Conflict Management and Communications Skills

by

Dennis K. Chong, Jennifer K. Smith Chong & Eleanor C. Chong ©

 

Part I: Conflict Management

 

            Many authorities in the field of education and training have examined this subject.

            Some people have wondered if these explorations have truly reached the requisite scope and depth that the problem merits and requires. Others have questioned if the answers have truly been found.

            One of us recently attended such a workshop. It was given by a well-regarded and esteemed training organization. The question that has to be asked is whether this workshop and its proffered solutions have proven their worth and value in automatic operation or are things as they were – on the knife edge of conflict, never knowing when it would erupt with all its negative consequences. Is it possible to hope that there will be no conflict ever again?

            An examination of Conflict Management in our view, requires an exploration of certain ontological considerations that in this Politically Correct age deter people from doing so. In failing to do this, they will not have examined the powerful forces that warp a situation into a conflict. As a case example let us examine the conflict between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.

            On the face of it, this conflict is deemed a fight between good vs evil, freedom vs tyranny and democracy vs dictatorship. However, in deeper structure, it is about “me being right” and “you are dead wrong.” From this is the critical extension, “God does not put up with wrong.” Therefore, it is my job to end your “wrong.” If I have to kill you and yours to do so, I will. I will because it is right.

            Anyone who thinks like this has assumed a superior position over the other. If such a person has the power, he would whack the one in the wrong. Now we have conflict because the whackee will fight back because he too believes that he is “right” and he knows that he is just as exalted as the whacker if not more.

            Now the equation resolves itself into who has more power; and power is the force to compel another to do as you wish. Now, Bush knew that militarily he had the power to do Saddam in. So, knowing that he was “right” and Saddam, “wrong,” he unleashed his power and whacked him. Then he found that he had now put over 135,000 American men and women into a maw that he cannot extricate them. It has also cost him the lives of 850 of his soldiers, the maiming of over 5700 because they have lost their eyes and limbs. In passing, it is estimated that this conflict has entailed over 200,000 Iraqi dead.

            In all conflict states is the Tabasco sauce composed of these ingredients:

1.                   ego or personal exaltedness

2.                   right vs wrong

3.                   power.

 

Can a condition of conflict be contained and eased if these issues are not remitted?

Can a condition of conflict itself be redressed in a well-formed way if these considerations are not overcome.

Do training workshops on Conflict Management address the problems of these forces and how to deal with them. People with good sense will have to wonder that if this is not done, what is offered in training programs that do not address such considerations may fall into the category of suspect worth and value.

However, clearly this does not cover the entire scope of the problem. In the critical work of John von Neumann and Oscar Morganstern was the finding that when people do things they are after a payoff. You can call the desire for the payoff – greed; and greed is indeed a very powerful ontological force that drives people to do things, even to deliberately enter into and engage in conflict with others in order to get what they want.

So, what is Bush really after? Some say it is oil!

As it stands, thanks to George Herbert Walker Bush, half of the world’s oil that is in Saudi Arabia is effectively in American hands. Of the remaining half, half is in Iraq. If Bush can place an American viceroy in Baghdad, he will have managed to get for America control over three quarters of the world’s oil reserves.

Of what remains, a quarter is in the Caspian Sea. Today, under the American proconsul, one Mohamed Kazai, the Americans via Halliburton have a treaty to lay an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan into Pakistan and the sea. Pakistan today2004 has an American proconsul in the person of one President Pervez Mushareff.

The Americans are arguing that if they have a client state in Iraq, they will have a hammerlock on this entire oil rich region given the kind of relationships that they enjoy with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Israel. Whether, their logic will hold in the face of the powerful forces of contradiction that have exploded in the region is another matter. It is what they currently argue that has the day.

Tied to the issue of greed is the meta gain of the strategic advantage that people want over others. With it they have a hold over others. So, the missing two ingredients to the Tabasco sauce are:

4.                   greed

5.                   strategic advantage a.k.a. power over others.

