 So my name is Ram Srinivasan and I'm going to be talking about conflict here and I'm an agile coach and a trainer. How many of you have been to Lisa and Michael's session this afternoon, right? I'm lucky to say that I've been trained by them and I was also kind of gated by them in my professional journey. I was a project manager before and I was also a consultant and so wearing so many hats and just couldn't have lost a lot of hair. I work with enterprise level as well as the leadership teams and organizations. My passion is about for coaching teams, coaching organizations and I really like the change which I kind of bring about in organizations. After reading all these coaching facilitation and stuff like that, I kind of got interested in how we really think and I'm also doing a lot of research on brain-based coaching and I'm happy to say that you'll be hearing some of those things here but if I get too technical just stop me and interrupt me, right? I have a bunch of certifications. I realize that sometimes I have to make myself marketable but I guess now I don't really need them therefore sale if you like it, you can pick them up, right? So the title of the session is Conflict Paradox and I was really thinking about what is the best title I could give this and I was really thinking about some of our history, the Indian history and I realized that some of our greatest epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, right? And they were also about conflicts and having worked with senior executives and leaders and people, a lot of people say that you know what? We want to have very constructive disagreements. We want to really have collaboration with teams. We don't want group thing and stuff like that but most of the times people fear conflict but yet in conflict is where you really get great ideas, right? How many of you here like conflict? I thought I was the only one, I have a few people here. How many of you deal with conflict every day at work? So you don't like conflict but you deal with it every day with reluctance. My goal here is to actually not give you a whole bunch of tools and techniques or anything but to actually give you some pointers so that you can take it back with you at your work or at your personal life so that you are better equipped to deal with conflict, right? My goal here is to not be very extensive, I have about 30 slides or so, it's a workshop so you'll be working together for those folks who are sitting in the back. You won't be able to work alone by yourself so if you can come forward it's great. And if you are really sitting by yourself maybe join some other table, right? A note about this session is that you will be talking about conflict if you are really not comfortable talking about a specific scenario in your personal life or professional life. You don't have to but definitely be curious about yourself because we will be doing a lot of introspection here in the session and I will also be using some coaching questions and be curious about yourself and I have an open mind. A lot of people know about conflicts, a lot of people are in the leadership position so that's probably the best way to get most of the session, right? So we'll start off with something, right? If you are alone, part of with somebody you probably cannot work all by yourself so this is a group activity. Think about a recent conflict either in your professional life or in your personal life, right? You don't really have to explain what it is. Think about a recent conflict which you experienced and as a group discuss some of those words which come to you, which come to your mind when you are thinking about conflict, right? One single word, single words or a pair of words which come to you, right? You have about three minutes for this exercise. I'm going to use a timer, online timer as well. So you have three minutes to kind of come up with a lot of words which you can think of for conflict. And let's see which table comes up with the maximum number of words. Write them down because you will be using them. Adjectives rather than nouns. Adjectives which describe conflict or words which rather than saying a person or a role or a position. Work as a group. Probably what words come to your mind when you're thinking about a conflict? The single words like fear, whatever comes to you when you think of a conflict. Work as a group because you'll be working as a group throughout. Okay, that's fine. About 50 seconds to go. You guys are rocking here. Less than 15 seconds to go. Okay, here is your next part. Classify them as either words with negative connotation or with positive connotation. And count the number of words. You got one minute for this. You got one minute for this. Count the number of negative words and positive words. How many words do you guys have? Negative and positive. Everything's negative? No positives. Three positives? How many? That's negative. 10. 13 may have three positives. Can you think of more words? So, it's time's up. How about you? How many words do you have? Negative and positive. Three positive, 10 negatives. Anybody got better? Six positive? And the rest is a negative? Wow, okay. How about this team? Five neutral, everything else negative. So, how many total words do you have? 20, okay. Anybody else did better? 17 negatives, okay. How about this team? Six positives, three negatives. Wow, I like this. Interesting, okay. How about this team? All negatives, right? What are you really realizing from this? Okay, when you talk about conflicts, you're really thinking about negative stuff. Because primarily our experience with conflict has been negative. Our emotions associated with conflict have been negative. We have either been affected by it, or probably we didn't really get a very favorable outcome. We are going to be talking about conflict quite a bit. This is just a warm up thing. And for us to really work with conflict, we need a working definition. The reason we did this is because a lot of times we have a stereotype or stigma about talking about conflict. People say like, let's take it offline, heard that? Especially when it gets heated, right? Because the negative connotation associated with conflict is probably the source for that, right? So let's talk about what is a conflict? This is a great book. I would recommend you get that. Becoming a conflict competent leader if you are really interested in learning about conflict. And the authors say this, right? Any situation in which interdependent people have apparently incompatible interests, goals, or values, right? There are a few key words here. One is interdependence, meaning if you are dependent on somebody, you're gonna have some friction. If the guy is in America and you are in