Dialog across difference #8: Did you see that? Yeah, no.

 What you see is what you get!

--Flip Wilson as Geraldine

Conflict conversations, say experts from the Harvard Negotiation Project, are informed by what the various parties perceive.

What we see relates to, and is influenced by, who we are, what we've experienced, and what we care about.

Elaine: Those so-called activists stormed our campus library and wrecked stuff.

Mazin: Yeah, well, they did it to protest the university's complicity in killing Gazans.

Elaine: My students have nowhere to study and find materials that help them do their work.

Mazin: Yeah, well, Americans seem to care a lot more about buildings than they do about Palestinian children.

Sherry: Well, as a Native American, I feel a lot of solidarity with Palestinians who have had their land stolen from them.

And so it goes, often building in intensity, deepening the conflict as identity, experience, and priorities clash. 

The idea of such conversations may be to reach some agreement about something, or it may simply be to achieve a level of peace between people in conflict. Whatever the preferred outcome, it will be more easily achieved by the compassionate curiosity that elicits more about why each person concludes what they do. 

One of the least effective phrases in a contested conversation is I assume that...

As the experts put it, "We each know ourselves better than anyone else can" (Stone, Patton & Heen, 2024, p. 41). Assumptions can be quite alienating and feel disrespectful.

Instead of announcing assumptions, inquire. The honest, caring inquiry can deepen relationships without offensive essentializing. Eliciting with an attitude of willingness to learn brings us closer and closer to a shared body of knowledge and can show each other that there are vast areas about which each of us knows more than anyone else in the room, and that tends to build the tone of dignity and respect on which conflict can turn from destructive to constructive.

Stone, Douglas; Patton, Bruce; Heen, Sheila (2023). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most, 3rd ed. New  York, NY: Penguin.