 

Is it possible to deal with conflict issues if one does not examine these forces and how they wrap themselves into a coherent equation, well-formed or ill-formed, that binds people in the kind of mess that they cannot get out and which in the first case, in saner moments, they would not have wanted to go into.

Now we come to:

6.                   the issue of the unconscious forces of contradiction that is contingent to every case of conflict. These unconscious forces exist in both conflicting parties. They are not only mental but also psychological and emotional.

 

Do trainers in Conflict Management have any awareness that such forces are at play. They are powerful drivers. They can even skid nations into war – the ultimate form of conflict. In another day and age, General Haigh and Field Marshall Foche, over breakfast would send 55,000 men to their deaths in one morning in the killing fields of the western front. The Germans would do the same. Today, one American soldier is killed and the entire American nation is devastated.

This brings us to the axiom:

All conflict is insane!

 

            Conflicts are insane because they do not satisfy the conditions of well-formedness:

i.                     the parties must have the choice to consider all options, even to disengage

ii.                   what is done is done impeccably well

iii.                  what is done is useful and worthwhile

iv.                  what is done is ethical – by this we mean that it must entail no harm to the self and to others

v.                    the conditions that are created must be conditions in which the parties are able to be better aware about what they are doing and what they intend to do

vi.                  what is done is done with love and compassion.

 

Clearly the current Bush war in Iraq does not satisfy all these conditions. And if you re-examine any conflicts that you have ever had and set them against these parameters you will find that they would not have satisfied these conditions.

Compounding the conflict is the final ingredient:

7.                  lying and duplicity that distorts what is real-to-fact and accurate-to-fact. People are misled and they loose mightily in a conflict.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part II: Communication Skills

            To be a good communicator, a person has to have these four elements:

1.                   mastery over IROSSFMISsTEMPs – refer to Addendum I, Human Communication

2.                   mastery over the Non-Aristotelian Language system – refer to the work Power and Elegance in Communication, People, Paradigms and Paradoxes

 

 

3.                   a rich knowledge base

4.                   depth in thinking, not superficial and a deft handle on the subject matter, refer to Addendum 2, Charisma

 

A business corporation is in a way a sentient entity. Any corporate body that reads this paper instinctively knows the truth of what this paper is addressing and will know immediately the kind of unique problems that it faces internally and which a workshop by these authors can be of such help to it.

            We welcome the invitation to offer what we can share.

 

 

 

Part III: The Philosophy of Language and Business

 

            On one hand, all businesses create their mission statements. However, these statements are very restricted subsets of a far greater philosophical generalization. This generalization is tied to how we came to be able to speak and the matters that relate to its purpose and value.

            Since the work of Charles Darwin, researchers, scholars scientists and academics now agree that we are descended from genealogical ancestors that:

1.                   came hundreds of millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct

2.                   could not speak

3.                   at best, we came into our present form, at best, some 4 million years ago.

 

When the hominids that were to evolve into us could not speak, communication could only be by feelings and actions. The expressions of feelings and actions in turn carried the meaning and intentions of the person. They were the Body Language, BL. It was critical to be able to read it as accurately as possible. Thus, if the alpha male of a hominid group suddenly flared red in the face, bared his teeth, jutted out his jaw, breathed high into his upper chest, clenched his fist and took a step forward, you had to read that it is best to give up the piece of meat in your hands at once and run. To conclude that he wanted you to come lovingly and cuddle him . . . !

All us have inherited the BL. Nobody taught you how to conclude that in the room that you just entered and which you have never been in before, pervades an environment of tension and anger. And you just know that there is something the matter between the people present. You can be 10 feet away from two people at a busy airport. You cannot hear their conversation. However, you can see that if one of the two does not stop the other is going to loose it. You have not seen a dear friend for a long time. However, instantly you can tell that something is deeply troubling him/her. When you arrive at this conclusion and you want to share:

What is troubling you? Maybe I can be of some help.