India, you're not going to interact with him. It really doesn't matter what he thinks or what he says, right? And the second thing about this is that it's not whether he has the real incompatibility. He or she has the real incompatibility. It's just about apparent or perception of incompatible interest, right? What that really means is that how you interpret things depends on how you're really going to perceive the message. So even though it appears like a genuine message, sometimes if you interpret it wrongly, you are going to kind of see frictions rising, right? And it's very interesting because you see that these are fundamental amongst all human cultures, different cultures, different religions, different folks working in different industries. It's not very specific to software or it's not very specific to any other industry, right? And for a couple of reasons, this is interesting because conflicts sometimes can be very beneficial as well, right? Conflicts by itself is neutral. What you get out of it is either positive or negative, right? If the conflict is just about a specific task or a particular work item, right? You are discussing that and that's a very positive conflict. Not all conflicts should be negative, right? If you're really having a heated argument with a colleague about how something should be implemented, you're collaborating with him, you're brainstorming with him, that's a positive thing, right? But most often we slip from left to right, right? We really don't focus on ideas. We focus on the person giving the ideas and we discount the ideas because it's from specific person, right? And when you really start doing that, your emotions also can increase or rise up, right? You get triggered, right? And on top of this, if you're really not very skilled at managing conflicts, it leads to other problems, poor morale, productivity decreases and stuff like that, right? The goal is to skillfully identify which conflict you are in, right? Either you are on the left side or in the right side and you have to identify where you are, right? And this back and forth happens all the time, right? It's not like somebody's going to say, oh, we are going to have a conflict which is associated with the task. So let's actually do that. And nobody's going to say, oh, we are going to have a conflict which is going to be about our relationship. Let's do that. It's going to be switching back and forth, right? So to easily visualize that, the authors came up with something like this, right? The levels of conflict, right? Primarily, if you are somewhere in level one and level two, you are primarily focusing on a task-based conflict, right? You're having disagreements because people see things differently. They understand different things differently and you are having differences. Or you are having a different assumption and the conflict level escalates but it's still, it's a misunderstanding. It's not focused on the person at this point in time, right? But where it really gets escalated is when it moves to level three, level four and level five, you start seeing that it's more focused towards the person and it kind of starts escalating, right? You're going to start taking sides. You're going to focus away from the issue or task at hand and you're going to focus more on the person. And sometimes when it's getting really escalated, you are really even avoiding solving the conflict. That you're staying away from it because you don't want to deal with it, right? If you have questions, you can feel free to interrupt me and I'll be happy to answer these questions, right? A good diagram which illustrates this diagram, right? Conflicts happen because you see something, right? Or you interpret something and that triggers you or triggers your emotion. And if you are very sensitive about how you are managing conflicts, we'll look at constructive behaviors later. If you're very sensitive about how you are managing conflicts, you really focus on the constructive behavior and the conflict de-escalates. It's a cycle, you're again going back and forth. But lack of understanding of conflict, the stigma around educating, getting oneself educated about conflict, lot of times lead to destructive behavior. It changes focus from task to the person and when that happens, the other person also realizes that and the conflict starts escalating. It might actually be a level two conflict, but when you really have destructive behaviors, it starts escalating to level three and then if it's at level three, it starts escalating because the negative emotions kind of keep kicking in and once you really start that, a retaliatory behavior is something which happens, right? You do something bad, you get back the same thing, right? And we have proverbs for that, right? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Now they have glorified it with a proverb, right? And that's called the retaliatory cycle and you have to have the awareness that having a conflict undersold will only escalate the conflict or probably not going to be very productive, right? The reason why this is important is because when you really see an event which bothers you or which triggers you, you are responding to the event which is out of your control, right? The way our emotions rise, we will actually see and we'll talk about that, right? The way we actually react to things and where our emotions rise is a completely different process. It's not a rational cognitive or a thinking process. I'm not going to think about, oh, now he's offended me, I gotta get mad and then you really don't write an algorithm for that and you don't have steps to execute for that to get really mad. You instantly get mad, right? And when you really get mad, the retaliatory cycle kicks in and it escalates, right? So this is actually a good book, Beyond Revenge, The Evolution of Forgiveness by Michael McCullough and he talks about how we have evolved as humans in terms of reacting to people, right? Our first thing is to actually develop awareness about conflict. So we talked about precipitating event or hotbedden, right? A lot of people get triggered about different stuff, right? Our first understanding to really deal with conflict is about understanding about conflict, gaining an understanding about yourself on how you react to conflict, how you view conflict, what is your attitude towards conflict and how are you equipped to deal with it, right? In your tables, you will probably see, most of you will actually see this questionnaire, right? We'll take about five minutes' time to fill this questionnaire out, to talk about your triggers. Now, this is a very generic thing and these are some of the five common things. I have classified them as groups. We'll talk about the