Introduction and Episode Question

[00:00:03] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

[00:00:08] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:00:10] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:00:11] Karen: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, what do we do when the house is on fire? 

[00:00:19] Paul: This was a question we posed sort of at the end of last week's episode where we were talking about building skills for working better together. You know that ideally you want to be doing it at a time when there's a problem, right? There is a flame that sort of motivates us to do some degree of skill building.

[00:00:36] Paul: But not everything is on fire, right? Where the house isn't burning down around us. 

When the House is on Fire

[00:00:40] Paul: And yet one of the things that both Karen and I experience is oftentimes we get called in when the house is on fire. When the problem has become so bad, now no one can ignore it. So they're very motivated to actually do something about it.

[00:00:53] Paul: But also the presence of that problem is severely impacting their ability to work together and learn anything about how they could resolve the problem together. So what Karen and I want to talk about today is what do we do in that situation? Because you're not really set up for success, and yet very often as consultants, that's the situation we find ourselves coming into.

[00:01:16] Paul: So how do we address that? And how might you start to recognize some of the things that might be going on in your situation that you might be able to do something about.

[00:01:25] Karen: Yeah, I think this is absolutely classic. 

Recognizing Group Dynamics

[00:01:27] Karen: It's pretty unusual for me to get a call from a group that says, you know, we're just kind of unsettled about a number of things. I don't think our communication's working great.

[00:01:35] Karen: It's kind of getting in our way, which that's a great time to actually do some of this work. Not when it's all clear skies and smooth sailing, but when it's gotten a little clunky. But in fact that tends not to be when they call, they have enough skills to get through that tolerably. And so they do, and they call me when their skills have completely failed them and they're just stuck.

[00:02:01] Karen: And usually some kind of hefty conflict, generally with sides taken and that kind of thing. And in that situation, it's very predictable that some of the people are saying, well, yeah, this happened because we didn't ever do the skill building and we don't have the skills and what we need is the skills. And other people in the group are saying, I was fine until this big thing showed up, and I just want the off ramp for this big thing.

[00:02:26] Karen: I just wanna bring it in a consultant to solve this thing and not spend all the time and money and energy and whatever that it takes to do some big touchy feely workshop thing. I just wanna get through this crisis? Often the organizers will say, okay, we've got these two different perspectives, and some people who want both, and where do you start with that?

[00:02:48] Karen: And for me, it is somewhat situational and I think the biggest factor that I'm looking at when facing that kind of a question is how tolerable is what's going on in the group in terms of emotional dynamics. 

Building Trust and Safety

[00:03:06] Karen: If they can't be in the same room together that's not gonna work. If they are just roaring, mad raging and don't feel safe, so maybe they'll come into the room, but they're a hundred percent defended and not actually listen to anybody. That's not gonna work.

[00:03:21] Karen: So I'm not going anywhere near that hot topic. If there isn't enough trust and safety in the room to share real feelings, to hear other people, to set aside myself for a few minutes and step into somebody else's world to really get where they are, those are all the kinds of skills I wanna build, and I can't do that if people are so defended that they won't do vulnerability at all. So that's kind of the tipping point for me, is what do we have to do to get enough safety? And even as I say that, I wanna acknowledge that sometimes you can't get the safety without somewhat addressing the problem that was brought. 

[00:04:01] Paul: Well, and ultimately, like you do need to address the problem, right. Whatever the current situation is, whatever the fire really is, you do need to do that. And that is what is motivating people to actually do whatever it is that you're gonna have them do.

[00:04:16] Paul: And I do try to keep that, you know, sort of front and center, right? One of the things that I really try to anchor anything that I'm gonna ask the group to do back to is, and here is how this is gonna help you with this intolerable situation you're in. Right? 

Balancing Skill Building and Problem Solving

[00:04:32] Paul: And so if it's things like, as you say, before you even have to answer the question of like, do I try to build skills or do I try to address the problem, right?

[00:04:39] Paul: To deal with these sort of two different camps in a lot of ways, before you do that, you have to have the foundation where it's like neither of them are may be possible from where you are. So when you're trying to do things like, get everybody in the same room, get them talking to each other, get them listening to each other, you know, things like that.

[00:04:56] Paul: I'm always connecting that to, and this is necessary for us to address the bigger problem. Because it is, right? I wanna be tying it back because that is the thing that will motivate them to do the thing that they're unwilling to do otherwise. If they were able to do those things without you being there, they would've.

[00:05:15] Paul: You are the scaffolding that's showing up, that's helping them expand their capacity to deal with the problem in a small way, and you're using that capacity to move them forward, you know, in whatever way. So, I agree with you. You've gotta start with. What are the preconditions for even being able to make a choice about are we going after the problem?

[00:05:36] Paul: Are we going after, you know, skill building? And then I think the place that we both go on this is those are actually interlinked, right? You can't only do one or the other and you're gonna have to do both. And it's a question in almost a like moment to moment session to session. Like, where is my focus right now?

[00:05:55] Paul: That you're gonna jump back and forth between doing those two things because, you can't not, I mean, to the people, I get both of those positions, right? There are people who say we need skills. Right? And there are people who say we need to address the problem.

