 Thank you folks so much for coming to this session today. It really means a lot to me that you would give me some time, and I'm really excited to talk to you. My name is Ana Marie Sayed. I'm an engineering manager. I'll tell you a fact about my last name. It actually means leader in Arabic, but the two most common mispronunciations mean Fisherman and happy. It's cool. You can call me however you think that you should pronounce that set of letters, but officially it's Sayed, which rhymes with head, I guess. Yeah, and so we're going to do a presentation on something that I have a lot of experience failing at and that's resolving conflicts. All right. Let me know if you think, oh, she's going too fast, she's going too slow. This is supposed to be a workshop, and so I would love it if you feel safe enough to talk, but if you don't, that's fine. Not everyone. Ah, hi. All right. So in case you're not sure what this session is about, I used a bunch of pictures of people playing rugby because gosh, there's so much conflict in rugby. I played college rugby, but I'm too old now. We're here to talk about how to navigate conflicts that we face on open source teams, and the way that we're going to do that is we're going to establish a taxonomy of different kinds of conflicts, and then we're going to look at different solutions or different strategies for solving them, kind of trying to make a table for you. So anytime you face a conflict, I'm going to give them a minute because I get all distracted. My friend Petter is going to be the session chair here because we're missing someone. Petter is the kindest, best tour guide. If you don't know something about Brno, this guy here knows all of it. So thanks to Petter and thank you, Martin, and it's your new faces and familiar faces. I'm really so, so happy. All right. So we're going to try to establish a taxonomy of different conflict types, and you might, I would say, admit a patch, come up with your own taxonomy. I'm going to tell you the one that I think works best for me with my contacts with open source communities, and I hope some of it will be useful for you. So what we're going to likely do here, I'm kind of discombobulated trying to find something to time myself on. I'm going to try to do taxonomy for 20 minutes, strategies for 20 minutes, and then we can do a practicum where you try to sort through some conflicts on your own or with me, but really right now, live. All right. I wanted to talk about psychological safety explicitly, and I just, I want you to know that we have different styles for how we feel comfortable practicing. This is a group of, I don't know how many you are. Let's say there's maybe 25 or 30 folks here. Not everybody is able to talk. That's fine. I know your brains are still working. You don't have to prove it by talking. But if you do want to talk, I can make you some promises. And the first one is that I will listen to you, and I will do my best to make sure that everybody else listens to you. And if we have an unsafe environment where someone isn't listening or is being rude, then we'll address it before we move on. Okay. Anyway, thanks for coming. All right. So, the reason that I think we should have a taxonomy, or like a collection of types of conflicts, is because I think that the strategy you decide to use to resolve them will change depending on what kind of conflict it is. So, you know, with an open source project where you're volunteering, you are deeply invested, your investment can lead you to have a strong emotional attachment. So, some conflict comes up and it can feel terrible. It can feel overwhelming. The first conflict I'm gonna tell you about, I cried my head off. And if I had kind of known, okay, it's this type. These are the ways I can probably solve it. It would have been healthier for me in the short term. So, the main types that we're gonna talk about today, the first is interpersonal. That's, you know, you and somebody else, you just, you don't like each other. You bug each other. That's interpersonal conflict. Value-based conflict, that's where you have a set of values. Someone else has a set of values. And you're trying to navigate a problem in common, but your values and their values are not compatible. It happens a lot in open source. Issue or data conflict, that's where you've got a task that you're trying to work on. Everybody understands the task, but you have different ideas, conflicting ideas about how you're gonna resolve it. That's issue or data conflict. Organizational conflict, this is you versus the man sometimes. This is where it's not between two people. It's you and an entity, or you and a rule, or you and an organizational standard. And then the last type that we're gonna talk about today is, I think maybe the most common, where it's not just this is purely interpersonal conflict or purely a value-based conflict, it's a conflict that has different components in it. And so addressing it completely, you'll need to know different strategies and put them together. So I'm gonna go first. I think a good policy is, don't ask your audience to do something that you're not willing to do yourself. So I'm gonna do my exercise here, which says, think of a conflict you are experiencing. What type is it? And I'm gonna give you an example from my personal life. Most of the examples in here are from when I was a young woman working on open source so about 25 years ago. I've tried to pick really old open source conflicts so that if we have investment in them, our feelings have quieted down a little bit and it's easy to talk. But a current one I'm having right now, I'm renting a house where I live in Detroit. The piping, that's a piping. The pipes are a disaster. From April 17th until June 7th, I had no hot water and I have five kids. Okay, so my house is a disaster and I'm trying to rent a new house. The tiny little school district I'm in has this crazy frackle shape of a boundary and so I'm having a hard time finding a house I can rent from me and my five kids in that school district. I am saying, kiddos, I love you very much. I'm gonna be your consistency. We're switching schools. They are saying, Mama, from Dubai to America. You have moved. This is a conflict that I have in my life right now and we'll talk about it because some of the different strategies here, not all of them are. So what do you think? Am I having an interpersonal conflict with my kids? Were they're bugging me? I love them. I mean, you can love people who bug you. That's true. But it's not an interpersonal conflict. Am I having a value-based conflict? Yeah, yeah. I value not spending my whole paycheck. They value staying with their friends. What will we do? Could also be an issue conflict. We ask to move houses and we don't understand how to cooperate but it's not organizational. It's not like us versus the man here. So organizational part of this conflict, it's me versus the school district. I said, hey, Buds, how about if I move real close and I drive the kids? They said, no way. That's what's going on with my conflict. Does anybody have one that you wanna tell us about? Stream versus product. Oh. And that makes upstream and north with stability versus stability in the downstream and if people on the team can work and both and have different natural tendencies to make upstream as stable as you think was. Beautiful. That's a classic open source conflict. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Tanya. Anybody else wanna tell us about one? I would say anything you say will not leave the room but I didn't know they were streaming this talk. So in reality, anything you say may go anywhere in the world or to Mars. Thanks, Tanya. Yes, yeah. Okay, so I didn't, did you say your name? Would you say your name? Nice to meet you, Stefano. So I remembered that Martin told me repeat questions so I'm gonna repeat your question. Stefano is asking about if you have a bias-based conflict. Where do you put that? Stefano, you're like teeing me up for my next slide which is a bias-based conflict. I put it personally, I put it into interpersonal. Can you, so Stefano says, yeah, it depends. Maybe, maybe not. Can you explain it more? It could be organizational, right? You know, when I went to, oh my God, you guys, all right. Or even value-based. Or even, or value-based. It could be a lot of things, right? When I went to university, I went to MIT which didn't have many women at the time and the women's bathrooms were only on alternate floors. Like if we had to go to the bathroom, we had to like, where am I? Go up a floor, try to find the bathroom. Come on down. This was a conflict that was organizational. Yeah. Do you want a based one, Stefano? I'll get back to you. Thank you, thank you. Does anybody else want to say something about biases and conflict? Thank you, Stefano. All right, so let's move on. Interpersonal conflicts at work where you can't get away from people because they're on your team. This is the most common kind that arises. They usually stem from a personality difference. And when you're resolving this, my big hint to you is that you're gonna have to resolve this inside of yourself, right? Have you ever, if you've ever been married as a double divorcee, I can tell you for certain, that you can't change how someone else behaves. Not very much. You can maybe change them a little bit. But in order to make peace with a conflict like this, usually you have to change your personal investment in it. You can try checking your behavior. You can try changing your expectations. I will, 22 years ago. So picture it. Copenhagen, April 2001. It's aquatic. And I am talking about user interface design. And RMS, Richard Stallman, is in the audience. And I am going on, you know, we're designing this email client, Evolution, it was called at the time. And we're kind of emulating the look of outlook because we don't want people who are using outlook to be confused. I'm talking about UI design and outlook. And Richard Stallman stands up and raised his voice and said, APIs are interfaces too. And it kind of disintegrated there. I went to store mode like this and he eventually sat down. But you know, to this day, I have like a hard feeling in my heart. I think, I don't know what he thought. Maybe he thought, I'm famous, I can stand up and talk. Or maybe he thought, this person doesn't look like she knows open source, I can stand up and talk. I'm not sure what he thought. What I thought was, I came to freaking Denmark to do this presentation and you're interrupting me. And so it caused like a hardness in my heart. So there's one from back in the day of open source for you. Do any of you wanna talk about an interpersonal conflict that you've dealt with in your life or at your work or in open source? You can change the names. I think we understand this one, right? You've met people and you just don't get along sometimes. It happens. All right, value conflicts. I have such a doozy for this one. Oh, shoot, patoot, okay. What do we think happened here? Does anybody have a guess for me for how to solve this? Cause I legit don't know. Okay, was that you? Did you fix it? Oh, thank you. Thank you magic angel, whoever you are. So this happens when people are both invested in something, but they have different values that they've brought with them. So the hints I have, by the way, are different resolution strategies. I'm just trying to tell you the taxonomy now and give you a couple hints, but we'll do a whole part on the strategies next. So if you feel like, man, you didn't give us any strategies, just please hold your horses. Hints for this one. What could help is recognizing that values aren't universal. Clear and explicit about how you explain your values. Just we're trying to move down that quotient from misunderstanding. So that's, other thing you could do is learn about what other people value. Those are my hints for this one. So can you tell us about a values conflict that navigated? Okay, I will tell you one. It's kind of dramatic in exchange for me telling you what I hope someone will also tell me one. Ooh, okay. So I'm 46. When I was 31, I was still not married. And in my culture, I'm from a Muslim culture background. In my culture, that was very old. And the people in my community started saying, you need to get married. No one's gonna wanna marry you. You're gonna be an old maid. And I thought, oh, how are you getting married at what now looks to me like a young age? So I married to someone. I moved to the Middle East with them. It was a disaster. It didn't work out. That was divorce number one. This was a hard thing in not mixing personal values with the values of my culture or the values of my community. Yeah, so now that I've told you about filled marriage and trip to the Middle East, do you have any values conflict you wanna share? There's so many of us with some of them in the beginning