answers later, but take about five minutes to fill this up and we will see where your triggers are. Sorry, what is your question? Think about how you're affected by, generally from all people, then just from a specific person. Yes, yeah, once you're done, just give us a couple of minutes. If you're done, let me know and if most of you are done, we'll just move to the next part. Yes, yes, wait for that. I'll give you an answer. So once you're done with just your score for the questions, I'll give you further instructions. Ron knows there is somebody who's trying to flatten others and give his job done. Flatter. He may not really qualify, but he's kind of trying to see if he can. Done? Done, most of you done? Most of you done? But one more minute. The bottom part, we will do it right once everybody is done. Everybody done? We'll move to the next part. Somebody needs more time? Need more time? Anybody? Okay, so I have to switch slides, okay. Here's your score. This is how you're gonna be scoring it, right? Questions, four, eight, 12 and 20, they are categorized under a category called abrasive, or that is your hot button. Score these questions, add up the total. See under which category, your total is maximum, and that is probably your hot button. Four, eight, 12 and 20, from one category. Yeah, they are question numbers, right? Two, six, 14, and 18. They belong to another category. One, seven, 10 and 16 belong to another category. Five, 11, 15 and 19. The last one is three, nine, 13 and 17. So add up your score in each of these categories, and see which category scores maximum for you. All are tens, everybody got your totals? Everybody got your totals? No, need more time? Have a question? Sorry? Okay, got it, cool. Anybody have two or more categories just scoring the same? Okay, in that case, choose whatever you can relate more to, based on what you know about yourself. Based on what you know about yourself, there is a tie. Choose a category which you can relate more to. So let's actually do some group activity here in discovering or really figuring out what's happening with your perception of what conflict is and what triggers you, right? We have about five categories here. This is not exhaustive, but these are some of the common things which are found. We will be going to split this whole audience into multiple groups. Abrasive, if you are really an abrasive personality or if that's your hot button or trigger, come on over here. Anybody who's scored highest in abrasive? Abrasive, just come on over here. A loop, come on over here. Self-centered, just go there. Unappreciated, if that's your trigger or hot button, take a seat there. And if untrustworthy is your hot button, take a seat there. Yeah. One, two, three, four, five, four, five. Yeah, untrustworthy is right here. Untrustworthy is right here. Wow. Are you the only one? Okay, sure. Okay, maybe just occupy two tables. Maybe occupy two tables. Yeah. Yeah. This one is a loop. A loop, yeah. Which one? What relates to you more, knowing what you know about yourself? Yeah. You want to join, guys? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. They have a mix of audience here, but if you want to join others, feel free to join others. Pick your next highest and then join them. You don't want to be alone. I'm going to give you two minutes to actually discuss this as a group, because a lot of things emerge when you're going to be talking about this, right? These are the discussion questions, right? Think about why this is your hot button and why you get triggered when somebody pushes this hot button, right? Think about what are you going to do about it when someone is going to push it the next time? What might be the other person? Why might be the other person be acting this way? Think about it. Just talk about it as a group, right? And see if you can gain more clarity around it. And how would you really want the other person to react? I'll give you a couple of minutes. I'm not going to run the timer. Just have a discussion, just for a couple of minutes. These are the discussion questions, right there. Yeah. This is untrustworthy, is what I hear? Ah. Oh, that one too? Wow, untrustworthy. Okay. That triggers you, okay? What is your trigger? Unappreciated. Okay. How do you feel about being here? What does it trigger you? What does it bother you so much? Yeah. Why might the other person be doing it? Have you thought about it? Probably, there are different traits. Some of them, they're not very expressive. They're not very appreciative. If you're doing a good job, it's okay, fine. I'll figure you out how you start doing the bad job. And you know, poke you when you do the bad job. Yeah. But if you're doing a good job, it doesn't matter. Yeah. It doesn't even matter. So that is the time that I already came to know. Very true. Very true. That is the reason you're calling me. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. That's a racial man. I am a racist, and there's no one who can do that. Okay, that's fine. See if you can get different perspective from different people. Let's keep moving on. Yeah, that's moving on. Let's keep moving on. Right? What insights did you gain by talking with other people who have similar hot buttons? What insights did you gain? Okay. How about this folks here? What insights did you gain by talking with similar people who have similar triggers? Interesting, right? So we talked about triggers, and we talked about self-awareness or what hot buttons, right? Trigger is something which annoys you, which irritates you, and you get provoked by it when somebody kind of pushes your trigger, right? And we talked about emotions too. So when you're triggered, you are probably in a very emotional state at that point in time, right? I'm going way ahead of myself, right? This is actually the basis of our emotions. We have evolved, I mean, depending on whatever theory you follow, we have evolved to actually not deal with conflict. In fact, we have evolved to deal with fight or flight, right? And David Rock calls this the SCARF model, SCARF, right? We're always scanning for threats. It's called auto-operators. We are always scanning for threats about five times a second, right? Because we have evolved from the forest and all this kind of stuff, right? And anything which is going to reduce our safety, status, certainty, autonomy, or fairness, we perceive that as a threat. And anything which increases our status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, or fairness, we actually see that as a reward and we like it. And if you really perceive something as a threat, what happens is that our limbic system kicks in. A limbic system is what controls our emotion. In fact, you might know people who have a very