Finding Common Ground and Workable Solutions

Some thoughts on finding common ground and workable solutions when trust is low and conversations are challenging.

Finding Common Ground and Workable Solutions

Here are some of my rules of thumb for navigating challenging conversations, especially when trust and even mutual respect may be low.

Address issues promptly but prepare: often, sleeping on it and putting your thoughts in writing can make for a more productive conversation.
Listen and check understanding: ask clarifying questions and accurately summarize what you heard to confirm shared understanding.
Stay calm and respectful, and avoid defensive responses. Take a break to maintain equanimity.
Keep your statements brief and on point. Don’t interrupt, and don’t repeat yourself unless asked to clarify.
Don’t suggest solutions until you have a rough consensus on a problem or need. Don’t select a solution until you have evaluated at least two alternatives to the status quo.
It’s OK to disagree on the situation or a course of action in any one conversation or sequence of conversations: commit to finding a workable solution.
You need at least three conversations: one to frame the situation and agree on goals and constraints, one to generate alternatives, and one to choose a course of action.

George Washington’s Farewell Address

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.

[…]

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

George Washington’s Farewell Address (19-Sep-1796)

Washington was mindful of the “spirit of encroachment” and saw the need for ongoing dialog and negotiation so that the temptation to gather power is managed. I like that he acknowledges “I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.” This mixture of confidence and humility is essential to finding common ground.

John Cooper Powys: The Art of Growing Older

A conceited old person is a shocking spectacle.

Not only intellectual humility but what I am driven to call–for it is an evasive quality–spiritual humility is a valuable organum of discernment and discrimination.

A young person is compelled by life itself to be self-assertive beyond the measure of well-digested opinion; for the critical intelligence refines itself by practice and you’ll never swim if you don’t boldly strike out!

But if by the time we’re sixty we haven’t learnt what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven’t grown old to much purpose.

I suppose the hardest of all things to learn and the thing that most distinguishes what is called a ‘ripe old age’ is the knowledge that while bold uncritical action is necessary if things arc to move at all, we are only heading for fresh disaster if some portion of our interior soul doesn’t function in critical detachment, while we commit ourselves to the tide, keeping a weather-eye upon both horizons!

Might it not indeed be said that the soundest advice any old life-navigator could give to a neophyte on the broad sea would be that what has to be done must be got through somehow; done in the rough if in no other way, but at any rate done; and then on to something else.

In brief, we must reconcile ourselves, as we get older, to the charge of ‘living in a groove.’ For what, after all, when you come to think of it, is any sagacious amor fati, or adjustment of our personal organism to the maturing and ripening and then to the autumnal fall of the great Law of Necessity, if not the acceptance of Nature’s groove? The heavenly bodies follow their allotted orbits; why should we want to be random meteorites?

John Cooper Powys in”Art of Growing” (January 1, 1944)

Powys (1872 –1963) was 72 when this book was published and lied another 19 years. He was a realist: “while bold uncritical action is necessary if things arc to move at all, we are only heading for fresh disaster if some portion of our interior soul doesn’t function in critical detachment, while we commit ourselves to the tide, keeping a weather-eye upon both horizons!” Success involves intellectual and spiritual humility, the ability to strike a balance and muddle through.

Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

“Research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961) [PDF]

I like the fact that he clearly sees a balancing set of risks. We need to fund research but we don’t want to extinguish individual initiative and curiosity; science and technology are an increasingly important component of our lives and competitiveness as a nation, but we cannot defer the analysis of tradeoffs and opportunity cost of investment solely to experts, in particular government funded expertise.

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Finding Common Ground and Workable Solutions