How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right • Hacker News Board

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#161

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #152

One problem is that when people are triggered by certain topics, they will still be triggered by the topic, no matter how careful or non-violently you approach. If you are married, and your trigger topic is house work, it doesn't matter if your spouse says "you need to more house work" or "when I get home after a long day of work, I feel let down by having to do a large amount of house work, could please do more in t…

Well, here are some of the problems with such a statement:

The observation wasn't there. I initially wrote "I think we can both agree that it is not needed in this context.", but on reflection that's a really poor assumption. Because (and trust me, this is common), the other spouse may actually have tidied the house (or done laundry or whatever), and is now dealing with the complainant complaining as if he/she hasn't done any work. It would help a lot more if the complainant specified the problem.

Did you mean to say "I feel down" or "I feel let down"? The latter strictly violates NVC (it's not a feeling but a judgmental narrative). It will trigger defensiveness.

The spouse didn't state the need. Having to do a large amount of house work is not a need.

Your example is one of the most common types of problems between two people. One side is OK with a sloppy house, and the other isn't. The way you phrased it, the other spouse is likely to respond with "So don't do the house work. What's the problem? I'm fine with it, why aren't you?"

One spouse perhaps needs more order than the other. Unless that is made clear, how will progress be made? Is this obvious? No. Because it may not be about tidyness but about a filthy bathroom where the need may be sanitation. I'm not being splitting hairs. I know people who insist on very clean bathrooms and kitchens, but are not at all fussy about stuff all over the floor in the house.

Finally, the request was a poor one. Both the observation and the request need to be specific, not general.

Imagine that the other spouse had put effort in cleaning up, and is being requested "Could you please do more in the future?" More what? What will it take for you to be happy? And did I just waste my time doing something that you perhaps don't care about? Should I waste my time telling you what I already did?

Defenses are up.

If the other spouse managed not to be triggered and knows NVC, his/her response may be "Are you dejected/annoyed because you need the house to be more orderly?"

A better NVC statement from the original complainant would be:

"I came home and there were several of your dirty plates on the countertop, and the sink was empty. I have a need for tidyness. Would you be willing to place your dirty dishes in the sink if the sink is not full?"

To your wider point, though, of course - if there is a history of conflict on a particular topic, anything can trigger them. Looking at several comments here about technical debt and managers, I think I see it in action. :-)

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#162

Post by quantified » Sat, Apr 04, 2020, 12:18 AM UTC

The fundamental needs omit "power". Perhaps "security" is the analog, but "I will keep my job" is not quite the same as "my competitive standing relative to my peers and superiors will remain at least as strong and ideally improve". Let's recognize that the author strives to steer organizations in a direction of open productivity, but once anyone in the org is good at managing up it becomes an arms race. No org of >400 people can ignore this factor, and an org of any size can have it.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#163

Post by btilly » Sat, Apr 04, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #153

btilly wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you are saying that refactoring is usually incompetently done to me. Not at all intended on my part. Nor would I say it is usually what went wrong. The primary root cause is an underestimation of the true complexity of the problem. The details of which only start to become apparent after you've begun the rewrite. An inevitable secondary cause is organizational pressures to add features to the rewrite. Thi…

Do you mean rewrite? You're acting as though refactoring is a process that involves destroying bad code and rewriting it from scratch. It's not. Refactoring is usually the modification of existing code while maintaining existing functionality in order to make the code easier to maintain and reason about for future developers. Furthermore, if you're given points for refactoring (as you should be) your velocity is very…

I mean that when developers are given leeway to devote a sprint or two to a large refactor "to take care of technical debt", it naturally turns into much more of a rewrite than expected.

Small refactors happen all the time.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#164

Post by friendlybus » Sat, Apr 04, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #159

friendlybus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So can we agree that your problem is not with NVC but with a few people? No. I was describing what NVC is. The book, this thread, the culture of people like you pushing it in the workplace is what I wrote. The book encourages a language form, the proponents of the book push a language form, you are pushing a 'communication style'. >I do get the sense from a number of comments (not necessarily yours) that people thin…

> No. I was describing what NVC is. The book, this thread, the culture of people like you pushing it in the workplace is what I wrote. The book encourages a language form, the proponents of the book push a language form, you are pushing a 'communication style'. I'm sorry, but: 1. You haven't read the book. 2. You are falsely accusing me of pushing it in the workplace. Do you work at my workplace and know me? 3. I am…

I can’t abide these blatant contradictions. I just stood up for a guy who was swearing, that you tried to lock out in this very same thread. You are pushing NVC and in that very comment you mentioned that you would let this guy go for his communication style.

I know there are books that describe “the obvious”, we just had two years of Jordan Peterson telling common sense things to 500 million people and selling books on it. I don’t need another guru to tell me how to do the “obvious”.

You didn’t answer my question about who’s responsibility this problem communicating self evident ideas is. If you can answer that then you have a key to why NVC is silly.

You didn’t answer my point about NVC being more about papering over judgements of character or acknowledge that these treatments of communication necessarily fall into problems of attribution.

Associate me with religious critics however much you want. I have made solid points and you have lied. I’m done here.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#165

Post by davesuperman » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

lidHanteyk wrote: post #84

BeetleB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is how you're going to behave in these situations at work, I'll have you off the team/company in a heartbeat. Your concerns are valid. Your method of expressing them is problematic. And your automatic assumptions are lethal to a good work environment. I was going to address some of the specifics, but you're not exactly giving the impression of someone who wants input.

I don't work for you. I am the consultant sitting to the side and watching you crash and burn. If you want to hear how I'll talk to you when you're my manager, then you'd better put a salary in my pocket first. When you say that my concerns are valid but that I am expressing them in problematic ways, you are tone policing . This is a typical technique used by management: First, break up the original complaint into sm…

> Nope, he doubles down, just saying that it will be awkward at first but that you'll learn

Dave here. The point of the article was in fact not at all that NVC is awkward and you'll have to learn, but to say there are valuable principles that you can apply without the format, that can help you address conflict.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#166

Post by davesuperman » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

Having read all of the comments to this article, it's quite impressive how quickly people lost sight of the conflict, and took sides with whoever they empathised most with.

I included enough facts to elicit a trigger response for anyone that's worked in a tech company. Just reading them was enough to make people angry, and invent a back story that 'management never listens' and 'this company is going to fail' (paraphrasing). This wasn't in the piece and likely reflects a projection of their reality.

This angry tone is pervasive in the comments and quickly turned people against each other. Anger that came from somewhere, perhaps a place that isn't apparent to the angry. A lasting sensation of not feeling listened to, or truly seen and valued.

Even if you only communicate your emotions to yourself, and get curious about where they come from, it's likely to help simply by acknowledging that not all emotions arise from the present situation. I believe this is true in life as it is in the comments.

Anyway, I wish you all a productive week!

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#167

Post by mpweiher » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #107

quanticle wrote: post #28

Suppose product development has slowed down, reported bugs have increased 30% since last month, and sprint velocity is down by 40%. Your engineer is feeling desperately unhappy and is terrified of building new features because of the risk to the system as a whole. They want to stop building new features and refactor some of the system architecture. But what do you think their unmet universal need is here? If I were i…

In my experience situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks that would come back to bite us later on. To respond to something you were warned about with NVC baby-talk (as opposed to…

> 80% and bug counts go up by 90% as stuff randomly breaks in the refactor.

Er...that's not a "refactor". I know the term nowadays gets used liberally for any kind of rework, but refactoring involves making the tiniest of steps, often automatic or automatable, that improve the structure of the code without affecting functionality, all under the umbrella of a comprehensive test-suite that catches violations.