I am a commuter. For me to get to work I take a total of four trains across three different states (and back!). I know, it sounds long! But I enjoy the hum drum of the rails and manage to get a bit of work done in the process. In all, it takes me around two hours from the front door of my apartment to the black chalk board of my classroom.
For the latter half of my commute to work, along the uptown 1/2/3 train, I often find myself taking a break from people watching to look at the ads in the subway cars. It is interesting to see how businesses and public services are attempting to reach customers in a post-ish-pandemic world.
I took the photo at the top of this post during one such commute. In its messaging, I found there are some interesting avenues to explore regarding productive conflict.
For one, the position that “everyone should have an opinion” is a distinctly east coast, if not New York, way of thinking. Where I grew up in the midwest, opinions are to be used sparingly, perhaps even gently, as part of a communal effort to get along by way of staying out of other’s people’s business. This is, after all, a little easier to do when you have a few acres between you and the next person.
However, in our places of work, miniature cities in themselves with their own politics, there needs to be a way to navigate and manage the range of opinions shared among the group without fighting everyone who disagrees with us.
If everyone should have opinion, an important question gets raised: should everyone say their opinion?
In a previous post, I offered that people with conflicting opinions should simply Just Say It.
Looked at from another angle, the more important way of thinking about our opinions is not whether or not we should say them, but how we can help people who do not have opinions, or people who have them but don’t know how to raise them, articulate their ideas in a productive matter.
Put another way, if everyone should have an opinion, how can we go about sharing (and listening) to those opinions in ways that help us move beyond “he said/she said” or, at worst, “I said!!!”?
In small towns like the one I grew up in, people tend to share their opinions at designated time and places (like the school board or city council meeting). In our offices and city streets, where people are crammed together, the designated place could be at the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change, or the topside of a cubicle wall. The designated time is, sometimes unfortunately, whenever a thought occurs to someone.
I raise the distinctions between designated and undesignated sites of opinion-sharing to help us think of productive conflict in terms of cultural differences. Cultural differences exist when we move from one place to another, and need not be limited by big geography or nationality; cultural difference can be found daily, for example, when we move from the conference room to the dinner table.
The point I’m making is that behavior is not random but, among other things, culturally taught and reinforced. As the Buddhist’s remind us, “there’s a cause and condition for everything,” including why people act the way they do (and do not).
So, wherever you come from, and wherever you are going, you have a cultural norm for how to, or how not to, share an opinion.
The takeaway is that is that simply having an opinion does not constitute conflict nor does it in itself foster anything productive.
An opinion is just that, an opinion. To transform those little nuggets of what you think ought to happen into what is actually happening, more work needs to be done. You need rhetorical strategy to communicate effectively, but you also need to value what the others at the table think ought to happen.
And then, once all the oughts are out in the open, rhetorical work can begin anew on figuring out if your next move is to persuade, to negotiate, to compromise, or to continue the inquiry (perhaps by Saying a Little Less?)
Masks may be like opinions, in that everyone should have one. But masks are also like conflicts, in that if they are used correctly, can be a productive way to handle problems faced by our communities.
Next week: The soft connections in life…