Preface

During my second year of law school I had my first “real” lawyer’s job. I was an intern at a local legal services clinic. On my first day I was handed twenty-five cases “to work on.” This would be my job for the semester. Three weeks later I asked the managing attorney for more cases. When he asked about the twenty-five he had given me, I told him that I had resolved them.

He was very surprised—and very curious. He asked how I had done it. I told him that I had reviewed the files, spoken to the clients, thought about a fair outcome and what needed to be done, called the attorney or agency on the other side, and reached a satisfactory resolution.

I knew nothing about being a lawyer. I had no inkling that the cases were difficult, needed to take a long time, or had to be handled in any particular way. With common sense and a “beginner’s mind,” I found the solution that worked best for all concerned. Simple? It was for me!

I spent the next twelve years becoming a “successful” lawyer—and becoming less effective at resolving matters. Then, feeling frustrated, anxious, and fearful, I stopped practicing law. I have been in “recovery” ever since, recovering what I knew about resolution when I started, discovering its component parts, and learning how to teach and model it for others.

As a young attorney, although I listened politely to more senior lawyers, I was surprised at the coaching I received. Standard practice discouraged communication among the parties in conflict, communication that I had used in my legal services cases, communication essential for efficient resolution. Many lawyers were playing a very different game from the one my natural instincts chose.

Yet, I was fascinated with how the most effective judges and lawyers paid attention to people’s real concerns. They knew what to honor and what to respect. They knew how to frame situations and condition people’s expectations. They embodied a tradition that accommodated competing concerns and built consensus. Winning or losing was not the point of their work. Their game was resolution and getting people back to their lives.

I had a similar orientation, and this orientation, coupled with my belief that everyone had a lot to learn about conflict, focused me on trying to understand conflict, this pervasive aspect of life. Amid all the business and personal conflict, there was some clarity: We could do a lot better at managing conflict, and we could prevent conflict if we formed new business and personal relationships in a different way.

I am driven and motivated to use resources efficiently, to minimize the emotional fallout from conflict, and to build sustainable collaborations. This book shares what I have learned from observation, study, and reflection. That journey continues.

My Objectives

I have specific goals for this book:

1. Change your thinking about conflict. By providing a new set of principles and values, I would like you to shift from thinking about problems, fighting, and breakdowns to thinking about collaboration, engagement, learning, creativity, and the opportunity for creating value.

2. Provide a conversational model for agreement and resolution that enables you to develop the craft of helping people create sustainable collaborations. This model consists of specific, tangible steps for you to follow when conflict is present in any situation or when you start new professional or personal relationships.

3. Inspire you to develop a new perspective toward conflict. With this new perspective you could prevent the emotional trigger, the cost of unproductive energy, and the waste of resources. You would know that no matter how hopeless it seems, no matter how strong the emotional impulse to fight and win, resolution could be discovered within any situation.

4. Steward a mind-set of resolution. I want you to learn a model that fosters dignity and integrity; optimizes your resources; and allows all concerns to be voiced, honored, and woven into the resolution.

5. Foster a culture based on principles and practices of resolution and agreement. I hope the book motivates you to become a “resolutionary” in your life and a leader of others in practicing resolution, while at the same time appreciating the richness that the creative tension of differences provides.

6. Enable you to take personal responsibility for dealing with the opportunity of conflict, diversity, and disagreement.

This last goal is critical. We are living at a time of great opportunity. We can thrive if we design a world order that provides stability, optimizes natural resources, preserves the environment, controls population, and shifts our thinking from rights and entitlements to service and responsibility. This process starts with each individual. You must tend your own garden. As a first step I encourage you to develop a spirit of resolution. Given our shrinking planet and the increasing transactions of our global village, learning to take responsibility for effective collaborations and resolving the inevitable conflicts is essential.

Now is the time to start working together more effectively!

The Contents

This book is based on four premises:

1. Conflict is expensive in many ways.

2. Efficient conflict resolution requires a new paradigm of collaboration grounded on ten principles (delineated in Part II).

3. Efficient conflict resolution requires using a new systematic approach—a model that is applied consistently and that reinforces the new paradigm through routine use.

4. The resolution of conflict using the model returns you to productive living and functional relationships.

Part I of the book sets out its context. Chapter 1 explains what resolution is and why it is so valuable. Chapter 2 details the ways that conflict is expensive—the great individual and collective cost we incur on a daily basis as we work within the standard ways of handling conflict. I list, illustrate, and explain the cost of conflict so you can appreciate the huge expense. You see that, under current practices, “winners” are losing. Capitalist culture is based on economics and profit. I hope recognition of all the costs will motivate you to use new practices.

Part II shares a case study that introduces the model for resolution (Chapter 3) and gives an overview of the steps in the model (Chapter 4).