short fuse. Anybody know people who have a very short fuse, right? They don't even think they just act just like that because you are evolved for that. You are evolved to actually see a danger and then just run or fight or flight, right? But we evolve through that and we are not really doing a fight or flight today, but we are expressing them as emotions, right? We are really having hatred or we are really trying to bully other person or we are trying to resist getting bullied because we are feeling threatened, right? That is the basis of our emotion. And your limbic system is something which is totally different from your rational or your cognitive brain, right? The limbic systems evolved a lot before your prefrontal cortex or a cortex evolved and our limbic system acts a lot more faster than our prefrontal cortex, especially your memory and your impulse response. They are governed by your limbic system and it probably takes about 40 milliseconds more for any impulse to reach our thinking brain than to really get into our limbic system. So this is the first one which receives signals and that's probably one of the reasons why you really don't even realize that you are being emotional when you are actually undergoing that particular emotion, right? The first thing is to actually gain awareness about how emotions rise, right? And once you really gain this awareness, we talked about the retaliatory cycle in the beginning and this is how you really break your retaliatory cycle. You gain awareness by knowing how to cool down, how to cool down your emotions. Think, slow down and reflect because that's where your prefrontal cortex is doing bulk of your work, right? Applying brakes to your limbic system, right? And engage constructively, right? In our model, we saw that you're getting triggered, your emotions are aroused, you're again having a destructive behavior and then it loops in again and again, right? And to break that, you've got to understand that you have to realize you are in a conflict at the first point of time. You've got to cool down, slow down, think about it, and then engage constructively, right? So we'll talk about these strategies one by one, right? Cooling down, right? Like the first thing we said, when you are under threat or when you are under attack, what happens by evolution, by design, is a lot of blood flow goes to your larger muscles in your arms and legs, either to fight or just kind of run, right? And a brain is really deployed of oxygen, it's very, oxygen supply is very, right? See if you can see things from a different perspective. These strategies will help you cool down. Maybe not instantly, but definitely slow you down and please give you more awareness about you're going through a conflict, right? The second thing is slowing down and reflecting and this is where you're going to engage your thinking brain, right? You're going to be reflecting on your thoughts, right? We are a data interpretation machine. So when we get data, we are interpreting. We mean, we talked about auto-operators. We are interpreting data, whether it's rewarding data or it's going to be a fight or fight response. So we are always interpreting data, right? So slow down that response and say, what is the data here and how am I interpreting it? So pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to your emotions. And again, this is more about slowing down the reaction of your limbic system, which kicks in whenever you are emotional, right? What are you feeling, right? How do you realize what you're feeling? How do you realize what you're experiencing? And really think about what is your interest rather than just getting carried away in that situation, right? Think about your experience, reflect on it and think about other person's experience as well, right? Think about what does he want? How is he feeling about this situation? And what are the assumptions and biases which he might be having, which I am not aware of, right? So pretty much this is something about cognitive reappraisal as well. You're really trying to see things from another person's perspective. I do want to add one note here about empathy and mirror neurons, right? You will be able to pick up emotions even when the other person's not talking to you. And that is because we have evolved in this evolution with something called mirror neurons. And based on how somebody else feels about something, you don't really have to know about all the data. You can experience the same feelings, right? And that's pretty much what empathy is all about, right? Experiencing other person's emotions and feeling as though you feel for it, right? And when you start doing that, you will also be able to understand why he feels that way, right? You might not understand everything about his situation, but at least that will give you a chance to relate with him better, with him or with her better, right? And when we really talk about emotions, we talk about emotions a lot here. How many of you talk about emotions in your office? How many of you talk about emotions should be not discussed here? You should really attend the meeting and then just go. And we should not take things personally. And expressing emotion is not the right thing. How many of you really heard that? You should not get emotional. Anybody heard that before, right? That is a lot of research which suggests that suppressing emotion is probably the worst way to deal with conflict, right? When you're suppressing emotions, how many of you had those emotions go away after suppressed? Or do they still linger? They still linger, right? And on top of it, it actually adds to chronic stress, right? We mean chronic stress isn't like, we talked about the retaliatory cycle. When that retaliatory cycle happens, when you're really having the flight of flight response, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, right? And the effect of adrenaline kind of waits away after 90 seconds. But when you're really kind of rerunning the circuit again and again with all those emotions, effect of cortisol, which is again another hormone, this kind of stays longer and that really reach to chronic stress and a lot of other diseases, right? Stress, tension, hypertension, all those kind of stuff too, right? The other thing is about emotions is you are not going to be focusing on that particular event or that particular meeting or the particular conflict because your focus now is on suppressing your emotions that your attention is not there in gathering the data, right? So we talked about mirror neurons as well and what they found out is that when people suppress emotions, other people are able to sense it and that's not very effective. So if you're really kind of feeling frustrated and