dougnoll’s posthaven

Segment 1: The Military Creates Wars.  On this edition of The Doug Noll Show we are speaking with David Swanson, author, journalist and radio host. David is working to organize a movement to end all war (worldbeyondwar.org). David started in journalism and a press secretary in 2004, and from 2005 onward he’s been organizing peace organizations. Similar to a lot of children in the United States, he was brought up being told he should use words instead of fists, but as a young adult he realized we as a society put a tremendous amount of energy fighting. When you’re raised with such contraction, you either pretend it’s not there or you decide to support one side or the other.

We spend more on recruitment into the military than we do on education. Why is this fact not catching people’s attention? When you look at polls you have a strong majority saying we should have never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Nobody wants a new war, either. But when you ask people if we should stop having war or stop having a military, many people say NO WAY. They think the “evil people will get us.” This thinking spans both the left and the right. We tend to redefine war and tweak the numbers to accomplish a minimization of war deaths. In reality, the military doesn’t protect us from wars; the military creates wars. 

Segment 2: 190 Million Deaths.  During the 20^th century, 190 million deaths can be attributed directly or indirectly war, more than the previous two centuries. One thing people do is argue that proportionately speaking, 190 million isn’t as big a percentage because our population has increased. Even more unfortunately is that 85-90% of the deaths are civilian. The media does not discuss all the civilian deaths. In the U.S. we have a different standard of holding our government accountable. Since we have not had a war in our country in recent history, many people cannot possibly understand what war is really like. 

Segment 3: Planning for War.  David tells us that President Obama has tripled the troops in Afghanistan and is now pledging to keep 5,000 troops for 10 more years. When we put all our resources and efforts into planning for wars, we will end up getting more wars instead of avoiding them. Annual U.S. spending amounts to $1 trillion per year! David thinks we are making an effort to dominate the entire globe.

Segment 4: A Highly Reactive Issue.  There is a myth of redemptive violence that is very much a part of our culture. How do we get people back to peace? First of all, David tells us to get rid of the TV and treat it as a dangerous weapon. TV is misleading. We are trained to believe that the U.S. government intervenes to protect people from evil and the bad guys, but in reality the horrors are usually brought about by the government intervention. It is a highly reactive and non-integrated issue. To find out more about David’s work, visit www.davidswanson.org.

To listen to the entire interview, please CLICK HERE.

 

 

People fear peacemaking. They fear the uncertainty of the outcome. They doubt their own abilities to make peace. They often doubt the competency of the peacemaker. They have high levels of anxiety because everything seems confused and chaotic. In addition, their pre-conscious brain is signaling danger and invoking freeze, flee, or fight responses. This is normal and expected behavior. Nevertheless, you, the peacemaker, must not get caught up in the swirling emotions of the parties. The best strategy is to maintain a “non-anxious” presence. 

The capacity to maintain a “non-anxious” presence within a conflict may be one of your most significant capabilities. Not only can this capacity enable you to be more clear- headed about solutions and more adroit in difficult situations but, a non-anxious presence will modify anxiety throughout the entire group. This aspect of leadership can sometimes do more to resolve issues than the ability to come up with good solutions.

Do not confuse a “non-anxious presence” with the idea of staying cool under pressure. A non-anxious presence is a true state of inner calm. You are connected to your people, but detached from their swirling emotions. Peacemakers are like transformers in an electrical circuit. To the extent that they are anxious themselves, when anxiety in the peacemaking session permeates their being, it potentially comes back into the session at a higher voltage. Consequently, to the extent that they can recognize and contain their own anxiety, they function as a step-down transformer or perhaps as a circuit breaker. In this case, their presence, far from escalating conflict, actually serves to diminish its destructive effect. 

Two aspects of non-anxious presence are worth highlighting. The first is playfulness.  Anxiety’s major tone is seriousness, often an affliction in itself. It is always content- oriented. Its major antidote is playfulness, especially with those for whom you feel responsible. Your capacity to be paradoxical, challenging, earthy, sometimes crazy, and even “devilish,” often can do more to loosen knots in a peacemaking session than the most well-meaning “serious” efforts. This is not because being paradoxical affects the content in the heads of others (reverse psychology), but because the act of being playful frees others by forcing them out of their serious “games.” I have gotten up from a table in the midst of a very heated dialogue between counsel and stepped into a nearby wastebasket. I stood there until they looked up, incredulously. A fifty-year-old man dressed in a dark business suit, standing in an office wastebasket was too much for them.  I grinned at them, they laughed, and the dialogue loosened up. We take ourselves way too seriously in our conflicts and in our efforts to resolve them. This is not to say that peacemaking is not serious, difficult work. It is. But we cannot get too carried away with it. When you have to assume the mantle of peacemaker, keep the load light when you can.