 

            If you only have BL, the only way you can communicate this is by doing the equivalent of a charade. To do this with any efficiency, however, will require an analog alphabet and an agreed grammar and syntax for it. It would be far quicker and more efficient to be able to speak it. This then is the underlying driving force for our hominid ancestors to develop the spoken word or Natural Language, NL.

            Concordant with this step, the hominid brain took a quantum change. It was the leap from the ape mind to the human mind. The latter was no longer situated and restricted in its thinking by the spatial and temporal co-ordinates it found itself. It was now possible for it to think of actions in other places when it was not there. It was also possible for it to think of actions at some future time.

            With NL, it was possible for the group to agree:

1.                   on common goals that benefit the group

2.                   to enter into a collaborative frame to attain the goals

3.                   on forms of actions to be taken to achieve them.

 

This was the purpose of our ability to language.

In business, we are looking at the legal articles that incorporate the business. This is its collaborative framework and its goal(s) that is implicitly for the benefit of the hierarchy of the business corporation and its shareholders. Today, you can think of the kind of duplicitous violations of this rule from Adelphia to Enron to WorldCom.com, refer Addendum 3, Ape Mind vs Human Mind.

Unless this philosophy is clearly understood by the entire hierarchy of a business corporation, and it cannot be by just lip service, then, there will always be the need for “experts” in Conflict Management.

 

On the other hand, all forms of language are packaged within their operating systems. Certainly in the West, and apparently also in the rest of the world today2004, language is formatted within the Aristotelian system of Causality. This was the discovery of Alfred Korzybski, the Father of General Semantics.

He in turn discovered that the Aristotelian system of Causality or Cause and Effect is, as he called it, unsane! Then, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-founders of Neuro-Semantic Programming discovered it to be semantically ill-formed:

            We have generalized the notion of semantic ill-formedness to include sentences such as:

My husband makes me mad.

            The therapist can identify this sentence as having the form:

Some person causes some person to have some emotion.

When the first person, the one doing the causing, is different from the person experiencing the anger, the sentence is said to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable. The semantic ill-formedness of sentences of this type arises because, it, literally, is not possible for one human being to create an emotion in another human being thus, we reject sentences of this form. Sentences of this type, in fact, identify situations in which one person does some act and a second person responds by feeling a certain way. The point here is that, although the two events occur one after another, there is no necessary connection between the act of one person and the response of the other. Therefore, sentences of this type identify a model in which the client assigns responsibility for his emotion; rather, the emotion is a response generated from the model in which the client takes no responsibility for experiences which he could control.

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: The Structure of Magic Science and Behaviour Books Inc.  1975 pages 51 - 52.

 

            We in turn are quite sure that it is an insane system.

            What is unsanity or insanity and what is semantic ill-formedness? These terms are synonymous. They refer to the condition of human illogicality without humour. In turn, it then becomes the mother condition for fear and anger, anguish and frustration, pain and suffering and woe and tears.

            Korzybski then concluded that it was imperative to discover:

1.                   the opposite of the Aristotelian system of Causality. He called it the Non-Aristotelian system. We know it as the No-Y-ian Frame or the system of Relativity and Relatedness

2.                   what were the linguistic formats of the Non-Aristotelian system. In this respect with respect and sadness we note that he never quite elucidated what they were. It was only in 1993, that these formats were unravelled and published in the work, Power and Elegance in Communication, People, Paradigms and Paradoxes.

 

            When we talk about communication skills, we are talking about linguistic competency over the language of the No-Y-ian Frame or the linguistic formatting structures of the Non-Aristotelian system. These formatting structures will guide the individual to think, communicate, be and relate in a sane way. In turn, it will hold in check those psychological dispositions towards lies, duplicity, greed, egoism and exaltedness.

           

            For any sentient corporation, this surely, will be worth something for its staff to attain.