you're trying to suppress it, the other person somehow has an instinct, gut instinct that you are frustrated too and he is going to exhibit that same emotion to you, right? Having said this, we really have to find out good ways to express our emotions, especially when you are in conflict. I'm talking about conflict in a workplace but this is also applicable to your real life outside your work as well, right? One technique which is very effective, which I like is called affect labeling and this is using precise words to describe your emotions, right? And when that happens or when you're trying to label your emotions at that point in time, a region in the brain called ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, if I'm getting too technical, stop me. See, somehow it's not, okay? Something in the brain, the thinking brain kicks in and it applies breaks to your emotional system, limbic system, simple, right? And this is very, very effective, right? Another non-threatening way to express your emotion is to actually describe it rather than acting it out, right? And the third technique comes from psychology. You write about it and then just tear it out because the more you carry it in your head, the more stressed you are going to feel about it, right? And the key here is this, right? You're not going to write an essay about your emotions, right? But the key here is to actually use symbolic language, just acting it out or using a metaphor or using similes or maybe thinking about a song or a movie which will describe your emotions, right? Be very brief and then move on to the action part because now once you cleared it out, you can focus more on the meaning, right? So we focused on cooling down, we focused on slowing down and reflecting, right? And we'll now focus on the behaviors, right? We'll talk about engaging in constructive behavior and not being in destructive behavior, right? So again, we have a group activity here, right? We have four quadrants here, active constructive behavior, meaning anything active is you are really deliberately putting effort into it to make sure that it happens, right? Passive constructive is you're slowing down a little bit but again, you're trying to engage in a positive way, right? Active destructive is something which you are engaging very actively but it's destructive, it's escalating the conflict and passive destructive is something you are trying to avoid or you're trying to kind of do something but it's not really helping and it's probably also adding time to conflict and it's kind of become stale and it's kind of not resolved and the longer the conflict is not resolved the more undissolved it becomes, right? So we're going to do a group exercise here. Again, you can talk with your groups. Let's see how you actually do this. We have about 17 behaviors here. Can you group them into active constructive, passive constructive, active destructive and passive destructive? I'm going to leave this screen and I'm going to just use my timer right here. So you work as a group, active constructive, active destructive, passive constructive, passive destructive and I'm going to leave this slide. I'm not going to use a timer because you can't see this if I run the timer. I'll use the timer in my cell phone here. You got about six minutes to see if you can do this, right? Want me to go to the previous slide? Yeah, I'm going to leave this here. Work as a group. You guys are okay. You guys want to join with somebody? You guys want to join with somebody? You guys are okay? Or you guys want to join with somebody? Okay, sure. Feel free to join other teams. Yeah, maybe he can join, yeah. Let's move on. Here is the solution. Active constructive behaviors, deep listening or active listening, perspective taking, creating solutions, expressing emotions and reaching out. Anybody got all this? Okay, cool. Passive constructive, reflective thinking, which we talked about, thinking about yourself and thinking about others, thoughts and emotions and what they want. Delay responding, adapting and being flexible, and repair bids. I'll talk about repair bids and almost everybody asked about it. Yielding is passive destructive. Yes, we will talk about that. Active destructive, winning at all costs, displaying anger, demeaning others and retaliating. And passive destructive is avoiding, yielding, hiding emotions and self-criticism. Anybody got this correctly or at least most of it correctly? Okay, cool. So, almost everybody asked me about repair bids. I'll tell you what repair bids are and this comes from John Gottman. John Gottman is probably one of the marital researchers. He's in Seattle. You probably know him and Microsoft employees actually have free access to him is what I believe. I don't know if that's true or false, Arlo can say that. Yeah, I'm probably a discounted consulting fee or something like that. This guy has done research in marriage and counseling for more than 30 years and he can pretty much tell that when a couple walks into his office in a couple of minutes if they will be getting divorced or if they will stay together for more than seven years. And the divorce time is just about four to seven years that's when people get divorced. Repair bids are something where he says that you are pretty much having a partnership or a team, a lens where you are doing bids with each other and you are giving a bid, somebody's taking a bid and you are giving a summary as repair bids and especially when you are experiencing a conflict you're not in real good talking terms. This applies to marriage as well and you are really kind of facing each other off and sometimes one partner says can we just go for a movie? It's not even related to the conflict but it's something totally different but it's trying to break the ice. That's repair bids. In an office situation it might just be a regular topic but maybe just go for a coffee. It's not actively addressing the conflict it's not actively resolving the conflict but you are pretty much trying to relate more with that person and you are trying to create better connectedness with that person and that's called repair bids. Yeah, you are trying to bridge the negative. It's not addressing the conflict at all but you are trying to address the relationship. So you are at that point of time building bridges so that you can address the conflict later and that's why I call it passive constructive. I can talk about all these but I can talk about specific things. Which topics do you want me to talk about? We only have self-criticism. I hear quite a few things for that. I'll talk about self-criticism. Tell me about self-criticism. What is self-criticism? Right? What else? Criticizing yourself. It's my fault. It could be. What happens