Part III explains the principles (new thinking) for resolving conflict. Current practices are based on an underlying set of beliefs, beliefs that may have served you in a world based on power and control. That world, I sense, is fading, and it’s time to adjust your thinking. The new principles reflect current, more enlightened, thought. These principles are the foundation for new practices of the resolution model.

Part IV provides a more detailed explanation of the resolution model introduced in Part II. Part IV also demonstrates the model in action, embodying the values of the new principles. It shares some of the results that have been achieved by following the model.

Part V addresses how the new resolution principles and model fit within current standard ways of resolving conflict. It also introduces the experts available to help you use the new principles and model—what they do and how to choose one.

Part VI provides a peek into what it can be like if we follow the principles and practices of resolution.

How This Book Will Help You

The book is written for many groups. Everyone looking for a way to reduce the stress involved in collaborating with others, personally and in business, will find value. People who work with and for others will learn how to clarify their employment relationships.

For executives, managers, human resource and training personnel, business owners, and employees who must do more with less, this book will help increase productivity and improve communication and coordination among intercompany and intracompany teams.

Entrepreneurs and business developers who must build “virtual organizations” will find this book useful. For consultants, lawyers, architects, and accountants (whose business depends on satisfied clients), this book will provide tools for clearly articulating expectations and constructing sound business relationships from the beginning. For managers, executives, mediators, lawyers, and psychologists (the increasing cadre working in the field of conflict resolution), this book provides new tools and insights.

I hope that managers and organizational development consultants will use the models as the foundation for building and changing organizational cultures. I believe that culture reflects the quality and character of organizational relationships. And the quality and character of organizational relationships reflect the nature and quality of the web of implicit and explicit agreements that are the foundation and glue of organizational relationships. Organizational relationships, both internal and external, reflect and embody the culture. The sum of relationships is the culture!

People who desire social change will embrace the model. Individuals seeking formulas for more effective use of societal resources will value the way resources can be conserved. Folks who bristle at litigiousness will see that the number of lawsuits can be reduced if we adopt the new principles as primary values.

Consumers of legal services, and those who are afraid of legal services, will see potential for huge financial and emotional savings. People looking for a professional who will enter into a more heartfelt relationship based on a shared covenant will learn to identify such professionals and the standards that can be used to formulate a satisfactory and predictable collaboration-based relationship.

Married people, family members, and those in other partnerships can construct agreements to guide them to deeper connection, greater understanding, and less stressful relationships.

Beginner’s Mind

Unfortunately, your impatience is likely to trump your desire to do things differently, so please be patient during the learning process. Please take on the dignity of a “beginner’s mind” as you try the new practices. Most of you want to be experts immediately. You want to conquer the expert slopes on the mountain, master the new software, or take off on your new computer with little practice. Cut yourself some slack in gaining comfort and competence with the new practices. It will be worth it.

Following the principles and the model will enhance the quality of your life, the lives of those around you, and the culture of your various communities. The principles embody values that we all want to embrace. The model is simple, but applying it is challenging. Using new practices and developing new habits requires mindfulness, commitment, and repetition. As you acquire competence, you will become artful in discerning how much formal attention to the steps in the model some situations require, and what steps are not necessary in other situations. At the beginning I suggest that you practice using every step. That will help you internalize all the principles and practices.

After the first edition was released, I realized a few critical components that contribute to comprehensive understanding of “sustainable collaboration” did not get the attention they deserved. I am grateful to have the privilege of supplementing the book with the hindsight of ten years and a great deal of client and audience feedback. I hope you appreciate the utility of the changes as we navigate through a very challenging period of history. Twelve years ago I knew we had a universal problem. Our capacity to engage in civil discourse and dialogue, and to prevent or resolve conflict productively in critical public conversations, was sorely lacking. Unfortunately the last 12 years have not demonstrated progress. And the stakes are now higher!

This edition is motivated by a great sense of urgency. I just finished reading a marvelous book by David Korten called Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. As we plod through a great economic meltdown I find myself reflecting on the public dialogue, or lack thereof, of the past dozen years. My assessment: Our leaders should all be fired for not taking care of the people’s business. Our politicians behave as if it were the 1950s and all we have to do is to return to peacetime prosperity.

Instead of real dialogue about the pressing and urgent challenges we face—like terrorism, 9/11, Social Security, race relations, financial disparity, and climate change—our leaders continue lining up combatively along party lines no matter what proposal is put on the table. I can already see it happening with the new President’s economic bailout, even within his own party. Rather than sitting down, exchanging ideas, and exploring common ground for some greater good, our leaders push forward with the ultimate antithesis of diplomacy and tact, engaging in a never-ending and debilitating game of “Gotcha!”

I can’t help thinking that if our leaders had engaged in dialogue about matters of real substance we might have been able to focus on the pressing issues that continue to confront us. While Washington was playing politics, Social Security, Medicare, Iraq, Afghanistan, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, and Wall Street were ignored. And we are all picking up the tab for that.

