Positions and Perspectives

In one of my early — and most challenging — engagements, the family I was working with was deeply entrenched in conflicting positions about the future. The family business had more than forty family shareholders. There was long running animosity between different family branches and the family dynamics within and between the branches were complex and conflicted. Different people had very strong and highly specific opinions about the future. People who had taken these strong positions hurled arguments and insults at those who disagreed with them. The discussions were broken and unproductive. The family was “stuck”. What happened with this family is described in the last paragraph, but the really important stuff lies in the dynamics that animated the solution.

While this situation above may have been a bit more complicated than most because of the number of people and family branches involved, this basic situation is not unusual. Persistent conflict in families is almost always rooted in situations where people who hold opposing positions have become entrenched. The family cannot make decisions for the common good because they are frozen. Consequently, everyone suffers.

This inability to make collective decisions is a problem of governance.

As I interviewed family members, I realized that I needed to help the family shift from being “positional” to being “perspectival”.

What do I mean by “perspectival”?  For me, it means that individuals are able to see behind the positions they are holding to get at the real interests driving the positions they are defending or advancing. I have found that people take positions because they see the solution they are espousing as the only way to get what they want. They have become locked into their positions because their field of perceived options has narrowed to a singular approach.

Things begin to get unstuck when the deeper interests become visible to the entire family and the positional cloak begins to drop away. For example, one family member might be arguing against a particular change because of a deeper concern that change will cause the family to fall apart, while another may be arguing against change because it will “ruin a sure thing” and yet another because their short run immediate economic interests will be hurt. Those supporting the change have equally diverse interests and perspectives.

What happens in most families is that the person taking a strong position either assumes everyone shares the same understanding of the “truth of the situation” or the “facts” (because they are “obvious”) and the argument is largely one of means rather than ends. This is often not true. People actually see different facts or are making sense of a particular situation in very different ways. When these assumptions are not visible to self or other, they become impediments to reaching agreements.

Alternatively, family members often think that it must be obvious to everyone what most concerns them by virtue of the position they are taking. Rarely is this the case. In fact, most people, when push comes to shove, cannot clearly articulate even to themselves what their core interests truly are – they can argue their position quite effectively, but they have to think long and  hard to have even modest insight into what the perspective driving that position actually is. Most often the anxieties that underlie their positions and perspectives are even more opaque to them and to others.

Getting behind the position to make the driving perspective visible to the individuals themselves and to the family as a whole allows for a very different conversation to emerge.

Once people begin to see the perspectives of others – rather than simply seeing one another’s clashing positions – they can begin to discover areas of common ground and compromise that take into account the interests and concerns of all the family members.  With facilitation, they begin to ask very creative questions about how best to address these various interests in ways that will meet the deeper needs of all concerned and the family system as a whole.  In short, they begin to see and understand their common good. This focus on solutions that meet the needs or interests of the individuals are often the optimal solutions; far superior to any of the knee jerk positions that had been driving the argument prior to the deeper work of finding common ground, areas of give and take, and creative solutions to systemic issues. In short, these families start making better decisions together, which is the heart of healthy governance.

So what happened with the family I described above?

After a good deal of thought in designing a structure for the discussion, people were assigned to various groups that represented differing perspectives and then made the best cases they could for action that would “protect” that broader perspective. In this case, based on interviews of what mattered to various family members, these competing perspectives were loosely based on a Native American medicine wheel model.  The family was divided into four groups. One group focused on advancing into the future, one on preserving the wisdom of the past, one on what was required to have the family move forward as a cohesive whole, and one on what immediate actions were required. People were required to “protect” their assigned perspective which wasn’t necessarily reflective of their own point of view. However, because others were representing what was most important to them, they actually relaxed enough to see the world from these other perspectives. This led to some creative and useful solutions for this particular family that were “out of the box” of what they had previously considered. While not all conflict is now resolved, the core agreements  made in that meeting have proven durable.

— February 25, 2013