when you do that? You feel the way I see self-criticism is actually blaming yourself for something and when you are doing it I mean I am not talking about self-analysis. When you are really doing self-analysis it's probably reflective thinking. Did I do something wrong? What's my perspective here? What's his perspective? It's reflective thinking. But blaming yourself for something which is not in your control or blaming yourself for somebody else's behavior that's self-criticism. I'm always like this. Oh my God, I can't believe I goofed it up again. Those things are self-criticism. When this happens you are pretty much wiring yourself I mean that's something called self-talk or auto-suggestion and you are really wiring your brain and it's also very destructive because it's not going to help you solve the particular conflict. Right, and if it is something that you have to deal with. Yeah, I am very curious about that because that's not a very helpful attitude in my sense in my perspective because once you start judging yourself you are not going to be forgiving yourself and you are going to be too harsh on yourself and when you really are not able to forgive yourself you are going to carry those negative emotions and it's going to impact you as well as the other person. Asking for an apology is different so if you goofed up yeah yes reflective thinking is constructive self-criticism and blaming oneself is not going to be very constructive because it's not going to solve the problem yeah, go ahead yeah yes, exactly right, if you are really reaching out saying you know what, I goofed up that's reaching out and that's constructive because that keeps the communication thing open, right we talk about repair bits I want to talk about displaying anger too because I marked it I say displaying anger from a very broader perspective by using the Buddhist philosophy here by calling anger as something as an umbrella term for irritation frustration, sadness being upset, disparate all this kind of stuff too right, so displaying those kind of negative emotions is banging the table showing your frustration is very active destructive, rather if you want to kind of do that you would say you know what, I'm really very upset about this because of such and such thing rather than just showing your frustration on that particular event of person yes we talked about displaying expressing emotions in a different way yeah, this is what we are talking about expressing emotions in a positive way believe you came in a little bit later talking about your feelings talking about how you would respond thinking about your perspectives all those kind of stuff what else are you curious about agreeing to disagree, how is it destructive agreeing to disagree has two parts to it, one is the content part which is what the conflict is about and other is the emotional part when you are agreeing to disagree you are agreeing to disagree on the content but you are not addressing the emotional aspects behind it and how you feel about it and usually it's a very slippery slope saying that I disagree but I agree that we have different perspectives how do you really go about implementing a solution my idea is superior to yours and I feel strongly about it but I still think your perspective is valid but we really can't find a matching ground or common ground because I will be offended if my emotions are not addressed yeah yeah, it's a passive destructive behavior find out a way where you can both agree on a common ground and addressing each other's emotion so that your emotions are still addressed rather than just leaving them unaddressed it's difficult, I didn't say it's easy I didn't say it's easy, yes non-violent communication is a good book Marshall Rosenberg I believe is the author it's a really very good book and if you are an agile teams probably it's a must read for scrum masters or agile coaches how you are going to be communicating effectively yet in a non-violent way deep listening, okay I think this is something which I wanted to talk about because we have been talking about all these skills and a lot of people also talk about listening skills anybody heard about active listening right, you should lean forward you should see person eye to eye all this kind of stuff and most often we kind of even mimic that you know I want to pretend that I am listening to you very deeply and in the back of my mind I am preparing my response right, heard that right, there is a difference between listening for understanding and listening to respond you can pretend with all those techniques and you are really waiting for your moment you are just kind of waiting just pause for a second and I will just kind of give you all my thoughts right and that's not really deep listening when you are really doing a deep listening you are present in that particular conversation, you are listening as though you are hearing it for the first time you are suspending your judgments right and it's very easy to fake all these techniques right and only person you can tell whether you are really doing it in genuine way or whether you are faking it is you right so pay attention to that as well the techniques really don't matter much as much as your intentions any other behavior or somebody had a question there yielding, okay okay fine in a husband and wife conversation have you seen this, fine you seen that that exactly is yielding right what happens after that the conflict is still under solved so that also is not it's shutting down your communication channels too fine means there is no conversation anything happens after that is the next conflict right that is yielding too and when you are really yielding all the time you are also hiding your emotions it builds up and then you are kind of it's leaking in a very unexpected place right so pay mindful attention to that yes if it's very heated I would actually say take a break and see if you can get back to the issue after the break because if it's very heated there is no way to resolve it if the person is not in a mood to resolve it there is no way to resolve it just take a break sometimes helps really empathizing with that situation in a genuine way right we talk about reflective thinking right empathizing with them really trying to understand that position in that particular conflict and even summarizing it to it and just checking if that perspective is right those are things which you can do to effectively do that we will talk about some of those things right in our next section right so now you have really learned about these behaviors how do you go about implementing them in your workplace take a couple of minutes to discuss this with your table and see how you really go about implementing this in your