The opposite of playful functioning, which is most likely to heighten the seriousness in a system, is diagnostic thinking. Diagnostic thinking tends to increase polarization, intensifies anxiety, and is the natural manifestation of anxiety. When you become over-analytical, you become anxious about you own analysis. Am I right or not? Will I solve this conflict or not? The parties will pre-consciously sense your seriousness and will misinterpret it as worry or concern.  Their anxiety will skyrocket, with the usual, predictably negative conflict behavior. 

The other aspect of “non-anxious” presence is hope. If the conflict is escalated enough for a peacemaker to intervene, the parties have probably lost any hope that it can be resolved, not to mention transformed. Maintaining a “non-anxious” presence exudes confidence in the parties that they can, together, work themselves out of the conflict. Most importantly, it gives the parties hope. With hope, they will try harder, be more engaged in the peacemaking process, be less competitive and adversarial, and ultimately find the solutions they need. They can be skeptical about outcomes and wary about the peacemaking process. As long as you provide them hope by maintaining your “non-anxious” presence, they will come through. 

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012

Humans have a tendency to form hierarchies. Sociologists believe that the formation of hierarchy is a means of establishing social order. Humans seek social order to reduce anxiety, establish self-meaning, and distribute tasks. Hierarchy is observed in lower orders of animals, as well as humans, and consequently is thought to have adaptive advantage in evolution. Often times, conflict arises because roles within hierarchies are misunderstood or ignored.  

Hierarchies are formed through a quiet, usually unconscious, struggle as people sort out who will be superiors, inferiors, and equals. If you look closely at any group, you will see a hierarchy. One person has more respect or popularity or responsibility, and is therefore a “superior.”  Others, usually followers or subordinates, are “inferiors.” People of equal rank are “equals.” The terms “superior,” “inferior,” and “equal” should not be confused with worth of a person. In this context they refer simply to social ranking within a group.

Most of the time, hierarchies are benign and useful. However, superiors can abuse their positions. Likewise, inferiors can ineptly not “fit in.” In our culture, individualism and egalitarianism is so highly regarded, and the notion of hierarchy is distasteful. Thus, most people either overlook or deny the existence of hierarchy. This social blindness can be a mistake. 

People develop their positions in hierarchy through roles and status. Every individual portrays multiple roles deriving from the various communities in which he participates. A person may be superior in one community, but an inferior in another. The complexity of society requires that each person play many roles, alternating between superior, inferior, or equal, within hours or even minutes of each other.

Within a hierarchy, successful role-playing is determined by how well we deal with our superiors, inferiors and equals. We learn these hierarchical social skills as children. Our parents are our first experience with absolute authority. We play before our parents, bring things to them, and entice them to play hide and seek. In this way, we learn to attract and hold the attention of our first significant audience. However, until we learn how to play other status roles, especially roles with equals, we will relate to superiors and inferiors as we learned to relate to our parents. 

Learning other status roles comes from learning manners. Through dress, gesture, speech, and bearing, we indicate to others and to ourselves where we belong or want to belong in our society. All manners are a dramatization of the self, telling others how we want to be regarded and how we regard others. Manners are the daily language of hierarchy, and the absence of manners signifies the absence of social order.

These concepts allow us to consider some causes of conflict. First, conflict arises when people are ignorant of the basic social forces that compel formation of hierarchies. Thus, they do not perceive that a role appropriate in one context or hierarchy is completely inappropriate in another. When people do not enact expected roles, groups act quickly to either force conformity or expel the offender. Conflict can be transformed in these cases when people become conscious of the hierarchies within their lives, and adopt behaviors appropriate to the role of the moment.  

Conflict over bad manners arises from the belief one is not really important in the eyes of the transgressor. A faux pas made out of ignorance (and soon corrected) will be readily excused. With a faux pas, the importance of manners as a social bond is not challenged. Likewise, people laugh at a comedian’s vulgarity so long as what they feel important is not threatened, but people become uncomfortable with savage ridicule or continued vulgarity because this conduct endangers the social order upon which manners are based.

