Face potential conflict with compassion and grace
The setting is a beautiful day at your local middle school playground. It’s recess. A group of boys are playing. From afar, a teacher looks over and sees two boys are engaged in a staredown. As the teacher makes their way over, they can faintly make out the one boy saying to the other, “what are you going to do about it?”
As the other boy steps forward to meet the challenge, they are met with a wicked left hook and wrestling ensues for a couple of seconds before the teacher arrives to separate the kids. The school notifies the parents while the principal reviews the evidence.
While the parents are coming the school administration confirms eyewitness testimony, character references and speaks to both boys. At the meeting, the principal informs everyone that the instigator should be blamed for starting the fighting and hitting the other kid. He is suspended. Conflict resolved.
Please ask yourself: would you look at the instigator in the story the same if he knew he was bullied? Or had an abusive parent? Or even if his dog just died? Were these questions considered? What impact does the punishment have on the child who is already hurting, and acts out?
In far too many conflicts, we reach a conclusion where we single out one person for blame and punishment; the student who fights needs to be suspended from school; the athlete who has a DUI needs to lose their scholarship and be kicked out of the university; the homeless man needs to be arrested for trespassing and loitering.
Hundred of times each day our society is forced to make judgements about conflict. The problem is that we often start with the confirmation bias that doing something bad makes you a bad person. This opens the door and somehow justifies us punishing the bad person for their actions.
I think this is extraordinarily naive. It is more likely that many of these conflicts are a part of a cycle of bad behavior and individuals like the boy in the story feel trapped, acted out and are unlucky enough to be caught. It is very unlikely they were alone in their skirting of moral and legal boundaries. More likely they are simply caught in the cycle which involves many people. All hurting. All that need some sort of help.
All of us, me included have become prone to the conformation bias of conflict. Too many of us are guilty during confrontation, when feeling victimized, to run for the moral high ground, use fierce language to defend our position and feel empowered to rub it in, if or when we are right. Case in point: Recently, I was driving approaching a light; as it turned yellow. I braked and stopped. The car behind me rear-ended me. I got out upset and yelled at the lady driving, emphasizing how wrong she was and how stupid a mistake she had made.
At the time, I was enraged, but looking back at it later, I felt very guilty. If I had a time machine, I would go back and start with, “Oh no! Are you OK? Anything I can do?” I would then politely exchange insurance, and wish her well, knowing that the matter would be settled with a slight inconvenience but feeling that was little worry considering everyone was OK. Instead of rushing to judgment, as I did, and acting like judge and juror, maybe in some cases we need a different mantra of conflict resolution which rightfully acknowledges that life is hard, we all cheat a little and we all suffer from stress and have bad days.
When people make mistakes and get caught, let’s start with a conversation based in compassion and grace. Let’s try and understand the person and why they acted this way. Then, let’s try and avoid punishing them but instead try and empower them and solve the issue as civilly as possible without a focus on being punitive.
The first step in overcoming bias is acknowledging that it exists. Recently, I had a followup conversation about my car being rear-ended. I opened the conversation by taking a moment to apologize to the other party and make sure they were OK.
Was that enough? Probably not. But I am going to work on it. I hope you also consider this story, and if we ever have the opportunity tp disagree on something, we do it civilly. Who knows? We may even get to a point where we can learn something from conflict deeper than one of us was right.