Transform and Transcend, by Johan Galtung, and conflict resolution in the intranet arena

Everytime I was taugh or I read about negotiation and conflict resolution, I felt that something was missing. If everybody already knew the same preparation tasks, the same tactics, the same technics to evaluate inputs and outputs, that would mean that the result of the process would always depend on other factors, just precisely what training programs, books and methodologies were not able to teach. This feeling was even more intense when I studied game theory, the branch of mathematics regarding these kind of problems: although highly useful, I though that the most intense and hard conflicts couldn't depend on maximin-minimax tables or Nash equilibria to be resolved.

And here it comes: by pure serendipity (a visit to the Peace Nobel Price Museum in Oslo) I found this book, written by an infatigable conflict fighter who have been involved in many of the most difficult conflicts in the recent history: John Galtung. I was completely attracted by the starting point of the book: there are conflicts that can't be solved. Here you go. Several hundred pages from this point disgressing about conflicts. Wow. What could follow next? What was the whole book about, then?

Here's the catch: there are always conflicts that can't be solved in their own terms, in the terms that the contends have used to set them up at least. These settings have to be transformed in their terms, and transcend in their objectives. Otherwise, you are bound to reach a draw, no matter how hard you try. And a draw is not an option in the most severe cases, wiht human lives at stake.

And if this is not an interesting enough starting point, Galtung take us on a journey in which we are going to see how these kind of conflicts appear in every scale of life: from marriage life, to clash of civilizations. And in every case, independtly of complexity or amount of resources involved, there is only one path to take: transform the conflict. And once transformed, transcend it, because a new range of previously not seen possibilities have been opened to everyone involved.

It's easy to make jokes about some of the examples, taking into account that several of them are very close to my circumstances. The "bullfighter" parabola to describe how Spanish people, mainly Castillian and Basque, behave in conflict situations, are, at some point, hilarious. But, as I can consider myself part of the "problem", maybe I am not entitled to ponder this point without bias.

The applicability of this methodology in innovation processes in organizations is direct and clear. We face position-based negotiations everyday, and people and departments which are to be transformed, commonly reluctant to change, have a huge amount of *arguments* against the need to evolve. The lesson learned here is that, unless your transform the terms of the conflict, and transced it, you will lost the opprotunity to change your organization crushed under a heap of common-sense day-to-day business-as-usual reasons. And how do you transform it? Although you can use the technics described in this book, the solution is always case-specific.

For example: in our project, we have been facing a lot of pressure from Internal Communications department to increase the size of the widget devoted to corporate news, although it implies that our desktop concept would be distorted to a unrecognisable point. What was the true reason to press for this? Fight for pixels? Hunger for protagonism? In fact, there was a completely understandble requirement: as long as its mandate is to reach employees to get them know about corporate news, the only way they have found to improve the hit-ratio was the common practice in traditional webs: more page space to attract more clicks on news!

Once we really got to the root of the problem, we were ready to transform the conflict and transcend, because this offered us new possibilities. For example, we got rid of tabs inside the desktops, using web browser ones instead. And if this was not enough to give them more page space to news, we proposed them to give a bigger protagonism to image and lesser to text, which provokes a more intense call-to-action effect.

Coming back to the book, I have to admit that I've enjoyed this reading a lot and it was a really useful lesson in a very special period of my life... and a lifelong lesson indeed, professional and personally speaking.