Intent or content?

William Ury (2024) advises us to go past the "what" and focus on the "why." Grenny, et al., (2023) cautions us to look past the content and suss out the intent, bringing zero assumptions to that process. 

If the Board of Trustees is discussing the deficits does this mean we should ignore that and think about our opportunity to bond with members of the BOT?

No. It means that showing and expecting mutual respect is the first baby step toward sincere, productive, principled negotiations. When frustrated members of one side resort to dehumanizing targeting of the other the chances for actual progress based on a win-win possibility are quickly reduced, usually to zero. Ad hominem attack almost always guarantees either a protracted stalemate or a win-lose, or a lose-lose outcome. Maintaining genuine mutual respect is the only hope, even when slim, of a win-win agreement. 

When Uri Savir, one of the chief negotiators for Israel in the Oslo process, first met Abu Ala, his Palestinian counterpart, he wondered to himself if this was one of the terrorists who killed his friend. Because of the excellent facilitation and due as well to the actual desire by all parties to produce a working peace, relationships flourished over time--Palestinian negotiators and Israeli negotiators attended each others' children's weddings, and they took family vacations together. They did it--they got a working peace agreement. 

It took determined spoilers to derail that peace, including radical violent ones on both sides doing their best--their worst--to upend and destroy the peace. A radical Islamist bombed a bus in Tel Aviv. A radical Zionist imperialist shot Itzak Rabin at a peace rally. The process unraveled. But its brief success was a tantalizing glimpse into what a Middle East peace could look like. 

Empiricists could generate the amount of time needed to reduce past atrocities in the collective memory enough to inoculate against the spoilers, but clearly there are times, like in the Middle East, when the spoilers have an advantage for quite some time. 

My activist slogan for decades, literally, has been, "Heighten the confrontation while we deepen the invitation." I learned that from my Dad. He was a WWII vet, in the Philippines "for the duration" plus a year, but he became a peace activist during Vietnam, quit his corporate VP gig to go back to school on the GI Bill, got his doctorate, was the only draft counselor on his campus even as he was Chair of his dept., and most tellingly, kept all his corporate conservative friends even as he became a radical peacenik. I've been following in his footsteps forever.

References

Grenny, Joseph; Patterson, Kerry; McMillan, Ron; Switzler, Al; Gregory, Emily (2023). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. 3rd ed. VitalSmarts.

Savir, Uri (1998). The process: 1,100 days that changed the Middle East. New York: Vintage.

Ury, William (2024). Possible: How we survive (and thrive) in an age of conflict. Harper Business.