with how much planning was valued over conflict. Many of us have been included in the ones that I started. Someone shows up congregating, they have a lot of respect. That is like the very strong current, that's very valuable. Then I showed up at some project and I was doing integration between different projects. And showing up with a patch before having conversations was one of the worst things you could do. And they were like, who do you think you are? I think you can write that code. So why didn't you talk to us first to bring this up? And so it was fascinating how the different values were just, I mean, eventually everyone wants to make progress, right, as a good foundation. But the different values were absolutely just a code between the different ones. That is a challenging one. Thank you for sharing that with us. Anybody else have a value-based one? I have one for you. I'm not, you know, I'm a little bit worried that I shouldn't share it. It's about X free 86 versus the FSF. Okay, here's an old value conflict in open source. That's not a perfect match, but I'm trying to show you how it does happen in open source communities. So back in the day, I think 2007 or so, X free 86 is gonna release version 4.4. And they're made a change to their license. They're adding a credit clause, like a traditional BSD license. FSF says this is no longer compatible with the jail. If you go forward with this, be warned. Well, they went forward with it. They kept their change to their license. They lost the majority of their users. So here's a case where licensing is a value that we hold dear and can lead to pretty catastrophic consequences for that project. I know this is that, I'm from Mellons and we're quite direct and very, very open, whereas at one point I was interviewing someone in India and it wasn't possible for me to understand his opinions, which is very important to me. So by concluding at the end of the interview, I basically, I don't know. Like based on the interview, is that critical? I would say I will never hire you because you're gonna make your opinions. But I know that in India, that's different. So what do you do with that? Oh, okay. I had that one as well. I worked for a company called On Ganon. And in 2004, I went and I lived in Bangalore where I was teaching software design. And my first lecture, I put like all kinds of colorful examples. I had John Denver crashing his helicopter and the ballot disaster in Florida. American examples. I hope I had some American centric. Look, probably culturally tone deaf. But I thought, oh, they'll be roaring with laughter. They'll be talking to me. And it was so quiet. And I went home and did my normal solution to conflict, which is cry. And it took me a long time. It just took time for me to understand this wasn't disengagement. This was respect. And so with that one, what I ended up doing was noticing how the folks on my team in Bangalore responded to share food with me. I remember the last session that I gave there, I had a big, God, more American stuff. I had a big bag of American saltwater taffy. And we played Jeopardy. And I found that if I bribed people with candy, they would stand up and shout. So take time. Be explicit. I'm expecting to hear you talk about X, Y, Z. Those are some hints that I have. Yeah. I will say I read the book, the culture map back in Mayer, and that was very useful to understand. At least there was difference. Ah, beautiful. How do you spell the last name? Every Mayer with M-E-Y-E-R. Okay. The culture map is a recommendation. So we're getting, for streaming people, we're getting a recommendation to read the cultural map by Erin Mayer. Thank you for your recommendation. All right. Anybody else want to talk about a value conflict? Hi. Mm-hmm. Oh, thank you so much for sharing that example. For sure, for sure. Oh, right. Let's see what the next one is here. Oh. Issue and data conflicts. All right. This is where you have a common task that needs to be solved, and people have perhaps strongly held different opinions about how to solve it. So the example I have from ancient GNOME, GNOME 2. We were trying to design the menuing system, and we had these, what do you call them? Applications. Like Nautilus. I wonder, do you know what Nautilus is? You probably do know what Nautilus is, because you came to Open Source Development Conference, but it's a file manager. So this name isn't descriptive. So we had a task, right? Design the menus, and we had some folks who said, hold them by their proper names. And other people who said, give them a descriptive name, so no one has to know what Nautilus is, just so they can go find their downloads folder. In this case, keeping your lines of communication open, trying to not shut those down. You cannot go sulk in the corner quietly and get this one resolved. There is an idiom. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. It means putting something out there in the open where the sun can hit it, or where our eyes can be on it. That's the best way usually to work on solving this one. Anybody have an issue-based conflict that you wanna tell us about? What do I have here? Oh, I already told you. When I first started my job at Red Hat, one of my first responsibilities was to write the status report from my little group. And I love writing. I love creative writing. And so I would write these long status reports that were like all about the ins and outs of our CI travails. And my boss would take them and cut them down, send them up. And I would be like, oh, don't you appreciate my beautiful writing, dude? This was just a case we're talking to him. His name was Dominic. Hey, Dominic, what's going on? And having him be really explicit with me. You know, your teacher's one of many. This is not the form for your beautiful writing. That was a misunderstood task on my part. All right. Oh-ho. I have an EMACS conflict in this one for you to hear about, an organizational EMACS conflict, if you'd believe it. So the point of this slide is to say that between people, that they're between a person and an organizational standard or a rule or something, this can be really hard to resolve because it's not about people, right? It's you and something often much bigger and much more powerful than you. How are you gonna resolve that? So what has worked for me the best with this one is finding out where the support lies. So looking for who around me can support me. Maybe we're not