workplace now you have really learned a lot of new things here a lot of new terms right see how you would go about implementing this in your workplace yes yeah these emotions could be positive or negative right yes in this case would they be in different quadrants the reason for that is because when somebody is really really active and having a very positive emotion if the other person really don't relate to it it has a negative impact on them think about a hyper excited kid you are not able to relate to him all the time so it might also be very negative but again it depends on the group everybody is all hyper excited they can probably relate to each other but in a very normal day to day thing see uh huh yeah that's true right and that's one of the reasons why you need them to you need to educate them about conflict itself and how expressing emotions like that would not uh really resolve lead you to resolve that particular conflict when it's again an active destructive yeah right yeah and what happens is like when somebody does it right are the other persons yielding but those emotions still carry right so think about that right how would you really go about implementing this in your workplace have you thought about it maybe just take a couple of minutes to talk about how you'd go about implementing all this and I'll provide you some tips and techniques uh in the next few minutes what puzzles you what's challenging how would you go about implementing this at work I am not only implementing this but I'm going to practice that I'm trying to share what actually I have a question about personal participation take a break I'm happy to look up what's the result of that what's the result of that what's the result of that what's the result of that what's the result of that what's the result of that what's the result of that we wanna know what's the result of that what's really important what's this what's so important what counts but what's the next what works what wants that to plays but what almost looks like So here are some suggestions. The first thing is to create the right climate in your team or in your organization. And a couple of things about creating the right climate, right? One is your attitude about conflict. How do you really think about conflict? If you're thinking about conflict as something which has to be avoided, you're probably not going to be very successful at it, right? So your attitude towards conflict matters, right? Second thing is trust and safety. Trust and safety probably go hand in hand. If people are not going to feel safe about bringing in issues, if there are going to be consequences because they're going to be bringing in issues, there's a safety issue there, right? And there's a Bernie Brown as somebody who talks about trust and vulnerability quite a bit. Anybody heard of the name Bernie Brown? Yeah, the part of vulnerability, right? And it's a great talk. There's a TED talk about that, right? And safety also has to be issued address in your organization. It's not going to be very safe. They're going to have conflicts. Nobody's going to talk about it. It's all burning underneath, right? The fourth one is behavioral integration and collaboration. By that, I mean, how are the teams having deep conversations? How are they sharing information? And how well are they engaged constructively in a particular vision? And that's what I mean by collaboration and behavioral integration, right? Are they interdependent with each other? Are they sharing information? Are they actually having deep conversation within themselves? Fifth one is emotional intelligence. I'm probably going to refer you to Daniel Goldman. He's done quite a bit of work on emotional intelligence, and it's probably gaining a lot of attention in the agile community right now. So you can talk and see that, right? This side is about communication and keeping the communication channel open when you are in the middle of a conflict, right? We'll talk about techniques for staying on track and getting on track. Talked about expressing emotions. We talked about perspective taking, looking at things from a different perspective. And this is where a coach or a facilitator can come into. If you're an agile coach or if you're a scrum master and if your team's having disagreements, you can, as a neutral facilitator, help other person take different perspectives, right? We talked about listening and we also talked about deep reflective thinking too, right? If you have questions, just ask them. I'll be happy to answer you, yes. Meaning, I don't know if you can think about it. Think about EQ as just like IQ. IQ can be measured and they have various tests for it. And by emotional intelligence, I mean how well is the person able to relate to other person? How well is he able to regulate his own emotions? How well is he able to think about another person's perspective? There are about 15 different specific competencies for emotional intelligence. And saying how well you can match those competencies. That's what I'm talking about. Daniel Goldman has done a lot of work on that. I can probably finish this, yes. I don't know about that. And I haven't experienced that myself yet. But if you really talk about other philosophies, the Eastern philosophies, the Buddhist philosophies and stuff like that, and they say that there is a lot of things which happen inside you and happiness is from within, rather than from looking at things outside. So maybe there's something that you can talk about later. Cool, so getting and staying on track, these are things which some of you are very familiar with. Getting on track is establishing your team agreements. Anybody have team agreements with your teams, organizations? So this is a sample agenda of how to create your teaming agreements. There are multiple ways of doing it. The most important thing is actually discussing the kind of environment or climate you wanna intentionally create. Because if you're not gonna discuss that, then probably you're gonna have bad results. And to actually discuss how you would address things when it gets difficult. Explicitly having norms helps team because that gives them a guideline of how to behave. Another thing about staying on track, these are some of the techniques, especially during meetings. If your meetings really heated, use time outs. And use a neutral facilitator if possible who would not be very biased. Third thing is about asking questions. Clarify your intention rather than just attacking the person. And when you're really gonna give a punch, just prime the other person about what is that you're gonna be saying. Because he's prepared for it, and at the same time whatever you say will not be misrepresented or misinterpreted by the other