If handling collaboration and conflict is about presence and awareness, what’s that feel like? And how does it help you handle better?
Ordinary Experience
Ordinary experience has two defining features that matter for handling collaboration and conflict – convergence and… nothing special.
Convergence comes with our prevalent and dominant problem solving – aiming our efforts at a point, an answer, a solution or resolution. When reached, the feeling is closure. The puzzle clicks. You’re done. It’s satisfying because it ends the tension of an open problem. It’s easy to see this as a benchmark for better. It feels like we’ve handled something well.
When we don’t reach that closure or completion, the feeling is stressful. Incompleteness is distressing, and it feels like we didn’t handle something well enough.
A second defining feature is ironic – ordinary experience feels like nothing special. Nothing unusual. When your working model is humming along you feel like you’re seeing the situation as it actually is, the only way it can be seen. Direct and transparent, not through a lens. The lens is invisible because it’s working.
Psychologists call this naive realism – the commonsense view that perception gives us direct, unmediated access to the world as it actually is.[mfn]Philosophers have challenged this for centuries, and science put a serious dent in it beginning with a 1996 paper, “Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding.” See the glossary entry for more information.[/mfn] Why wouldn’t our perception be direct and unmediated – and reliable? Because cognitive operations are underway which are not obvious, and which are not supposed to be.
Your eyes detect lines, edges, light, shade, color. Your ears detect sound waves. What reaches your brain is a stream of electrochemical signals. What reaches your consciousness are judgments or just interpretations about those signals – questions, doubts, agreement, dissent, hope. They come with the signal but have nothing inherently to do with what the senses detected.
Neuroscience and cognitive science tell us our brain’s predictive processing generates experience for us to act in. We don’t receive reality and interpret it to act. Through prediction and correction, our brains continually create and revise working models of the world – and supply meaning to us so what we do isn’t random, irrational – or even non-rational. So what we do makes sense.
In every waking moment, our brains use past experience, contextual cues, and a goal we have for the situation we’re in, to give our sensations meaning. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body – to guide our actions[mfn]Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain—How We Create Emotions Through Brain, Body, and Culture.[/mfn]
This experience is seamlessness. There’s no gap between perceiving and concluding. The folded arms and eye roll are data which don’t require interpretation. They arrive already interpreted. Judgment comes with the perception, not after it, and feels like one thing. Mental maps aren’t tools we pick up and put down. They’re the structure through which experience becomes meaningful.
Different investigators describe different aspects of this.
Barrett describes an emotion as our brain’s creation of what your body sensations mean, in relation to what’s going on around you in the world.
Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers are a feeling tone, a bodily valence which orient you toward or away from something before conscious thought begins. You don’t decide the meeting is going badly. You feel it – a slight contraction, a discomfort – and that feeling is already shaping what you attend to and what you do next[mfn]Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.[/mfn]
Eugene Gendlin, an American philosopher and psychotherapist, calls it felt sense – a bodily knowing about a situation that is holistic, pre-verbal, and carries more information than can be immediately articulated. It’s not an emotion exactly, not a thought exactly, not a sensation. It’s a diffuse, unclear bodily sense of a whole situation that, when attended to carefully, can yield specific meaning[mfn]Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing.[/mfn]
Daniel Kahneman calls this System 1 cognitive processing – fast, automatic, associative. When it runs unexamined, things feel clear, obvious, natural. Cognitive fluency – the ease of processing – feels like truth. Which is exactly why unexamined working models are so persistent. They don’t feel like models. They feel like reality and just keep working[mfn]Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow.[/mfn]
All of these concepts – emotions, System 1 and 2 processing, felt sense, somatic markers, and more – all point at the same phenomenon from different disciplinary angles: The body carries meaning before words do. That meaning is accessible if you turn attention toward it. Accessing it gives you more and better information than thinking alone provides. The disciplinary distinctions matter to philosophers and neuroscientists working at a technical level. They don’t materially change what you and I are asking about collaboration and conflict handling. For simplicity, I’ll refer to the set as felt experience.