gonna change the policy, but support me and how I'm feeling. So look for allies, so you're not alone if you're feeling this way. Sometimes avoiding this is better. Sometimes saying, you know what? This process really triggers me and I don't wanna be near it. I am gonna go and I'm not gonna engage with that. That can also be a way that you help to protect yourself. All right. I'll tell you an ancient one from back in the day. All right. This is from 1993. GNU Emacs was the Emacs standard and Lucid was also contributing patches to GNU Emacs and it was getting a little dire for them because there had not been an Emacs release in years and so they were creating a fork. We are going to make Lucid Emacs, now X Emacs. We're gonna make Lucid Emacs and then in the future GNU Emacs, when you accept our patches, we will then merge back into head. We'll be one Emacs once again. But the GNU Emacs folks didn't have that same need. You know they didn't need to do a release right away so they didn't. There was this conflict that eventually led to completely different Emacs streams going forward. It was a fork. All right. Organizational conflict examples from anybody? Sergei? Yeah, once we left it, you forgot to put on your phone. Thank you, Sergei. Thank you, Sergei. That's a really nice example. Anybody else have an organizational one before we talk about the mother of all types? The compound. Complete from first taking of old cycle. Okay. Long story short, you know, we work in development sometimes with our product, sometimes with someone else's product, some other times we are just a product. So this is one of these kind of scenarios that I get about because the person on the other side, so whether it's, you know, come or some other engineer, whoever thinks that my component is a fault, I do like the work, but at the end of this journey, I realized that the problem is like my problem is in someone's. At this moment, I make a decision, maybe wrong, maybe not, but I would keep having this, you know, this defensive part on myself. I would work as a patient to treat this issue. We know how likely it sounds like human. I still have nothing to give to my customer. Sure, if he had to find it, it was completely because, you know, he's fighting against the process. But at the end of the journey, it's found because from perspective of any side, you know, you know, I don't think the problem is, but depending on who you are so much are here, it may be different. So this is, you know, what kind of tricks you're trying to apply to these. Right, right, depending on who you asked if we interviewed him, he'd say it was interpersonal, that guy. Yeah, I really appreciate your example. Thank you. Everything okay? You folks? So sorry, okay. I think I'm gonna come up and shake hands. Sometimes a conflict has more than one major source. And sometimes this happens because a simpler conflict has gone on for a very long time. Like you should have had your wisdom teeth out when you were 12, Anna, but you had them out when you were 45. So I was having excessive headaches because I didn't take care of a small problem 30 years before when I said that. So this can give you an issue, right? This conflict has cards. I don't know which one to address first. Which one is important to address first? How do I deal with this conflict situation? I personally do best with this one when I think about a body metaphor or human health metaphor, right? One of my kids, he just had strep throat and COVID at the same time. So I didn't have the option to say no worries, but I'll deal with the COVID first and we'll just let the strep throat go on. No, that one had to be dealt with. Both of them had to be dealt with at the same time. But you can imagine, you know, if you're a hospital technician or a hospital doctor, someone comes in and she has a gunshot wound to the shoulder and she also stubbed her toe. I mean, one of these problems has a dire immediate effect on her long-term survival. The other is merely inconvenient. So when you prioritize solving these, you can either start with, okay, what's simple and natural for me? Get that part solved. Then work on what's not so simple for me. Or you can say, look, we've got multiple things at play here, but one is really critical and is gonna cause us to really break down. Let's try to take care of that first. That is up to you. You have a compound. Would anyone like to come up here, shake hands and tell about a compound conflict? You don't have to shake hands with me if you don't want to. Okay, okay, Pinocchi. We'll keep going for now. If you think of one, then just let me know, all right? Resolving conflicts. I was trying to come up with an acronym for you folks. Is that the word? I think it is the word, yeah. But the issue is that the five strategies we're gonna use, two of them start with A and three of them start with C. So caca is the only acronym I could come up with and I felt like you might not take me seriously if I spent the next 40 minutes talking about that. So these different approaches are not exhaustive. Some negotiators will tell you there is more than five. Some people think there's only four. Some say seven. I find these five useful. Maybe you will too. I'll just tell you briefly what they are. I would ask from you is to think is one of these natural to me? Do I have like a natural conflict resolution style? Because if you have a natural one, you can lean into that. Conformization, that's you decide to let them win. You just decide to let it. It's more important to them, not that important to you or maybe you want to show them that you value their opinion, you value openness, you let that one go. That's accommodation. Compromise, both of you give up something, both of you get something. Everyone is mildly unhappy if you can move on from there. That's compromise. Avoidance, avoidance is we're gonna turn away from this conflict, we're gonna leave this one unresolved. It is sometimes appropriate to say we're gonna leave this unresolved. Like if the people involved in the conflict, if they're not the best ones to try to solve it, then for them to leave it and let someone else resolve it, that's an example of when avoidance for them is more healthy. Competition, competition is when the more powerful party sort of puts the smack down and says, you know what, the solution is this. Now we're done with this conflict, move on. Collaboration is like the holy grail of conflict