Eiffel Over

Tag: conflict

  • Free body conflict/a vector joke

    A final thought on conflict. This time, how the different modes of conflict (competition, accommodation, avoidance and collaboration) can be thought of as free-body collisions.

    Avoidance – the two bodies miss each other, and also miss the chance to influence each other

    Competition x Acceptance – This is essentially a dominant collision, where one particle’s direction overpowers the other.

    Collaboration: This behaves like a vector addition, where the resultant trajectory reflects the combined contributions of both particles.

    Maybe the best answers are the product of differences. Whether it’s a cross product depends on how angry you are feeling (sorry couldn’t resist the vector gag)

  • Conflict and collaboration

    The fourth mode of conflict is collaboration.

    In this mode we are interested in the other person but also keen to assert our own view. I want you to know what I think but I also want to know what you think. Knowing that we are disagreeing I become interested in the difference rather than getting stuck into the offence-defence plays of convincing each other who is right and wrong.

    Collaboration is the opposite of avoidance, wherein there is no interest and no assertion.

    In design, we are engaging in change. The aim of the designer is to taking existing situations and improving them. Since the situations we inhabit usually involve other people, we are likely to discover our views are in some ways in conflict with another’s.

    To avoid engagement is to avoid change. To compete is to overrule. To collaborate is to discover the shared interest and create a new way forward. All of which I think can be shown with a free-body diagram – tomorrow.

  • Approaching conflict in design

    Some people like conflict. Other people stay away from it.
    Some people attempt to engage constructively in conflict. The opposite is also true.

    For me, conflict is simply when two people discover they have different views on a subject. The key is what happens next. How do they engage with one another?

    It’s important to think about how we engage in conflict in design because disagreeing is a crucial part of the design process. It’s part of taking an idea from ‘mine’—an idea in my head—to an idea that exists in the world and fits well within the ecosystem it inhabits.

    Without conflict, the ideas we have risk only serving our own needs.

    In his excellent ‘Leading and Influencing’ course, Nick Zienau teaches four modes of conflict, based on a model called the ‘Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Instrument.’ I now teach these modes to engineers (and other humans) as part of managing a design process. The modes are: competition, avoidance, acceptance, and collaboration. These will be the subjects of my next four posts.

  • Imprisoned with the infinite – the philosophical implications of an imaginary visit to Sweden

    Imprisoned with the infinite – the philosophical implications of an imaginary visit to Sweden

    Yesterday our household returned home from an imaginary holiday. Despite being in lockdown, we realised that we could imagine going on a trip anywhere in the world. Our daughter suggested our Sweden. Too far to easily get to under normal circumstances without flying, with that constraint removed we thought, why not? Now back home, I have been using this visit as an opportunity to explore some philosophical arguments about how we deal with choice and how this affects our creativity.

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