person. So saying this is what I'm gonna say and what I say might not really come out to be right, but this is just my perspective and I might be wrong in what I'm gonna say. And it primes them that you're gonna say something very important and which might not be very agreeable. And the third thing is after the conflict, it's important for you to go back and do some retrospective on that. What helped you? And how did you really follow your team agreements? And if something needs to be addressed, use this feedback mechanism. Talk about the situation. Talk about the behavior. During that situation about the particular person. And talk about the impact you had or he had when that behavior was exhibited. So these are things which you can use to deal with conflicts and teams staying on track. And we talked about emotions, empathy, mirror neurons, body languages, all this kind of stuff. With virtual teams, this get a lot more complicated primarily because you are not having cues on how they are interpreting your data. And time zone differences also complicate stuff. So be more careful and be more aware of different things, different assumptions which might lead to conflict with virtual teams. And if possible, always prefer face to face interactions over virtual interactions. A lot of agile teams have ambassadors. They travel from one place to another. They build a relationship and then they come back. That way the relationship is there. And when difficult things come up, they can really count on the relationship to solve that particular conflict. Always give benefit of the doubt. People will have different cultures, different assumptions. And a lot of cultures focus on task, especially the western cultures focus more on task than on relationship. And eastern cultures focus more on relationship than on tasks. So pay attention to what cultural background that particular person might be having. And also when you're establishing a team norms or organizational norms, establish norms which will also address cultural and background differences. That will really help you. So I'm almost done with this. So maybe we talked about quite a few concepts. Talk with one or two people in your table on what are the things you're taking away from this talk, from this workshop. These slides will be available for you in the website. And there are also index cards. It would be great if you can give me some feedback on what is that you like about the session and what is that I can do to make the session much more better. Two minutes to actually talk and see what your takeaways are and just give me some feedback. And after that I'll answer your questions. Yeah, why don't you bring it up as a question and I'll actually kind of role play and I'll show you what it is. Do you have questions? Takeaways? No, what I... I came late, so I was writing and some assessment for a few of the things and I told you. It'll be in agile effects. So what are some of your takeaways from the session? Anybody willing to share some of the stuff? Anybody else? Can I take the wings? Yeah. It's a trigger for you. But there could be other people who think of a conflict in the U.K. and in the U.S. They are... I'm seeing a loop here and there. Yeah. If you need to understand how triggers the other person may have. Exactly. I mean, that's hard. Yeah. And you should consider. Yeah. So that is one thing. Yeah. The book I mentioned has actually something called Conflict Competencies in Conflict Dynamics Profile where you can go and do it as a team and understand each other's perspective and what their triggers are. And you can even design teaming alliances and partnerships considering other person's triggers as well. Any other takeaways which was interesting for you? You had a question. Okay, let's move to question. Okay, what question do you have? When we get to a stage where we model different perspectives, how do we go further and what are the techniques to evaluate different options to be drawn upon? So let me actually... Hopefully for this, right? So I'm here as a speaker talking, right? And when I want to take a different perspective, I literally kind of move myself physically. I mean, there is some science to this. And I would actually kind of even say, Nilesh, this is what I'm seeing sitting in your shoes at this point in time, right? This guy is talking about all these high-five stuff, but I don't really understand everything about how I will apply this in my real life, right? And I'm looking for something more beyond this, right? Have I understood your perspective correctly? I would go with some approach, okay? Let's discuss what the context are based on two ideas. And if I go with your approach, what are the pros and cons? Then if I go with my approach, what are the pros and cons? And then we'll evaluate. So we'll go more on some kind of database discussion than the aspect. What I did right now is I just showed you by looking at things from your perspective, right? And that's exact, you're really trying to relate to the person at an emotional level, right? And when I did that, I mean, I'm not really trying to solve the problem. What I did was I asked for clarification if I understood it correctly, right? And based on what I said and I summarized, you gave me a little bit more information, right? So you're really looking at things, solving things from a data perspective, right? This is exactly what perspective taking is, right? Rather than seeing things from that side, I'm coming, physically coming in, seeing things from this side and I'm asking him if I understood his question correctly, I'm clarifying things with him and I'm checking with him. And this is perspective taking. Did I answer your question? Yeah, there are techniques. If you attended Lisa and Michael, I mean, Lisa Atkins and Michael Spades coaching session or if you're involved in there, they actually got trained as professional coaches and I went to the same coaching school. There are coaching techniques where you would move your physical place to look into things from different perspective and you will get it validated but that is beyond the scope of this smaller discussion, right? Any other questions that you have? Lisa Atkins and Michael Spade, they are doing some coach training sessions. So, and they were trained by an organization called CRR Global or Center for ITS Relationships. And it's a coach training school and they really teach you coaching skills where you can use perspective taking and other kind of stuff in a conflict and obviously you will have a coach or a facilitator who could help you do that. Any other questions which you want answered? Okay folks, thank you very much. I appreciate some feedback, so you have your feedback. Thanks for coming.