resolution. It's the only win, win in this whole set. And that's where you say, okay, we are going to work together to craft a mutually beneficial solution together. You know, sometimes it works. So my natural tendency is probably compromise and a little bit of accommodation and a little bit of competition. Do any of you folks wanna stay or get? What is the difference between compromise and, yeah, if you compromise, like if you and I are making lunch and I say, we're gonna have tacos. And Sergei says, we're gonna have pizza. And so Sergei and I compromise, we have taco pizza. Okay, so then we don't need someone like, I don't know, Karen to say, nope. You guys are done, you guys are done. So competition, it should have a different name, it should have something like other people deciding for you and you moving on. Anybody else have a natural one or one that you know you don't like? You don't like avoidance. Stefano is saying that he, I'm sorry, I'm supposed to be asked to come up here. I'm so sorry, I keep forgetting that. Sorry, streaming friends. Stefano is saying that he really doesn't like avoidance as a strategy because he believes it can make conflicts grow into compound conflicts, thank you. Stef? In particular avoidance. But I know there's also things like accommodation. Yeah. Opposition, delay. Yep, Stef is noticing that many of these strategies don't effectively resolve the entire conflict. They maybe resolve part of it, they postpone some of it. But you know Stef, there are times where an immediate resolution has to happen and so we end up saying, all right, we're gonna have to go with something like the competition strategy, which is definitive and final because we can't let this drag on anymore. Other times a little bit of space and time between people is healthy. But I think Stef makes a good, yeah, thank you. Anything else? Yes, sir, in the back. Yes. At a certain time, did you see Roberto was here? Yeah, wow. Did you see Roberto, what's your name? Alberto. Alberto, I love to ask if time is a consideration. Time is a big consideration. Collaboration as a strategy usually happens after a conflict has sat around for a long time. You've found out there's no solution to it, leaving it isn't making it better. That is when collaboration is more common because you've spent so much time trying to find other solutions that haven't worked. You know then, all right, we're both gonna have to build something new. Time also comes into play a lot with avoidance. Maybe it's not appropriate to have it solved right in that instant. And so avoiding the issue is, because it gives you time to cool down, right? Sometimes people have such hot temper that the healthiest thing is to say, let's put this on ice for a while until we're able to talk about it. Without being rude or hurtful. Understand which way the thing is all the way. Oh, Karen raises a brilliant idea. Karen is asking if it's the other person who's not aware of what strategy you're using. Karen, I don't know. I don't know. Do you folks think you're trying to resolve a conflict? Is it helpful for them to know which one you're doing? I would say, Karen, with accommodation, if you're gonna let them have a, sometimes I feel tempted to say like, hey, we're doing it your way this time, but, yeah. And that I don't think is very helpful, you know? But what, Anna, really. Yeah. So I can maybe give an example of a true good or bad because, of course, it's a way of how I interpret it. And this, this is about number four for competition. So this happens if you have a dream or a general in common contribution. It often happens that people start discussing, discussing, talking, but you need to finish the talk. You have something. And sometimes, you know, very small details can slow it down for a week and how often it happens. And, you know, whether the discussion's saying explicitly it can take so long that I take the authority to just cut the, I think, become the problem in the future, we will come back to this. And this is my, you know, my, my humble distinction. I take the authority to explain that. You're taking accountability. You're saying I'm accountable for this one. Yeah, thank you for sharing. Okay, I have a question. I see folks making for the door. I thought this session went until 150, 150. Does it go to 120? No, 150, okay, cool. Okay, so we still have some time. That's good. And this, I have got a couple of slides here that just go a little bit more into these types. So accommodation is lose when, right? One person loses because someone else wins. So you end up using this the most. You wanna show that you're fair or you don't want to be a dictator and shut down someone else's opinion. So you're trying to get the most of their opinion. You might in that case say, okay, let's make this decision the way you wanna make it. If it's more important to one of you than the other one, then you might wanna go for accommodation. It matters so much to them. It doesn't matter that much to you, so you can accommodate. Or if the relationship is more important than whatever the issue is. So that's accommodation. Does that one make sense? Yeah. Compromise, all right. This is we both win and lose. So win, lose, win, lose. Someone will give something up. Both of you will give something up. Both of you will get your point. Let's see, we've kind of discussed about this. So it's best used when everyone has equal power, right? So if it's me and the CEO of my company, does he want to compromise with me? No, is that even healthy? My scope of control is rel upgrades and conversions. His scope of control is something much different than that. It's probably not healthy for us to compromise. Sometimes for a temporary resolution. Alberto I think in the back was asking about timing. Yeah, compromise can work in the short term. We really solve this now, but let's make something good enough so we're not stuck. So that's compromising. Anybody love compromising? Is it anybody's favorite strategy? Yeah, can you say why? Yeah, ideally both sides get something. What about you? If someone gets what they want, because in this case, no one is truly happy. Ah, right, right, that makes sense. It's fine, it works for me, I mean, I'm fine, but I've heard that so many times from other folks are the folks who represent other people. Thanks for sharing both opinions. I say there's two ladies here in the back. The lady with the green glasses was had her hand up