Much conflict derives from poor training in status communication. People want to communicate effectively with superiors, inferiors, or equals, but, because of a status difference, often do not know how to do so. An employee may have a difference of opinion with a supervisor, but may not know how to address that person effectively. Similarly, a superior may not have sufficient skills to communicate effectively to subordinates. Likewise, equals may have difficulty expressing concerns or differences with equals. These are all examples of deficient status communication skills. If a person’s social experience precludes open discussion of differences with equals and superiors, he cannot be expected to welcome it. Thus, inability to deal with hierarchical differences leads to conflict avoidance, anger, frustration, shame and guilt.  

If you are facing a conflict situation within a work group, discern the underlying hierarchy. What are the roles of each of the members? Who is superior? Who is inferior? Who are equals?  What is expected of each role? Is the individual behavior consistent with the role in the hierarchy? If not, is the individual aware of the dissonance between behavior and role? If not, is the problem one of insufficient skills in status communication or possibly bad manners? If the individual is aware of the dissonance, a power struggle may be occurring.

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012

Have you ever considered what peace actually means? The word peace seems to evoke different meanings from different people. Take the workplace as an example. For some managers, peace in the workplace means the absence of conflict. No one is arguing or showing tempers. No fighting or overt violence occurs. Sexual harassment or other impermissible conduct is absent.  The company is in legal compliance with workplace laws. Therefore, the company is peaceful.  To me, this is depressing.  

For others, however, peace in the workplace means that employees feel respected, are cooperative with one another, are enthusiastic about what they do, and have a sense of teamwork. They love coming to work and value their friendships. I get excited about this kind of peace.

If peace means the absence of conflict, then both concepts of peace are accurate. But clearly they are not the same. One way of distinguishing types of peace is to consider the idea of negative peace versus positive peace. Negative peace is generally defined as the absence of overt conflict or violence. A ceasefire in Bosnia is negative peace. In the corporate setting, a negative peace may exist when all expressions of disagreement or conflict are suppressed. Employees put on their “happy” faces, pretend to get along, and avoid raising uncomfortable or difficult subjects for fear of angering the boss. The absence of conflict or violence does not lead to a positively defined condition. Hence, peace is characterized as negative. 

Positive peace, on the other hand, may parallel the ancient concept of shalom. Every person is valued and feels valued. There is a right relationship between each member of the work group.  Not only is conflict absent, but an esprit d’corps seems to exist. People are motivated by each other and strive for excellence. A balanced blend of personal, internal competition (How can I improve?) and external cooperation (How can I help the other person do better?) predominates. People are excited about their work. They feel privileged that someone is paying them for what they do.

Most workers would prefer to have positive peace around them. Yet most work environments are satisfied with negative peace. For example, I asked a company president if her company had a peaceful environment. She indignantly said yes and challenged my implication that her company’s environment was hostile. Of course, my question was purposefully unfair because I did not distinguish between positive and negative peace. I then asked her if the peace within her company was positive or negative. She was nonplussed by the question. When I explained the difference, she thought for a moment. To her credit, she admitted that her company probably maintained a negative peace.  

Why do most companies have negative peace? First, companies seek an interpersonal goal of absence of conflict. Absence of conflict is comfortable because anxiety is reduced and a sense of control prevails. After all, overt conflict means anger, loud words, and imminent loss of emotional and possibly physical control. One of our dominant cultural norms dictates lack of emotion, rationality, control, and repression of emotion so as not to be frightened with potential violence. Companies also seek a kind of corporate homeostasis or status quo. Maintaining status quo requires less effort, less thinking, less resources, and less creativity. Any strategy reducing difficult objectives appeals to many over-worked managers. 

Third, companies focus on the financial bottom line or the stock price. The payoffs from the efforts required for a positive peace are not easily related to the current value of stock options.  Thus, the minimum socially and legally required effort to maintain peace becomes the standard human resources objective.  

Imagine, however, how positive peace might operate on a company’s stock value. Employees would be easy to recruit because the company holds a reputation as good place to work.  Retention would not be as difficult. When restless employees compare their environment to other opportunities, positive peace wins. Since most companies have negative peace, the competition for retention favors the few who foster positive peace. Positive peace increases morale, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and increases productivity.  People are, to put it simply, happier.

