The Fourth Rule of Conflict: Finality is a Myth
The last piece of the puzzle
I'm going to talk to you today about the fourth of the three rules. Confused?
Let me give you a recap so you know how we got here:
The first rule is that the conflict is usually not about what it's about: there's something else going on.
The second rule is that everyone who's involved in the problem is going to have to be involved in the solution.
The third rule says that the process and the outcome are the same.
This means the qualities of the resolution process will be infused into the outcome. But that outcome is actually going to be a new process, which brings us to the fourth of the three rules of conflict:
There's not going to be a final outcome.
Now, that's hard to hear sometimes, but let me tell you why it's not such a bad thing.
First of all, it reminds us that life is an ongoing process. We don't actually want to get to the end any faster than we have to.
If we're in an ongoing relationship, each new situation or everything that we are able to fix or move into the increasing adequacy is going to set us up for a new situation, and we're going to have to deal with new issues after. It reminds us that we need to stop focusing on what we want to get or what we want to see happen. Forget about the what, because we're not gonna get to that place where we're like, "Okay, all done, everything's finished!"
What would that even look like? A situation where we have everything figured out isn't very pretty. If everyone agrees on everything, we wouldn't have any new ideas. Instead, we want to think about how we want to do things.
How do we want to be in an ongoing relationship with each other? How do we want to address the questions that keep coming up? To highlight, it's a shift from what do we want to how do we want it to be? That is a place where we have all sorts of capacity for changing the qualitative experience of whatever's going on.
Now this also means that we're not going to try to win because winning is a fixed state. Earlier this year, I pointed out that when teams win a game or something, no one thinks they won the sport. They just go back to practice and play a new game. It's an ongoing process.
There's another quote here that I want to share from Ursula K Le Guin from her book, The Lathe of Heaven:
"The ends justify the means? But what if there never is an end, and all we have is means?
And that's true. That is exactly what's going on. All we have is means and process. You can think about the government or political system as just a really complex conflict resolution process. It's not working very well, but that's where we get to the qualities part.
How do we want to be doing this? What are the qualities we want to have in the process?
A guiding question I like, especially related to the first rule of conflict is, "How can everyone involved in this process be aware of, affirm, and respect our ongoing interdependence?"
We're not going to get rid of the other people. We're not going to get rid of the disagreements. We're not all going to agree.
So, how can we recognize that we're interdependent and choose to engage with each other during future disagreements? What processes do we want to use? What qualities do we want to have in that process?
Again, the point here is to shift from what we want to see happen to how we want to do that. As part of that, I'm going to introduce a really cool model for thinking about this called Game B. There are people coming up with the rules of the new game. Stay tuned, I’ll be posting all about Game B on Friday.
Here’s the video that inspired this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
If you’d like to see more of these weekly round-up posts, subscribe to Omni-Win Visions here on Substack:
It would also be great if you could subscribe to my YouTube channel where you can see more of my long-form content, authentic discussions, and weekly content: