“Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” Ronald Reagan
Israel and Palestine. The Hutus and the Tutsis. The North and the South.
Just a mention of these opposing groups conjures images of violence and division. And many of these conflicts are as old as the blue and green marble that they took place on. It seems as long as there have been humans, there have been divisive conflicts.
But these divisions are not just things of history. In the United States, the recent election has exposed the deep fissures among us. There are divisions between states, counties, generations, ethnicities, and classes. For some, the UNITED States of America seems more like an aspiration than a reality.
But again, the division is not just between Liberals and Conservatives or nations and tribes. As consultants, we experience division and the need for unity every day in our organizations:
Marketing and R&D. The CEO and her board of directors. The young go-getters and the establishment.
The same sense of division comes to mind doesn’t it?
Imagine your most recent experience of a conflict in your organization. Did it happen in the form of an overt argument? If so, most likely, people were advocating their position, talking quickly and loudly, interrupting, and gesticulating aggressively. Or did it happen more passive-aggressively? Everyone nodding pleasantly in the room, but doing whatever they wanted when they left? How about the collusive conflict where your nemesis end-runs you to the boss, and suddenly that plumb assignment you’d earned is being taken away? Whichever form, I doubt it ended well. Nothing positive ever results from this kind of puffed up, reactive, manipulative, win-lose behavior. Yet we continue to respond to conflict this way, unwilling to abandon the need to win at the expense of others… We choose war rather than peace.
In The Anatomy of Peace, a fantastic book about attempted reconciliation between leaders of Israel and Palestine, the authors say, “In the way we regard our children, our spouses, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers, we choose to see others either as people like ourselves or as objects. They either count like we do or they don’t. In the former case we regard them as we regard ourselves, we say our hearts are at peace toward them. In the latter case, since we systematically view them as inferior, we say our hearts are at war.” If we continue to believe that we are on the superior side of the argument, we will only objectivity, vilify, and perpetuate conflict.
Perhaps the election has done us some good in this regard. There seems to be a growing awareness of the fissures among us. There seems to be a growing sense that we are not united and the work of unifying (not creating uniformity) will take a great deal of work. And many have come to see that that work must begin within ourselves.
What if we were more concerned with how we handle a disagreement than whether or not we resolve it? What if we found ways to remain convinced of our point of view, but accepted that others could have a different view? What if we sought not to convert others to our way of thinking, but sought to deeply understand the positions of others? Could it be that if we did this, getting our way might become less important than getting things done?
Finding healthy unity that embraces difference is no easy hunt. We prefer to retreat into our tribal groups among people who think and act like us. We say we value different points of view but rarely seek them out. We feign listening but are really just forming our next rebuttal. All of that is unity’s most insidious counterfeit – uniformity. We are seduced by the enjoyment of confusing sameness with unity.
We fear that adapting our viewpoints is compromising our values (spoiler alert: it’s not). But true unity is hard, gritty, messy work. It takes guts to let go of the need to be right. It takes the deepest of principles to understand your “enemy’s” views rather than vilify them. And only the greatest of organizations, communities, and leaders will take the leap of faith away from their staunchly held ideals in the belief, hope, and determination that there is room for both theirs, and others, ideals.
Over the next 12 weeks we are going to explore those questions and the ways in which we can unite our homes, teams, boardrooms, hearts, and perhaps, dare we hope, our country.