first. Question that was followed by your comments over there, which is sometimes we in the team have with the compromise, but then it has come back after someone was not happy with the resolution and then that's turned into another conflict. So my question would be, so how do you handle this new conflict that comes from an old compromise solution? So ultimately usually with something like that, where it keeps coming up, keeps coming up, usually you have to collaborate if you actually want it to be solved. Yes? I have a question. You often find that when you lose or lose win situation, can't it be a win-win situation in a compromise? If you both haven't put something down, oh, I'm sorry. Petra was trying to tell me something. The question was, does compromise have to be you both lose something and you both win something? Is it win-lose? Win-lose? I guess if you're incredibly fortunate and you find a solution that you didn't, either you need to lose something, then yeah, that would be win and win. Yeah, now we're being, so thank you. I was going to ask the fact that earlier comments about compromise come up again. Is that more common with the previous one, accommodation? Yeah, so the question here was, does accommodation actually solve the conflict forever or does it make it come back again and again? Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe Sergei and I, we make our, maybe we make one decision about lunch and then next week we have lunch again and we have to revisit that, it can. Or you know, if it matters so much more to them than it does to you, you can let it go in your heart, you can say. Yeah, but it can also lead to personal problems. Yeah. Right, right, right, right. Accommodating can definitely lead to resentment and avoidance. I think it's really really good. I think if you let it go, then it's done. Yes, it's good. Some people have to let it go because it's a family thing and then they can't let it go. But then, but then they don't do it properly. Yes. If you let it go in that instance, that's fine. You can really forget about that. But the lunch was a really great example of it because you're having a lot of decay. If you take a strategy forever, then it goes up. Yeah. Yes. So I want to ask on this, directly for that, that you can use, at which moment and how do you steal that conflict resolution in case of compromise or delay, accommodation and so on? Because we had this example where your accountant comes back and this was often happened. Let's say you have, for example, a team of seven people and they need to do something. And probably the most common strategy will be compromise because you cannot make all seven people happy. This is very unique and you are lucky to manage. But then what happened in reality? You had a team, you discussed, you reached compromise. So you cleared the meeting with the thought that I steal the deal. Everyone, you know, is agreed. No, I'm not saying happy intentionally, but everyone has agreed it. But then during the next hours, you get feedback directly, you know, from person to person. I'm not really happy with what we discussed, but like that, and then it makes you realize that you didn't really solve any conflict because it's very difficult. Because people, you know, people were maybe they were doing something all over, so they would just, ah, whatever, let's compromise and move forward. But they needed to come back to you and tell you, oh, I'm not happy at all for me, it's not complicated. And then because none of those seven people got what they wanted, then from the feedback you gathered, it's not even compromise. You just lost, you lost the battle on all the ground. We're hearing about the painful and probably familiar situation where you thought you decided it was in the meeting and nobody actually really agreed. My advice, and I'd love to hear what other people's advice is, my advice is at the beginning of the meeting, be crisp about how you're going to decide X, Y, Z. Our mission is to decide X, Y, Z. Take notes during the meeting. Record what the decision was. Make sure before you leave that people see what you have recorded. At least here in the situation, there's less room for interpretation. More, do you guys have more thoughts? What can do in that situation? I would just make sure that they would listen to no crisis, no otherwise, as I said, it is to make it to open double interpretation. Now, if you have everything in the right reason and don't grab very transparent, it's usually like help and don't have to think. Think. Right. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. What we are disguising together is present in the decision framework. Ha ha ha ha. We are. Yeah. That's great. That means I want to put a marker point just out of the table in transparency. And as you are saying in the beginning, we have a decision that they can. And also, it would have been very clear on the rules. Right. How the decision would be taken so time is important. But also, are we voting them in the end? Are we contributing? Are we setting down all the contribution and put two days for the final decision to get it done? And who is the final decision taken? Stefano is talking about being crisp and clear up front about what the process will be. Some people, they use a racy matrix where they say this matrix describes who's responsible, who's accountable. What does C stand for? I don't remember. Consulted. Who will be consulted and who will be informed? So having a really clear description of rules and rules that can also help to make the compromise. At work, for some matters, are we need an ax? This decision is gonna need three ax, three. I guess it stands for acknowledgement, probably. So that's like a voting mechanism. Yes, friend in the back. I want to, for each of you, each of you is a decision being made. So I don't think it's going to be easier for me to decide if I will make the right which process versus if I'm not in the decision. Because I'm willing to say that it doesn't affect effectiveness. It makes the process a lot of different objectives. But overall my happiness or unhappiness, so we lose, it's not much better because I'm still not happy with the decision. So it's like we are deciding whether we tackle for pizza and I'm thinking the process of this. Okay, let's go for tacos because it's cheaper. So I think we have to eat tacos whether I like it or not. We have to eat over this. Yeah. Yeah, the