Eiffel Over

Tag: LeadingDesign

  • 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)

  • Avoidance

    My job today is to convince you that avoidance is a mode of conflict, alongside the others we’ve considered this week: competition and acceptance.

    I could try to convince you. I really could. But, you know what? I don’t want to. You’ve probably got your own views. Maybe they’re strongly held. That’s fine. I’m not particularly interested.

    And while I do have a clear and well-articulated model of avoidance in my head, I don’t feel especially compelled to share it with you.

    So, let’s just avoid the discussion altogether.

  • Dealing with competition in design

    • “I don’t care what you think; you’re wrong because…”
    • “They didn’t ask what I thought; they just told me what to do.”
    • “I raised objections, but I was told we’re sticking to the schedule regardless.”

    In this series of posts, I’m exploring conflict in design, which, for these purposes, is what happens when two people have different views on a subject.

    In each of the scenarios above, two people disagree. And in each case, one person asserts their view without showing interest in the other person’s perspective.

    This is the definition of competition in the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Instrument model: high levels of assertion, paired with low levels of interest in the other person’s view.

    In my experience, competition is a very common mode of operation in construction.

    Some people thrive on competition. Others prefer to steer clear of it entirely.

    How we deal with conflict depends on both our preferences and our goals. But first, we need to explore the other modes of conflict. More on that 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.