of this expedition from the extreme dangers of the local terrain.
And then when they were ready, they went public. On January 28, 2001, the six women participants in the dialogue—Anne Fowler, Nicki Nichols Gamble, Frances X. Hogan, Melissa Kogut, Madeline McCommish, Barbara Thorp—copublished an article in the Boston Globe called “Talking with the Enemy.” In it they documented the concerns over violence that had brought them together, the extraordinarily difficult challenges inherent in their work together, and what they had ultimately learned. They emphasized that “much had been transformed,” despite the fact that they had not resolved the pro-life, pro-choice issues in their communities and had actually become more polarized in their views. Here they explain why they persisted in talking together.
First, because when we face our opponent, we see her dignity and goodness. Embracing this apparent contradiction stretches us spiritually. We’ve experienced something radical and life-altering that we describe in nonpolitical terms: “the mystery of love,” “holy ground,” or simply, “mysterious.”
We continue because we are stretched intellectually, as well. This has been a rare opportunity to engage in sustained, candid conversations about serious moral disagreements. It has made our thinking sharper and our language more precise.
We hope, too, that we have become wiser and more effective leaders. We are more knowledgeable about our political opponents. We have learned to avoid being overreactive and disparaging to the other side and to focus instead on affirming our respective causes.
Since that first fear-filled meeting, we have experienced a paradox. While learning to treat each other with dignity and respect, we all have become firmer in our views about abortion.
We hope this account of our experience will encourage people everywhere to consider engaging in dialogues about abortion and other protracted disputes. In this world of polarizing conflicts, we have glimpsed a new possibility: a way in which people can disagree frankly and passionately, become clearer in heart and mind about their activism, and, at the same time, contribute to a more civil and compassionate society.
The dialogue group members’ decision to go public, particularly given their roles and status in their communities, had a powerful positive impact on the larger system. Today, despite the fact that the abortion controversy rages on in the United States and abroad, the violence and vitriol of the debate in the Boston community appears to have subsided. As one journalist reported in 2009: “The reduction in angry rhetoric that resulted from the dialogue may have helped assign to history that ugly chapter in the abortion controversy.”15
The point is this. It is not disagreement over any moral or political or ideological issue that is bad. It is the generalized negative view of one another, and its collapse into good and evil, that is destructive; it has driven countless generations of people to perpetually plot to destroy one another, just like the inhabitants of the House of Atreus. But it is also this collapse that can be remedied by focusing on the dynamic properties of a conflict.
The events and processes in the Boston case are illustrative of the type of alternative thinking and approaches we suggest can help address the 5 percent. However, the dialogue approach of PCP is only one of a variety of methods available for increasing complexity and reconfiguring attractor landscapes. In order to make these ideas and methods more useful, more grounded and practical, we have translated them into a set of basic practices to develop and to employ in addressing intractable conflicts. These practices are the subject of the remaining chapters.