Mastering a Non-Anxious Presence
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on August 24, 2013
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 c
haotic. 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
Social Hierarchies and Conflict
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
Positive Peace in the Workplace
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on August 1, 2013
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
The Pashtun Concept of Jihad and the U.S. Dilemma in Afghanistan-Pakistan
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on March 5, 2010
The problems the US faces in Afghanistan with the Pastun-Tajik conflicts seem more regional in nature than local. Pakistan is in deep conflict with India over ideological, cultural, identity, political, and geographical (Kashmir) issues. Since Pakistan and India have nuclear knives at each other’s throats, Pakistan has a vested interest in keeping Afghanistan destabilized. Thus, Pakistan, while happy to take the billions in military aid provided the US each year, is loathe to rein in the Taliban. Losing control of the Pashtun-dominated federal tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan would be a big problem for Pakistan. It seems that the best long term US strategy is to focus on building peace between India and Pakistan, allowing Pakistanis to determine what kind of democracy, if any, they really want, and then sort out Afghanistan. In the meantime, the US should maintain the least amount of presence necessary for stability and security in Afghanistan. As Afzal Kahn notes, the US should spend time and resources understanding the Pashtun culture and work with that knowledge to bridge peace. Despite these needs, I am afraid that the polarization of US domestic politics will lead to short-sighted quick fix policies rather than long term perspectives over the next 25-50 years. Those policies have in the past, and will in the future, only bring war and violence rather than peace and stability to this region of the world.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
The Manhattan Peace Process on Israel and Palestine
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on January 18, 2010
In reading Betwa Sharma’s story of an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue facilitated by Marcia Kannry in New York City, I am struck again by the failure of process. In this dialogue, as reported, a Palestinian woman< Ms. Rahsid, is complaining. To characterize a bomb attack on a Palestinian bus as an "operation," she says, is unacceptable and dehumanizing to her. Instead of stopping the conversation right there to explore this statement more deeply, the dialogue participants jumped in. An Israeli woman was apparently personally offended and the conflict cycle engaged. Ms. Kannry missed the moment. I see this so often in Israeli-Palestinian dialogues. The same cycle is poignantly depicted in the documentary "To Die for Jerusalem," and is repeated countless times wherever Israelis and Palestinians meet. What is needed are deeper skills to help these people process and work through their grief, anger, humiliation, and frustration. Facilitated dialogues hold excellent potential for reconciliation and understanding in the Israeli and Palestinian civic societies. To prevent conflict escalation, facilitators should be thinking about processes that engage participants, especially in moments of provocation or high emotion. Until we up the game, the results of the dialogues will continue to mirror the results of the political negotiations: stalemate, frustration, and blame.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
‘The Empathic Civilization’: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on January 17, 2010
Mr. Rifkin has correctly stated the false assumption of modernity and post-modernity: that humans are rational, self-interested actors and international relations is a collective of rational state actors seeking to maximize national utility. He misses the mark, however, in thinking that mirror neurons, part of the neural substrate of human empathy, is the key to global change. We humans have evolved many emotional systems in our brains, many of which are barely understood. These systems work out solutions to the environment, social or physical, that cause them to metaphorically conflict and argue amongst themselves. In other words, the human brain is not some computer than churns out answers in responses to information. It is an extraordinarily complex biological system that allows for fast adaptability to environments that change right around it. Our brains have many limitations as well, known as cognitive biases, that shape and distort how we view the world and make decisions. Our brains have a rapid response fear reaction system that causes us to judge everything as good or bad at a primitive level. Instead of hoping that our mirror neuron systems will kick in to save us, maybe we would be better served understanding how the emotional and cognitive systems of our brains limit us, and begin working on realistic solutions with those limitations in mind.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Iran Is Burning in Revolution; Not Recognizing It Can Lead to Calamity
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on December 28, 2009
