PIC No. 96:
• Title: Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In
• Authors: Robert Bordone and Joel Salinas, M.D.
• Publisher: Harper Business (March 18, 2025, 400 pages)
• Management Bucket #7 of 20: The People Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 96 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
Set Up 5 Chairs!
OK, be honest. You already know someone on your team (or in your family) who should read this book, right? Not so fast, the authors warn!
Here’s your wake-up call:
“The hard truth is
that conflict isn’t the problem.
We are.”
Oh, my. The co-authors of Conflict Resilience (their term) leverage their faculty years at Harvard Law School (Robert Bordone) and Harvard Medical School (Joel Salinas, M.D.) to deliver a powerful book (“a toolkit”) for negotiating conflicts and disagreements. The big idea: we must rethink our relationship with conflict.
Sound familiar? “…your heart races, your breath shortens, your muscles tighten.” Maybe “if certain conflict situations trigger especially painful negative signals for you (like high-stakes disagreements with your boss, spouse, or parent), chances are your brain will make it all too easy for you to react by choosing your go-to option among the five F’s:
• FIGHT (combative overcompensation or counterattacking)
• FLIGHT (avoidance)
• FREEZE (stonewalling or experiencing feelings of disconnection with your body or surroundings, known as depersonalization, dissociation, and derealization)
• FAWN (placating or inappropriate yielding)
• FESTER (numbing or suppressing, often with substances that in excess are highly destructive or deadly).”
Here’s the problem. The “Five F’s” are not helpful. We must, instead, think about our thinking. “We find ourselves in a culture and society that sees conflict as poisonous and to be avoided or ‘winner-takes-all.’ We often live and work in environments—families, social circles, schools, churches, organizations—that paint conflict in a negative and destructive light.” And as Dr. Salinas, a behavioral neurologist and clinical scientist, notes—our brains are part of the problem.
Trust me. When you read this book, you’ll replay those personal and hurtful conflict experiences in your own life. Lightbulbs will come on. They’ll spotlight what you did—what they did—and what might have been.
Peter Drucker preached that “Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes.” It’s not if you’ll have a crisis, but when.” So, should you, and your team members and board members, read this book? Absolutely.
I made 144 notes (I counted them) while reading and digesting Conflict Resilience. With 400 pages (nine chapters and 343 pages, plus notes)—what kept me reading? Here’s a short list: original thinking (backed by brain science), humorous anticipation by the authors of my push-backs, the authors’ transparency, and the in-the-trenches real-life conflict stories. (We’ve been there!) Examples:
• NITPICKER! Robert Bordone (he calls himself “Bob” in the book) joined a volunteer advisory board and “because of his legal background and his expertise in negotiation and process design, he was quick to point out various ways in which the board was eschewing due diligence for the sake of efficiency and harmony.” He became known as a “troublemaker” and “legalistic nitpicker!” (Sound familiar?)
• BBO. “Carmen—a mindless apologizer” (whose default response when in conflict was to say, “I’m sorry”) learned to break bad habits with the “BBO” (the bigger, better offer)—using a “brain science hack.”
• MIRROR. Should Gustavo, a member of his church’s vestry, raise issues about the new rector’s leadership approach? He asked Bob to coach him and they identified six “sides” of Gustavo that he had never thought about. (That’s part of the “mirror” exercise—brilliant!)
Great books deliver great labels and I will use the following descriptive and helpful trio in the years ahead. In Chapter 4, “Embracing Your Negotiation Within: The Self as the Starting Point for Conflict Resilience,” the authors share a simple process for “managing the negotiation within a little easier” which offers both “personal and professional benefits in how you handle conflict and manage across-the table negotiation.” It’s memorable: Mirror Work, Chair Work, and Table Work.
• MIRROR WORK. When we look in the mirror, “we’ve found that distorted self-images, like circus mirrors, can easily replace the image we see of ourselves.” The authors add, “Because of our tendency to evaluate, judge, and criticize certain internal narratives and stories, we end up with a distorted self-image.” The biggest fuel for “circus mirrors?” Shame.
