Conflict And Information
We Gather Information
From sources we trust: headlines, media, news organizations, articles.
From people we trust: friends, family, superiors, mentors.
From experiences: similar moments, memories of events that feel the same, empricism and pragmatism.
From our sense of reason: what we can figure out, think about, and rationalize.
Others Gather Information Too
Pick a topic, any topic - something easy like religion, politics, money, time, power, effort, purpose...
Surely someone else, particularly in the setting of a difficult converstaion, has some information. Their opinions, experiences, and reasonability all form their own sources of knowledge and information.
Our Information Differs
This is perhaps the complexity and "difficulty" of information - that the information differs between the (two +) of us.
Approaching Different Information
more soon...
We Each Make Sense
Have compassion for the other person & people in a difficult or complication situation where information differs.
As the authors of "Difficult Conversations" say, "We each make sense in our story of what happened."
See The Shortcuts We Make In Collecting Information
There's a lot of information - too much for us too gather, consider, and make sense of.
We make "shortcuts" when taking in all of this information - shortcuts to "filter out" information.
Sometimes we consider most the information we think of first, ignoring things we haven't thought about in some time.
Sometimes we consider first an odd, outlier, shocking, surprising detail.
Sometimes we consider most the newest info - a new research article, a new author's depiction of info...
Each of these "shortcuts" to collecting information is something like a two-sided coin:
- on one hand, we simplify the information-gathering process, making sense of the overwhelming world of info we live in
- on the other hand, we may be missing some information, that doesn't fit into our shortcut, that would impact us significantly had we considered it.
Facts Aren't Meaning
"A Conflict of heart can't be solved with facts and figures; it needs to be addressed in other much slower and more subtl ways."
All of this detail about gathering info might certainly be interesting.
Facts, though, will only get us so far in conflict.
Trying to convince someone of new or different facts doesn't address meaning that we each associate with the facts.
Trying to get facts from similar sources will only aid differing opinions until new sources appear, which constantly happens.
Pointing out the shortcuts we make can be percieved negatively and be unhelpful.
The meanings we make from the information we have is another part of conflict and resolution.
Links
"Why Are We Yelling" by Buster Benson
"Difficult Conversations" by Stone, Patton, Heen, Fisher