Assumptions Unveiled, Conflicts Cleared
A public restroom taught me about conflicts.
After a comically-sized Starbucks coffee, I found myself queueing for the restroom. I glanced around the restroom in an effort to distract myself from my brimming bladder. A poster caught my attention. It was peppered with photos of farm animal and read “If you love animals, why do you eat us?”.
My head hurt. “I *do* love animals!”, I thought “so, why *do* I eat them?!” As I did the customary pee dance and jumped from foot to foot, I pulled out a paper and pen from my pocket and started doodling.
My goal is to live a fulfilling life. In order to live a fulfilling life I need to have sufficient nourishment, which means I need to eat meat because meat.
However, in order to live a fulfilling life, I must also care for all living beings. This brings me joy. And, in order to care for all living beings, I must not eat them!
Therein lies the conflict: do I eat meat, or do I not eat meat?
A compromise could be to eat farm animals, but not eat my cats. But this is really just a compromise. Is there a better way to fulfil both my need for nutrition and to care for all living beings?
I checked the arrows on my diagram, knowing an incorrect assumption in my logical connections would evaporate the conflict. In order to have sufficient nourishment, must I eat meat? No. Nowadays there are plenty of other diets that can offer me sufficient nourishment.
And if I don’t need to eat meat to have sufficient nourishment, I’m no longer facing a conflict.
How often do we encounter conflicts in organisations, and make equally painful compromises?
Software developers often wish to move fast in order to meet project timelines. IT Operations often want to move carefully in order to ensure IT systems remain stable. Both want to build and run IT systems that solve the original problem.
However, all-too-often the organisation settles on a compromise - a long and costly software change approval process - versus surfacing and challenging an underlying assumption that changing the system risks its stability. This assumption is less true under the conditions of small changes that are rigorously tested (with techniques such as Continuous Integration and Delivery).
The takeaway? In organisations, all staff are working towards the same goal. Any conflict can therefore only relate towards different assumptions on how best to get there. Debugging those assumptions together can remove conflict, compromise, and the need to eat our cats.