When we look in the mirror, “we’ve found that distorted self-images, like circus mirrors, can easily replace the image we see of ourselves.”
• CHAIR WORK. When you’ve done your mirror work, “If you identify five different sides of yourself, we recommend you set up five chairs in a room. If two or three sides, then two or three chairs.” (The examples will convince you to do this.) Yet… “While separating out the voices by putting them into individual chairs may seem hokey or gimmicky, our own experience is that the physicality of the exercise is part of what forces a reckoning that will set you up for the table work to follow.”
• TABLE WORK. “Table work is the place where we initiate the hard work of representing ourselves in the real world, the hard work of bringing the internal conflict to the table with our counterparties—whether they be a fiancé, a boss, or the imposing members of a school board.” This section notes common pitfalls and “rookie errors.”
Yikes. I may circle back and write a second review after I’ve (hopefully) survived a few more conflicts down the road—using the wisdom and pragmatic insights from this book. But before wrapping this up, here are a few more teasers:
• WARRING SIBLINGS! Why process matters—“whether you are trying to build conflict resilience in your workplace, in your home, in your church, or with your significant other.” (Example: When Bob coaches families on dividing an estate “among warring siblings”—or whether to “withdraw a parent’s life-sustaining medical care in exchange for comfort-oriented palliative care at the end of life.”)
• BEST PRACTICES. In Chapter 7, “Setting the Table: Design a Conflict-Resilient Process,” Bordone and Salinas share five “Best Practices in the Room Where It Happens,” including #5, “Be Raggedy.” They write, “The invitation to ‘be raggedy’ allows participants to ask for an extra measure of grace from others when they are trying to express a viewpoint.”
• LET’S MAKE A DEAL. Also in Chapter 7, the authors spotlight five building blocks for making a deal, including tips on effective brainstorming. And yes, they anticipated our gut responses! “For many of us who spend hours and hours of our work lives in meetings, the mere mention of the word brainstorm is apt to trigger an internal eye roll and a loud voice that says, ‘Ugh. Another hour of my life gone down the drain!'”
• BATNA. Taking a page from the book, Getting to Yes, you’ll learn how to consider alternatives and criteria using the “BATNA” best course of action: “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.” (I could have used this dozens of times at work and at home.)
FINALLY. Noting that several decades ago, “emotional intelligence” would never have been listed “as a required professional competency in a job description,” the authors are hopeful that—in the future, maybe by 2035 or 2050—“conflict resilience” will also be a required professional competency for most leadership positions. Wow—that would be spectacular!
In Chapter 9, “Building Culture,” the authors list five interview questions related to conflict tolerance, interest appraisal, deep listening, effective assertion, and creative process design. Each question includes a “competency rating” from one 1 to 5. Example: Under deep listening, this would score a 1: “The candidate exhibited close-mindedness or an inability to genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints.”
This chapter, alone, is worth the price of the book.
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the People Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies.
[ ] The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, by Ken Sande. (Read my review.)
[ ] Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (The World’s Most Popular Emotional Intelligence Test), by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. (Read my review.)
[ ] Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection, by Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Robert Biswas-Diener (March 25, 2025). (Order from Amazon and watch for my review.)
[ ] How to Get Along with Anyone: The Playbook for Predicting and Preventing Conflict at Work and at Home (Feb. 18, 2025), by John Eliot and Jim Guinn. (Order from Amazon and watch for my review.)
[ ] Overcoming Conflict: How to Deal with Difficult People and Situations, by Bob Phillips. (Read my review.)
[ ] Why We Argue and How to Stop: A Therapist’s Guide to Navigating Disagreements, Managing Emotions, and Creating Healthier Relationships, by Jerry Manney. (Read my review.)
[ ] Daily Wisdom for Peacemaking: A 365-Day Devotional, by Brian Noble. (Order from Amazon.)
[ ] The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown. (Read my review.) Note: The WSJ recently named this book one of “Five Best: Books on Negotiation.”
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In, by Robert Bordone and Joel Salinas, M.D. Listen on Libro (13 hours, 14 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy. For more reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews.
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