Contentious Meetings: Managing and Preventing

Establish common ground when a meeting seems headed for conflict 

If we are expected to participate or facilitate gatherings of people who might have differing opinions, there are three ideals we need to challenge in order to be most effective.

The first ideal is that people in face-to-face meetings will naturally arrive at optimal outcomes based on healthy debate and disagreement. The second ideal is that public meetings bring out the more noble behaviors in people like civility, critical thinking and logical rigor. The third ideal is that diversity of thought is an asset toward reaching optimal outcomes. These ideals might all be true, but let’s be realistic here.

Reality No. 1: Debate and disagreement in today’s world is often contentious and back-filled with anger, often driving irrational escalation and leaving damaged relationships in the wake. The damaged relationship then becomes the driver of our choices the next time we meet rather than the topic at hand.

Reality No. 2: Public meetings often bring out our most self-protective behavior rather than our most noble. In fact, multiple social experiments show that the more public we are, the more psycho-logical we are with a slight emphasis on the “psycho.”

Reality No. 3: It’s 2016 and we still don’t know how to interact when we have differing opinions. All too often, disagreement turns into conflict, which turns into anger, which brings out our less noble behaviors and then we are off and running.

So what do we do when we realize that the ideals are not necessarily the realities? One place to start is to understand how people create their realities in the first place.

Harvard professor Chris Argyris has created a helpful metaphor called “The Ladder of Inference.” Simply stated, everybody has a set of rungs they climb to make sense out of their world. At the base of our “ladders” lay all of the objective facts and the data. At step number 1, people select some pieces to pay attention to and then ignore the rest, observing different things from one another. Step number 2, they interpret the data they selected out from the noise—now it is becoming subjective because everyone’s interpretations are created from their own past experience. Step number 3, people form individual conclusions and these almost always reflect self-interest.

So, if people are not coming from the same starting place, they are very likely to disagree. Even worse, if they have stated a public position, they’re now entrenched. Opinion has now taken root and it is a taproot. Now we are in a “somebody has to be right and somebody has to be wrong” situation, which will no doubt affect the value of our outcome as well as our relationships.

In order to be able to anticipate and possibly preempt harmful conflict, here are some starting suggestions:

• Climb up other people’s ladders first. See if entering into their mindset can help you understand and perhaps find some common ground. Common ground is golden.
• Have the conversation at the bottom of the ladders at the level of fact and data and objectivity. If you disagree and have the discussion at the top of the ladder, that’s where righteousness resides. Disagreeing at the level of righteousness rarely turns out well.
• Get people to delay stating their opinions publicly, so they can listen with an open mind and rational thought.

For a few more tips and tools to use and traps to avoid, please join us for the workshop on Preparing for and Managing Conflict and Contentious Meetings at NACo's Annual Conference, Sunday, July 24, 4 p.m.