So why don’t companies work towards positive peace? Probably for the same reasons most companies are average financial performers: unawareness, apathy, insufficient human and financial resources, and lack of commitment. Those companies that do concentrate on positive peace find that their investment is rewarded by huge multiples in terms of recruiting, retention, productivity, and valuation in the marketplace. In other words, wealth is proportional to positive peace. 

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012

Conflict escalation is a gradual regression from a mature to immature level of emotional development. The psychological process develops step by step in a strikingly reciprocal way to the way we grow up. In other words, as conflicts escalate through various stag  es, the parties show behaviors indicating movement backward through their stages of emotional development. 

Escalation is charted in five phases, each having its own characteristics and triggers.   Stage One is part of normal, everyday life. Even good relationships have moments of conflict. These can only be resolved with great care and mutual empathy. In this stage, people look for objective solutions in a cooperative manner. If a solution is not found, especially because one of the parties sticks obstinately to his or her point of view, the conflict escalates.

In Stage Two, the parties fluctuate between cooperation and competition. They know they have common interests, but their own wishes become more important. Dealing with information becomes limited to favoring one's own arguments. Logic and understanding are used to convince or win over the opposing side. At this stage, each party does everything possible to not show weakness. The temptation to leave the field of argument increases until the conflict escalates because of some action taken by one of the parties. 

By entering Stage Three, the field of concrete actions, the parties each fear that grounds for a common solution is lost. In other words, they lose hope for a reasonable outcome. Interaction becomes hostile. All logic is focused on action, replacing fruitless and nerve-wracking discussions. The parties each believe that through pressure they will change the other party. At the same time neither is prepared to yield. At this level, stereotyping is applied as a negative identification of the opponent. Power becomes important as empathy disappears.  

At Stage Four, the parties’ cognitive functioning regresses. One is aware of the other’s perspectives, but is no longer capable of considering the other’s thoughts, feelings and situation. How often have we remarked that parties in conflict are acting like children?  In fact, they are because of the escalation. Both sides feel forced into roles from which they see no escape. If the conflict cannot be halted at this stage, the escalation undergoes a dramatic increase in intensity. Escalation results when one side commits some action that is felt by the opposite side as a loss of face. 

At Stage Five, progressive regression appears in the form of a comprehensive ideology and totalizing of antagonistic perspectives. Sacred values, convictions, and superior moral obligations are at stake. The conflict assumes mythical dimensions. Sometimes the parties have fantasies of omnipotence, seeing no way that they can lose in court. In psychological terms, the escalation has reached a hallucinatory-narcissistic sphere. The entire self-conception is drawn into the conflict such that individual perceptions and evaluations disappear. By threatening and creating fear, both parties strive towards total control of the situation and thereby escalate the conflict further. To remain credible and to restrain the enemy from an act of force, the threatened party feels compelled to commit acts of force itself. This process continues until the parties reach financial or physical exhaustion, or the matter is decided in the courtroom.

At some point along the way, the parties may seek mediation. The difficulty of an escalated case is that the parties must be walked back through the stages of escalation.  If a mediator is not aware of the escalation cycle and assumes that the parties are at Stage One, the mediation is doomed to failure. Furthermore, working back through the escalation stages takes time and infinite patience. The parties may backslide and regress.  Oftentimes, the parties resist the mediator’s efforts to move them into more mature levels of escalation. This behavior is very similar to parents working with children who have temporarily regressed. Sometimes, one party will move to an earlier stage of escalation faster than the other, creating more complexity. Thus, the mediator’s function is to act as a guide for the parties, assisting them in finding their way to the common ground of Stage One. Only when the parties have reached Stage One will they be ready to find a common ground for resolving the conflict. 

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012

Why is it that lawyers and the legal system are held in such disregard in a society that prides itself on individualism and protection of rights?  Part of the answer, I think, is that we ask too much of our legal system. We have lost the ability, as a society and a community, to resolve conflicts peacefully. The legal system has never been designed as a peaceful means of conflict resolution. In fact, the legal system is designed to be conflict-based, not peaceful. Lawyers are trained in an adversary process, not peace making. The litigation system is designed as a battle between parties, where justice hopefully comes out of the fray. I do not mean this to be a criticism of the legal system, but simply a description of the way it is. Even alternative dispute resolution is based on a competitive, adversarial model. 

The system has served us well at protecting individual rights against oppression for two centuries. Today, however, we bring all conflicts to the legal system, not just problems for which the legal system is appropriately designed to resolve. We expect that peace will be restored after the parties have expended financial and emotional resources to reach a result they are generally unhappy with. We wonder why there is such unhappiness with the legal system.