The continuing protests in Iran show that people can only tolerate autocracy for so long. With the irrepressible advantage of instant mass communication via the Internet and social networking, protests can be assembled quickly and efficiently before the government security forces can intervene. The Iranian people are taking advantage of this power in a unique way. Can the Iranian people translate this ability to self-organize into a sustainable regime change? Assuming the government is toppled, can the people choose more representative, liberal-style form of government? Their past choices suggest a contrary track record–Iranians have lived under one form of autocracy or another for the past 100 years. No matter the temptation to do otherwise, the international community’s role in the unfolding of the next form of government should be by invitation only. However, the international community can prepare now to respond to any invitation by thinking and planning for the possible range of possibilities. An organized effort to think about the possible futures of Iran carefully assembled and properly introduced to the world could offer hope and support without taking sides or appearing interventionist.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Congress-Please Wake Up on Climate Change
Posted by dougnoll in change, climate, Congress, Copenhagen, election, jobs, leadership, Obama, unemployment on December 18, 2009
Congress, please wake up. Climate change is here, it’s real, and it’s about to hammer us if we don’t take immediate action. I know that Detroit is suffering from 50% unemployment. I know that there are not many other happy places in the U.S. economically. I happen to live in one of the deepest poverty regions of the country, the San Joaquin Valley. However, the depression will pass. Climate change will not pass and is apparently not subject to economic cycles. If we, as a nation, do not take leadership on this, we could be facing the mother of all economic depressions a lot sooner than anyone expects.
I appreciate the fact that Representatives must face re-election every two years and that their job security rests on their ability to convince the voters in their districts that they are protecting local financial, economic, and legal interests. The larger problem of climate change calls for a different type of leadership, however. Instead of reacting to your neighbors, friends, and supporters at home, can you, members of Congress, unify and lead those people? Can you educate yourselves on the facts, not the polemics, of climate change? Can you be public stewards and resist insistent, parochial demands for quick fixes, jobs, money, safety, and security? Can you help the people accept the need for dramatic changes in energy use when the medicine tastes bad? Can you look at the problem of climate change in terms other than a zero-sum, distributive, winner-take-all political competition or negotiation? Can you instead look at climate change as an opportunity to collaborate, to invest in new technologies, to create jobs that have never existed before, and to rebuild our national infrastructure? Can you resist the lobbyists for the extraction industries that seek to continue business in the same patterns that have created the environmental crisis we now face? Can you face up to the fact that this is not Republican vs. Democrat political gamesmanship?
If you cannot, the conflicts, fights, disputes, and wars will be like none you have ever seen as people around the world fight for food,water, and arable land. If you cannot, the depression of 2007-2010 will seem like a mild economic correction compared to the potential devastation of a collapsed world economy. If you cannot, the plaintive cries of your constituents will turn to screams of anger at you, demanding that you answer why you did not take action sooner. Look into the future. You can see what is coming–it is a locomotive heading right at us. Will you slow it down or will you allow it to crush us all?
Please wake up and take action.
Obama’s First Year: A Nobel Effort
Posted by dougnoll in Uncategorized on December 11, 2009
I have read the American Grand Strategy report pertaining to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The students make the statement “Obama’s major policy error has been his demand of Israel to freeze all settlement building.” I believe this is a grave error of analysis. The history of the region has created a deep mythology for both the Israelis and the Palestinians that reinforces a social identity around the sacredness of Jerusalem and the sacredness of the land. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, regardless of motive, have been seen for decades as deeply disrespectful of the Palestinian right to autonomy. For decades, the Palestinians have asserted that Israel must conform to UN Resolution 242. Israeli settlements have been in derogation of this assertion, whether legal or not. In addition, the settlements have created a checkerboard in the West Bank that makes the possibility of a unified Palestinian state very difficult to create. A cynical person might say that this has been by conscious design of succeeding Israeli governments. At the very least, settlements have appeased the ultra-conservative fundamentalist Jews that have seized the moral and sacred high ground in the debate around peace with the Palestinians. Thus, if an acceptable peace is to occur, settlement construction will have to stop. President Obama is therefore correct in making that a cornerstone of his administration’s policy toward the conflict.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost