Submitters: Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Abstract:
Have you experienced a conflict where you didn’t understand what the cause was? Have you ever been stuck trying to solve a conflict? Have you ever been unhappy about a compromise solution?
Our assumptions are:
- that every conflict is caused by invalid assumptions
- that those assumptions can be found
- that we can find actions that dispel the invalid assumptions
- that this is a way to solve every conflict without compromising
Are you in a situation where you both need to do something AND can’t do this? For example, you need to spend some time refactoring but there’s no time because you need to release. Or do you sometimes have to choose between two alternatives and want both? For example, I want to refactor this piece of code to make unit testing easier AND I need to add unit tests to this piece of code to make refactoring possible.
Bring these types of conflict to the session and we will solve them together. The conflicts you bring along to use in our workshop can be both work-related and not work-related. If you have a life without problems, you can help someone else create their breakthrough solution. We will explain the techniques step by step. You will work in small groups to apply the techniques on the conflicts that participants have brought to the session.
You will leave this session with one less conflict in your life: either you will have discovered that there was no conflict after all or you found the breakthrough actions to resolve the conflict and create a win-win solution for both parties.
Objectives of the session:
- Understand and explain what a conflict is really about
- Recognize if there is a real conflict
- Learn to resolve conflicts using the Evaporating Clouds technique
- Create more options to break out self-imposed limits
- Create breakthrough win-win solutions instead of compromising
Format at length: 90 min interactive tutorial
Process and timetable
Participants who bring conflicts to the session are the 'customers' of the session. Other participants join a customer to help them to solve their conflict, so that we have small groups of 3-4 participants each.
The session presenters briefly explain and demonstrate each step. Participants then apply each small step, with coaching from the presenters. Halfway through the session, one person per group switches to another group, to bring in some fresh ideas.
| Duration |
Activity |
| 10 ' |
Customers present their conflicts. Form groups around conflicts |
| 10' |
Articulate the conflict |
| 10' |
Determine non-negotiable requirements and formulate the objective |
| 15' |
Evaluate the conflict statement |
| |
Switch participants |
| 15' |
Develop underlying assumptions |
| 15' |
Evaluate assumptions and create injections (actions to deal with assumptions) |
| 5' |
Select the best injections and commit to taking the necessary actions |
| 10' |
4-quadrant retrospective + answer the puzzles |
At the end of the session participants get a handout with an explanation of the process and a reference to further material.
Download a short tutorial about the thinking processes
Intended audience:
Everybody who struggles with conflicts and doesn’t want to settle for compromises
What do the presenters expect to learn?
- Understand and explain the model and its application better.
- The types of conflicts participants bring. The sorts of solutions participants find to their problems.
Materials, room layout, limits on number of participants?
- Maximum 25 participants (~= 6 groups)
- Tables with chairs per group of 3-4 participants.
- Flipchart sheets
- Whiteboard
- Maybe a projector
Background and history
Pascal ran a similar session with Marc Evers as a BoF session at the SPA conference. This was a follow-up to a session they did about Current Reality Trees and Future Reality Trees. The structure of this session is similar. The previous session was based on the "Thinking for a Change" book. The new session contains new insight and more experience from the "Logical Thinking Processes" book.
