Eiffel Over

Tag: ThomasKilmann

  • Begin design with observation (Part 2)

    Yesterday, I wrote about how starting design with observation allows us to take a broader, more holistic view of the systems we’re working within. Another reason to start design with observation stems from the final part of the goal of regenerative design: for humans and the living world to survive, thrive, and co-evolve.

    This isn’t a goal that can be achieved within our current extraction-based economy. Instead, it serves as a guiding “north star,” helping us think about how to shift our economy towards a more holistic way of operating.

    From that perspective, we see ourselves as collaborators with the rest of the living world—humans living and working in partnership with ecosystems, and humans collaborating across communities.

    As I’ve written before on this blog, collaboration requires both interest in the other party and assertiveness for our own ideas.

    Starting design by writing a design brief is an act of assertiveness—it focuses on what we want. Starting design by observing and investigating the needs of others—both the needs of other humans and those of the living world—means we begin the process with interest.

    Given humanity’s historic tendency (and that of certain groups within humanity) to over-assert ourselves on the rest of the living world, there’s no question: we need to increase our interest in other parties.

    Starting design with observation ensures we begin by understanding and addressing those needs first.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Acceptance in Design

    This week, I’ve been posting about conflict in design. By conflict, I simply mean two people with different perspectives. What happens next, when they discover their differing views, depends on their level of assertiveness and their interest in the other person.

    Yesterday, we met the competitive person. We all know the type (we may even be one ourselves): assertive in their own views and uninterested in the other person’s perspective.

    Often, the “dance partner” of the competitive person is someone who is acceptant. An acceptant person shows a high degree of interest in the other person but is not assertive about their own view.

    In this pairing, the acceptant person ultimately accepts the view of the competitive person.

    There’s no judgment intended in these descriptions. What’s valuable is noticing which modes we—and others—are adopting, and whether that behavior is helpful in the context of the design process.

    If, after considering the arguments, one person genuinely accepts the other’s view, that’s fine. But if one person is consistently forced into accepting the other’s perspective, that might be less fine.

    In such cases, there might be work to do with the competitive party: encouraging them to show more interest and perhaps less assertion. Equally, there might be work to help the acceptant person become more assertive and, perhaps, less deferential.

    More combinations to follow—stay tuned.

  • 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.