Ordinary Experience, Noticed[mfn]Eastern and Western traditions give us many ways to think about noticing experience. I’ve chosen one due to its explanatory power – one not without its shortcomings or detractors. That’s true of every way, however, so that can’t be a reason for disqualification. You can read your preferred way into my treatment of the subject, and share if you will so I can learn, too.[/mfn]
At the beginning of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman shows an image of a woman’s face with furrowed eyebrows, an intense stare, and mouth. He describes the image and the reader’s experience this way:
“Your experience as you look at the woman’s face seamlessly combines what we normally call seeing and intuitive thinking. As surely and quickly as you saw that the young woman’s hair is dark, you knew she is angry. Furthermore, what you saw extended into the future. You sensed that this woman is about to say some very unkind words, probably in a loud and strident voice. A premonition of what she was going to do next came to mind automatically and effortlessly. You did not intend to assess her mood or to anticipate what she might do, and your reaction to the picture did not have the feel of something you did. It just happened to you. It was an instance of fast thinking.”
The very next thing he writes is, “Now look at the following problem: 17×24.” He notes that, upon recognizing a multiplication problem, the mind immediately moves to solve it – and the experience changes. Now the reader would “experience slow thinking as you proceeded through a series of steps. The process was mental work: deliberate, effortful, and orderly – a prototype of slow thinking.”
The experience of reading the woman’s face is what Kahneman calls System 1 processing. Doing math is System 2 processing. System 2 is metabolically costly and limited in capacity. It requires effort, concentration, and cognitive resources that are genuinely finite. So the default is always System 1. System 2 engages when System 1 signals uncertainty or conflict – and even then, System 2 often can just endorse what System 1 already produced, rather than genuinely interrogating it[mfn]Kahneman is careful to say System 1 isn’t always wrong and System 2 isn’t always right. Expert intuition, built through experience with good feedback, is System 1 operating accurately. His point isn’t that intuition is unreliable but that it’s unreliable in specific, predictable ways – particularly in novel situations, complex social judgments, and conditions of uncertainty[/mfn].
If we recognize experiences these investigators describe, what do we notice?
You can notice seamlessness – the feeling of assumed clarity that signals your mental map is present. You can notice somatic markers – the slight contraction, discomfort, bodily valence that arrives before thought. What your body already knows and is communicating. You can notice cognitive strain – the felt signal that System 2 is being recruited. You can notice judgment that arrived with the perception – the folded arms already interpreted before you even thought about it.
To not notice can be sensed, too. System 1 processing can feel like strong conviction, hesitation, support, scorn – it can feel like ways you habitually engage in moments and situations. A patterned way you’ve developed over time and can recognize.
For many traditions and practices, your body has already processed a moment or situation. Your nervous system has already evaluated it, and signals – different camps call them different things – are already carrying meaning. The question is whether you’ll see the lens or see through it, while it’s working.
What Do You Do With What You Notice
You can react to your System 1 signal, carrying out what your mental map tells you without reflection. If your intuition is well-founded – recall Kahneman’s point about expert intuition – that may be exactly the right move. If your intuition is not well founded, you can make the wrong move for your collaboration conflict purposes, and for its impact on others. How consequential that is depends on circumstances. Acting without reflection is generally not an exercise of agency, and it constrains authorship.
You can act on your System 1 signal with reflection – checking assumptions, spotting uncertainty. Any form of validation of your working model will do. You can follow your System 1 signal to get more information about it. To make what’s implicit explicit, and then act. Following reflects on the signal to understand its meaning. You might do this privately – why do I feel tense, all of a sudden? You might do this publicly – you said the plan won’t work… please say more about what part won’t. Acting on a working model with reflection exercises agency and authorship.
You can overrule your System 1 signal with something else which could be impulsive or deliberate. You exercise or relinquish agency and authorship depending on how deliberate that move is.