A few years ago I was invited to speak to a group called Center City Proprietors Association (CCPA), the small business trade association for the city of Philadelphia. A couple of weeks beforehand, my friend Krista Bard, president of CCPA, asked if I would speak to the class of her ten-year-old son Alex when I was in Philadelphia. I said absolutely yes. A few days later I spoke with Alex’s teacher and she told me that, in the wake of 9/11, the class had been working on something called “The Peace Table.” The teacher was using it as a vehicle to keep the kids engaged in creating conversational tools for resolving conflict when questions arose about why the twin towers were targeted.

The evening before meeting the class I was still not sure what I was going to do with them, so I consulted Krista. She suggested that I do the same thing as I had done with the adults. So that’s what I did.

Doing my best Mister Rogers imitation in a chair designed for a ten-year-old, I asked the kids what they use when they listen. The adults had hesitated. No such hesitation with the kids. A hand went up immediately and the first response was “my heart!” Krista and I looked at each other with wide eyes.

My immediate insight was that it does not need to take multiple generations to change mass consciousness and the requisite skill sets around conflict and collaboration. We just have to begin a massive educational campaign that provides alternative ways of thinking before kids are corrupted. Terrorists are not born, they are made by indoctrination. Partisan debaters—conservatives, liberals, radicals—are also made. I know we have the capacity to do much better!

Unfortunately, when “No Child Left Behind” became the banner for educational curricula, all else was dropped. My colleague, a noted specialist who wrote both kids’ books and programs for conflict resolution, told me that all funds had evaporated. She had to go back to classroom teaching after spending years traveling the country teaching teachers and those who teach them.

How did we get here, and how can we get out of here? That is the context from which I write. What most people do not realize is that the skills presented in this book are tools that are essential for democratic participation. I believe that as a civilization we are tottering on a dangerous precipice. To resolve many of our great challenges we must be able to engage in thoughtful and authentic dialogue. We have conquered outer space; our big challenge is conquering “inner space.” Given our current military capacity for destruction, if we cannot make the mental shift to fully engage in authentic conversation we risk the end of life as we know it.

The planet will survive. I’m not sure about our species!

I think learning the mindset, practices, and models set forth in this book is urgent. If we can develop our capacity to speak with each other we will be better able to connect with each other, and better able to address our pressing concerns. All else is moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

As we move through the current economic crisis, many are suggesting the need for large-scale systemic change. A colleague, Christopher Avery, author of Teamwork Is an Individual Skill, recently labeled our current time as The Great Reckoning. I think the label is accurate. Given this time of reckoning, it seems important that we embrace communication and dialogue as essential to participating effectively in the democratic process. The bad news is that we have no choice but to engage, in part because people are sufficiently frightened. The good news is that there are tools available. I believe people will embrace new ways of interacting, and I hope you find some of them on the pages that follow.

Acknowledgments

Inspiration for this book came from many sources. Gus Lee, the author of China Boy, was critical. As director of the Office of Education of the State Bar of California, he reviewed a script I wrote for a mediation video and said, “You have a very important message to deliver to the public. I want you to write a book.”

From my parents, Adeline and Meyer, I learned about values, ethics, and integrity. They told me to find what I loved and success would follow. Susan Howard taught me to believe I was capable of accomplishing anything I wanted. John Haynes demonstrated the mood and process of mediation. I learned about leadership and resolution—my best work—from Marsha Shenk, who helped uncover the idea of “agreements for results.” Bud Seith personified male mothering. Marty Africa is a daily demonstration of courage, perseverance, responsibility, and commitment; I thank her for shelter in the storm. From my brothers Peter, Bill, Larry, Cliff, and Steve, I learned the joy of camaraderie. My sister Sharron has taught me about acceptance. I thank Tish for her joy. I thank David for being there, and for the example that he is. Heartfelt gratitude for the endorsers of this book, and to Joel Barker for the great foreword.

Thanks to the community of Berrett-Koehler authors, who are working to make a world that works for all. I thank Steve Piersanti, the founder of Berrett-Koehler, for recognizing the value of this project. His vision and nurturing of my ideas has been an extraordinary gift. Laurie Harper of the Sebastian Agency falls in that category. I thank Phillip Heller, Jeffrey Kulick, Annette Simmons, and Paul Wright, the readers who reviewed the manuscript, for their thoughtful comments. Special thanks to Charlie Dorris, Barbara Kimmel, and Judy Johnstone for their careful editing, and to Detta Penna for her artful design work. I thank my clients and all who have attended my courses for their contributions to this body of work, and I thank the entire Berrett-Koehler staff for getting it out.

Most of all I acknowledge you, the reader. Thank you for your “resolve” to grow and to make your life—and the lives of those around you—more peaceful.

Stewart Levine
February 2009