frozen pizza scenario has grown and become a question or the comment is about transparency not necessarily yielding happiness. If I thought I had a stake in this decision and I don't win, I don't get my way, then does the transparency help me? Would I have been happier if someone said, hey, we're going for tacos and I didn't feel like I had a vote? Maybe, maybe. I think my advice here would be understand and sign off on the decision framework that you're participating in. Believe it's legitimate or participate in something else. Are you more happy not knowing what you're doing? I hold some framework and then I'm aware that the decision that my process is, they make people unhappy but at the same time, as I said, you cannot make everyone happy. So I'm trying to ask myself, is it going to be helpful? I eat all the food, all the details about how you make decisions about all the process. Like, you know, other person on the other side, other person affected, how much details should I give you to help you? Because I've made it for granted that you will not be happy with this decision and now I'm trying to make those situations better. So you know, I'm trying to help you because anyway you are going to be happy but maybe I can do something or other, have some tricks to make you less unhappy. This is happy, you know what I'm trying to get you. The summary of this one would be, I think the summary is, thank you. I think the summary is, be mindful of how much detail is meaningful when you're communicating a decision, not always complete detail of the entire decision, let's not always be the best. My question for folks is, we have about 15 minutes left and we've got a couple more strategies to talk about, including this one, which I think you're not gonna like, this one is avoidance. Would it be okay to run to avoidance now? Should we avoid the avoidance slide? All right, so nobody takes action to resolve the conflict and so we think of this as lose, lose. I didn't get my way, you didn't get your way either. So the conflict is unresolved. But kind of the question is, why the heck would you ever want that, when that be better? And it actually is better sometimes. So timing is a constraint, right? If all of us know, keep wasting time on it, we're never gonna move to the bigger, more important, avoid that one. You don't need the fuss of not being able to solve it, focus on what's more important. And avoidance is okay, that conflict didn't help us. If, sorry, it's just being divorced twice I have some experience at this one. When the people who are involved need a chance to cool down and spend time apart. You know, it's not actually true that you should resolve everything in that minute. Sometimes your feelings are hurt, they are hurt, you can't hear each other anyway. If you need time, it can be okay to say let's table this for now. You don't have the right scope of authority to resolve this one, maybe someone else is better able to resolve it. Like, kids are playing with a doll, someone rips its head off, now they can't fix it anymore and they're really mad, they probably can't resolve that. Probably someone else, more empowered with an engineering background like me, should resolve it. Sometimes, this is a hard one to explain, sometimes the impact of dealing with the conflict is gonna damage everyone involved. You can solve it, but it's gonna hurt everyone's head and you see, we're all gonna get hurt if we do this, then it might be better to avoid it. So those are some cases where we'd like to avoid a conflict. I had this once in a document I was writing, it was a document for a promotion. So people were gonna vote on it and reviewer said something and I did not agree with them and they did not agree with me and it became a painful situation. In the end, what we decided to do was, the person who is the decision maker can see the conflict on the other side but for that reviewer and I to keep going back and forth, so we avoided it. Anything else on avoidance? Yes? I think it's usually, I'm sure it happens this way, it's both partly seen as a minor. In my opinion, one person seems to be minor, but other people seem to be all with it and that's why conflict is continued, even when one person tries to avoid it. Ah, that was a beautiful comment about, we don't always know how much a conflict matters to someone else, maybe we can ignore it, but to them it wasn't. Thank you. Yes? I also, I want people when I feel like I'm not in the third discussion, so like earlier you mentioned being, having a discussion, I think it's not being heard, then I start reporting it because it doesn't seem useful or why you're not even in the third discussion. Ah, here we're talking about no kind of depression or the giving up, you've participated in the discussion, it didn't go well, if you wanna protect yourself from that feeling and so you decide I'm gonna let it go. Ah, and save time. And save time, and competition. So where one person says I'm gonna use dominance and power and I'm gonna make this decision for you, this conflict will hereby be ended by the sledgehammer approach. This works sometimes if you've tried it and they failed. You might need a decision like this. If it's an emergency, you have to have a quick resolution and there is no time for debate. And sometimes this is appropriate. And I have one, I knew I was gonna take it home versus KDE, yes I knew it, in situations where an unpopular decision has to be made. So back in the day in 2000, three, I think, my startup was acquired by Novell. So my startup, Zimian, we were, oh, Pinot knows, Pinot's my best KDE friend. We were founded by the founder of the GNOME project. So we were a GNOME shop, Novell acquired it. The Linux desktop is the future. We said yes, we know. Then we heard Sousa and we said, we thought the Linux desktop was the future and you were gonna go with GNOME. And they said, well, yes, we have to go, we have to eat, and we're going. And you know, well, you do know, right? They didn't make a decision. A bunch of us quit, but in three years, we had applause. A question. You know people for some time, you know how they behave, how they interact, you know what they like and so on. What I'm doing every now and then probably I shouldn't be saying this, because overall, we may comment that this is a bad strategy. I know from the very beginning of the issue that I'm going to make a decision at the end. You think whichever argument I