What you do with information gained depends on the situation, the people, and what you’re trying to accomplish. Generally, the more information you have the more informed your decision and action can be. You improve your odds in collaboration, conflict prevention, and conflict resolution. Information use in rights and power-based conflicts is complicated enough to look at separately.
Rethinking Better
It’s easy to think of handling better as something you do in and about a collaboration or conflict situation. You’re in a moment of working with or working against, and you know what to say to handle it better. How to clarify communication. How to reconcile differences. You know what to do.
This is the classic problem solving mode we’ve discussed – like the auto mechanic, electrician, doctor. You stand outside the problem and solve it. You diagnose and treat. A brake clip is hanging up. A device is running hot and tripping a breaker. That rash is bacterial, not an allergy.
Collaboration and conflict have technical ways we can measure improvements or solutions – satisfaction with outcomes, effects on relationships, reduced recurrence, lower transaction costs. And handling collaboration and conflict better means, to some degree, getting better at producing those outcomes. But these measures, as relevant as they are, leave something out.
But if you concede that you’re part of the problem and solution, part of a moment or situation, you’re engaged in a way the outside problem solver isn’t. Better has to mean something else. Something in addition to technical improvements or solutions.
Better starts with the practice of noticing because that’s the moment you first exercise agency and authorship. Sometimes it’ll be in your intuition. Sometimes in checking or following it. The point is you choose, not react. You have more information, not more technique.
Better proceeds to how you do this with colleagues – you model it, in real-time and under pressure. When they see you pause, notice, choose, you create conditions for them to do the same. More information becomes available to everyone. That changes the conversation from something that happens to the group, to something the group does. Co-authorship without acts of coaching or training.
The practice of noticing also reconfigures the use of technique. Recall that techne assumes mastery and judgment first – technique serves those, not the other way around. The practice of noticing keeps you inside the collaboration or conflict moment or situation – where your mastery and judgment include you. Where you see your working model’s processing and signals. And where technique serves that, not leads it.
Making something extraordinary of ordinary experience gives us reasons and ways to rethink better handling. In the next blog, we’ll name these interiority, reflexivity, and positional awareness – and see how they work.
Test Drive Handling Collaboration And Conflict Better
Here are some things to try, to test drive ideas in this blog:
- Can you see convergence at work in yourself? In colleagues? Do you notice the “pull” to problem solve, to close gaps – or the stress of incomplete gap closure? You can watch for it in conversations at work or home – especially if it’s a conversation you don’t have a big part in because it might be easier to spot then.
- To spot naïve realism at work, listen to the different ways colleagues can describe the same event or situation. Listen for how sees what, what they’d make of it, what they’d do – and why those things but not something else. Ask yourself, is anything objectively “real” if we see the same thing in legitimately different ways?
- You have a sense of felt experience. If you follow a self or body-awareness practice, what patterns do you see? If you don’t formally practice self-awareness, try spotting it in conversation when you don’t have much to do in it. Listening in on pre-meeting chatter, party conversation, coffee shop conversation. Notice what you react to and reflect on why. You weren’t “part” of that conversation at that moment – why did you react to anything?
- You’ve experienced cognitive ease and strain, even if you didn’t have the labels. Because System 1 and System 2 processing work in tandem, notice when you accept an easy answer instead of spending more energy on figuring more out. Or when you substitute a hard question and answer with an easy one. Think about the effect on your decision making. Think about what happens if your team does the same.
A test drive isn’t a test. There’s no passing or failing, only trying and noticing. Sometimes you’ll have an ahh-ha! moment. Sometimes you’ll raise more questions than your answer. Both are the point.
The stance this series invites is different from the problem-solving, technique mindset most professional development offers. The goal isn’t to apply a technique correctly. It’s to better understand your relationship to work collaboration and conflict – so that you know what you’re doing with technique, and why, not just how.
