Page 144 - Make Work Great

Growing Your Crystal

What if your intentions are pure? Perhaps you don’t want to change
the occasionally diffi cult person, but you believe you can successfully
create mutual benefi t by role-modeling your new cultural patterns.
You’re a little hesitant to try because of some past communication
diffi culties between you. Perhaps you also sense that both of you had
a role in those diffi culties, and you wonder what improvements you
could make that would help. In that case, you might benefi t from the
following model for troubleshooting the inevitable diffi cult patches
in your communication.

Five Building Blocks of Reality
“Why am I having such a hard time communicating with this per-
son?” Most of us ask that question in silent (or not-so-silent) frustra-
tion, as we struggle through a confl ict over what we think should be
a simple issue. Phrases like “How can you not see it this way?” and
“You don’t seem to understand,” have their roots in honest confu-
sion about the source of disagreement but quickly become points of
argument all their own. Confl ict builds on confl ict until the original

Conflict in the Crystalline Network

Conflict is another interpersonal field about which much has been

written. Daniel Katz long ago suggested three sources of confl ict:
conflict over scarce resources, conflict over incompatible ideology,

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and conflict over competing desire for power or infl uence. Ron Fisher
adds the possibility of conflict driven by miscommunication. Analysis

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of issues related to the importance of an individual’s role set led Katz
and Robert Kahn to consider causes of conflict such as role confl ict,

role overload, and issues of perception between the senders and
receivers of expectations. Roger Fisher and William Ury promote the
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need to separate the people, positions, and interests and deal with
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them separately. My fi ve building blocks of reality are based on the
commonalities among these and other related sources.

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