I think there's a better way. Simply stated, we must reintroduce the social knowledge of how to resolve conflicts back into our community. Let me propose a radical idea: that lawyers be trained as peacemakers; that we train our children in the social knowledge regarding making things right and reconciling interests; that we learn how to apply the ancient principles of confession, apology, and atonement to everyday business life. 

This is not as far-fetched or as difficult as it sounds. Teaching lawyers is the easy part.  Without exception, every lawyer who I have talked to about peacemaking is interested and intrigued. To that end, I have developed a comprehensive continuing legal education program for lawyers: Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro. The goal is not replace the adversary system. Instead, the goal is to provide new tools and orientations to human conflict. This is a multi-disciplinary curriculum, drawing on social psychology, law, and human conflict theory.

Teaching the children is also easy. The problem here is convincing the schools to introduce peacemaking as an expected everyday occurrence on campus. This effort has already been initiated by the Center For Peacemaking and Conflict Studies at Fresno Pacific University. We just need to expand and support its effort. 

Finally, reaching out to the business community should not be difficult. The social knowledge necessary for effective conflict resolution is simple to teach and easy to learn.  It's like riding a bicycle: once you learn, you never forget. Once we convince business owners that peacemaking is good for business, good for people, and good for the bottom line, we move forward into a more peaceful and efficient way of resolving conflict.

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012

Peacemaking works because it transforms relationships.  

Peacemaking addresses these problems and gets to the heart of the conflict without fear of escalation. When people agree to follow some simple ground rules, with or without an intermediary, they move into an empowering and special relationship. This relationship requires a commitment to be constructive, to actively listen, and to be empathically accurate.

Conflict escalates when this temporary special relationship is not formed. How many times have you heard voices become angry or louder as an argument ensued? The conflict is escalating because neither person believes that he or she is being heard. The easiest - but least effective – way to be heard is to raise one’s voice. However, then the other person doesn’t feel heard and raises his voice in response, and so on. Sometimes out of sheer frustration violence erupts. Peacemaking stops this escalation by committing each person, for a few moments, to be in a positive, rather than a negative, relationship with another.

  Peacemaking also works because it changes personal orientations from a competitive and hostile attitude to a cooperative and constructive attitude. The attitude shift does not change immediately. However, as people work through the peacemaking process, they begin to understand each other's perspectives and, in that context, re-evaluate their own positions. Often times, this re-evaluation and recognition provides the basis for transforming the conflict.

On an emotional level, peacemaking works because it allows for mutual recognition of injustices or wrongs. In many conflicts, each person feels violated by the other. Peacemaking allows both parties to recognize not only that they have been victimized, but that the other person also may have a sense of victimization. Similarly, peacemaking allows parties to acknowledge there has been a wrong or a violation. The Japanese take this to an extreme. Even when one party is clearly wrong and the other is clearly right, the party in the right will attempt to find some reason to offer apology so as to make the reconciliation process mutual.

On a practical level, peacemaking allows for a discussion of how to make things right. While people are in that special temporary relationship, they can identify how the wrongs, whether mutual or not, caused harm, and what they think is necessary to remedy the harm. Sometimes making things right is as simple as an apology. Other times, making things right is substantially more complex. However, if the parties have committed to the peacemaking process, they have agreed the only acceptable solution will be one that satisfies everybody's interests. 

Peacemaking permits movement into the future. Having recognized wrongs and discussed how to make things right, the parties find that the trust-building process begins with affirmations of future conduct. Many times the parties in conflict agree to support each other in ways that did not previously exist. The conflict thus becomes an event for strengthening relationships and providing for cooperative benefits that did not previously exist. Sometimes discussing future intentions uncovers a need for outside support, training, or other assistance. Without this discussion, these needs would go unmet, providing the seeds for conflict on another day.

When people can come together in hostility and anger, acknowledge injustices, whether mutual or not, decide how to make things right, and discuss their future needs and intentions, they engage in a process of moral growth. They learn to confront their fear, anxiety, and frustration. They learn to listen and to be empathic. They learn to recognize and acknowledge the other's perspective. They become empowered with their own ability to make decisions constructively and cooperatively. They begin to look to the future and rebuild trust. 

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker

Creator of Negotiation Mastery for the Legal Pro

California Lawyer Magazine, California Attorney of the Year 2012