want, but I will take the authority to make the decision. But I let people discuss. I know that there are some people who are not going to like the decision I make. So this is kind of what it comes before. So I give them this feeling that they are discussing, that their point is being taken, even though I've made my point, even before they were coming into this country. So, you know, of course, as they don't know, but people are smart. I assume that they realize it's better to do this rather than to make a decision, you know, behind closed doors and that's it. So I'm a bit puzzled because I treat them like smart people, but at the same time, knowing myself, I would have already called the bluff a long time, you know. Well, if you work on this guy's project, you got to watch it. Take a feedback, but you're not on the web right now and maybe in the future. Then at least it will hurt and less overall. So I'm not sure because it resembles a bit, you know, saying, I'll hear you back. This is something that I, in my catalog, I don't do. Like, the moment I write somewhere in the comments, I hear you back, I say to the other person. So I don't want to do this, but at the same time, the way I treat them is not good either. So. Well, I'm wondering, maybe you're thinking, because maybe this is a problem of communicating with all the needs and all the reasons why you're with the other two, because I think if people clearly understand, okay, I value, I don't know, maybe this one takes over all the others, and that's why I'm making this decision, then maybe there's the, oh, like, discussion about this as fuel, because, like, the ethos of the project requires this decision to be made. So, because I think that discussion has to go on, because people think, oh, maybe this is a discussion about the ethos of the project, and maybe it's okay. Yeah, it's usually the value of discussion, so that's why the authority of people has value, context has values, and company has values, and good luck, have a good one. This was a discussion for our streaming friends about the role of a decision maker when they've made a decision, but they still want to encourage communication because they're hoping to generate buy-in. So the last strategy for us to talk about, can you believe we have five minutes and 28 seconds left? So much for breaking you into groups and making you resolve conflicts together. You guys dodged the bullet there. All right, collaboration, this is a win-win. We both worked together, we found a beautiful solution, but it is difficult, and it takes a lot of time. It's not always appropriate. It's appropriate when you're trying to get at the root of a problem that's gone on for a long time. You've tried all these other strategies. They haven't resolved the ultimate problem that continues to occur. The tacos versus pizza problem has never gone away, and Sergei and I decided we're gonna make one from now on, right? But you need everyone involved to be willing to investigate alternative solutions that they haven't necessarily thought of. So they have to be willing to say, I'm not looking for fame and glory for my decision here. And these are kind of some of the reasons that doing collaboration can be difficult. When our ego comes and says, I hope they pick mine because I am the best, they should know, makes it hard to collaborate. So we're running out of time. I will send my strategies to, I'm not my strategies, I'll send my slides to the DevComp organizers. So if you ever wanna look up anything, you'll have them here. I thought it would be helpful for you if I gave you a summary of four different conflict types, what works well and what doesn't work well, but I suspect you can all read. Since we have only three minutes left, I'm not going to read this to you. I guess for our last three minutes, what would you like to share? Have you thought of a conflict you wanted to talk about? Have you got any feedback? Never do this again on anything on your minds? Yes? Alexander? Yeah. That's the reason why we're like moving to the next and we're wondering whether conflict's ever end. I think there's just a forgotten stage here. And really this reasoning doesn't really, you keep the overarching conflict just the individual stages of it. Like if you take three minutes to cool down, your name will take three minutes to go for a shotgun and now you're in entirely different conditions. Art? It'll be your longer conflict. I think we should analyze it this way quickly. So next time around, we'll work on Alex's point about what happens when we are really moving our conflict down the road. Change our personal investment. Maybe over time something looks healthier. Maybe we do build something together where we agree. Maybe external circumstances change the shape of our conflict. It won't always continue on and on. Accommodation doesn't work well, so accommodation is where one party, let's see other party win, right? So if I am having a conflict with the state of Michigan where I live, right? So if the state of Michigan were going to decide, oh, okay, Anna Sayed, you win in this case. This just rarely, rarely happens. It creates a present of unfairness. It weakens the complete organizational system. Accommodation, allowing one-offs is not usually the best way to resolve this. Yeah. All right, oh, our last comment with 39 seconds left. What do you have? I would model. So the question here was about, my poor friend, Petter, has to keep showing me this. Thank you so much for being willing, Petter. Petter, say and repeat the question. The question was how to get a team or a group to learn conflict resolution strategies over time. One of them is to verbosely model these strategies. Say out loud what you're doing. You can be the one showing fairness. You can say what you're doing. That's one. Training, yeah. A bunch of trainings exist. If you're a red-hatter, there's crucial conversations, right? You can take a red hat course called crucial conversations. LinkedIn has courses about this. There are a bunch of books. You said Aaron Meyer, something culture. Culture map, our friend here gave, I would say provide learning resources, recognizing that different people appreciate different strategies and come from different backgrounds. Oh, we're 48 seconds over. All right. It was really beautiful to see you today. If I made some mistakes, please forgive me. It was just a pleasure to have your company. So thanks for coming.