[00:06:08] Paul: Like they're both right. And they're also not a hundred percent right. It's like you actually can't address the problem without skill building happening because otherwise if you were capable of not getting into this situation, we wouldn't be here. So you're probably not capable of getting back out of it with your current level of skill.

[00:06:28] Paul: I think sometimes there's a belief that like, oh, we'll bring in a consultant and that will solve everything because maybe they will give us the magic answer that we just weren't aware of. Like a smart person who's seen this stuff a lot of times will give us something that we didn't think of before.

[00:06:43] Paul: Maybe they'll help us all hear each other and then they will declare that I am right. And we've talked about this before about how the two of us try not to fall into the trap of we're there to pass judgment, and be a decision maker about what you should do. So you need to do some degree, you're gonna need to do some skill building to get out of this, but also you need to not just focus on the skills, right?

[00:07:03] Paul: You need to focus on just enough of the skills to be able to make progress on the problem. Like you've gotta interleave these. So like both of these positions, these viewpoints are right and wrong. Like I get both of them.

[00:07:15] Karen: Yeah. And I think people get caught up in, among other things, the fear that if we agree to one the other won't happen. And so we've talked a little bit about the folks who are like, well, we need the skill building 'cause we're afraid that we'll just keep getting into these problems. I think they're probably right.

[00:07:30] Karen: But the flip side of the fear, which happens a lot by the way, in conflict of earth spaces. Is that we'll all stop and talk about it and we'll remember how much we like each other, and we'll have this lovely little trust building exercise and everybody will feel a little warmer and a little happier in the moment.

[00:07:47] Karen: And the thing that I was feeling ticked about and not getting my needs met and wanted addressed, just got thoroughly shoved under the carpet and people aren't upset about it enough anymore to be willing to put time and energy into solving it. And do that once and nobody will ever be willing to work on the skills again because there is that sense of betrayal of, okay, I came and I did all this work because I thought my thing was gonna get some resolution and then it doesn't. 

Navigating Emotional Energy

[00:08:15] Paul: In some ways, you don't want people to feel good after the skill building. You want them to feel capable. You still want them to be unhappy about the situation, but know that they now have a thing that they can do. Because you want them to still be motivated to do it.

[00:08:29] Paul: Like that's kind of what you're talking about. And there are a lot of those, you know, types of interventions, right? Where somebody comes in and they don't actually address either the problem or necessarily the skill building, right? They kind of plaster things over and they help everybody feel better, but it doesn't actually address any of the underlying issues.

[00:08:47] Paul: And that's the sort of thing that people are a hundred percent correct to be dubious of and to be concerned about. And it's like, I don't want that to happen. And so, you know, so unhappy, but more capable. Maybe a, a useful place to go there. And I said like, you know, you're kind of deciding on a moment to moment, like sort of piece by piece in small chunks where you're gonna go kind of thing.

Isolating and Addressing Issues

[00:09:08] Paul: You know, my usual approach to this is as I'm thinking about the problem, like the house on fire is never one thing. It's usually a complex of things, right? It's a lot of interleaved issues and things like that. And I think one of the things that I'm always kind of doing, and I'm encouraging the group to do this as well, is to look at like, what are the pieces of this that where we can start to sort of isolate chunks of it.

[00:09:33] Paul: Not necessarily that they're independent of each other, but we might bound our problem solving around it a little bit. And then I'm starting to think about which of those chunks as they start to reveal themselves, might the group be capable of where they are now. And then like, if there's none of them, it's like, what's the skill they need to build to be able to deal with the next biggest one?

[00:09:55] Paul: And then we can focus the skill building around that particular aspect of it.

[00:10:00] Karen: Yeah. And I think often that skill building is actually concurrent. 'Cause whatever it is I'm teaching them to do, when I ask them to practice that new skill, they need some kind of content to do it with. So as long as we have enough safety and we have enough sort of mental and emotional connection together that people can be like fully themselves present and share and all that kind of thing.

[00:10:21] Karen: Very often we can use at least a chunk of the issue that we've got to practice the skill that I'm teaching. The other thing I do wanna mention is that while it is important to make sure that people feel settled about whatever the conflict was, I think it does often happen that by the time you've dealt with a lot of the emotional energy around it.

[00:10:42] Karen: People are in fact settled. Even though they don't have the thing they thought they wanted at the beginning. So they start out saying, we need a solution for this problem. We need a written agreement, or we need a new policy. Or we need a process for how we make decisions in the future so we don't get caught in this.

[00:11:00] Karen: That kind of thing. Like there's this vision of it's often a thing you can put on a piece of paper, I will say, but a vision of an outcome. Some kind of agreement, some kind of consensus that we can get to that is what I think we need to get through this, right? And very often, the deeply hearing one another and feeling heard by each other.

[00:11:23] Karen: And if everybody in the room is like, okay, that bad thing happened, we didn't like it. We still don't have a rule that's gonna protect me from it again, or a new policy, but everyone in the community really did hear me. They understand why it hurt me. They care about that. I'm good. And so while we do need to address the conflict that brought us here and make sure that the fire is out.

[00:11:48] Karen: We don't necessarily need to empty a whole fire truck full of water on it, like okay, we started with this problem, so therefore we have to see it all the way through. This is where that, what you're talking about, of that sort of step by step, meeting by meeting, what do we need now is really important because I think we can exhaust people by taking it way further than anybody actually needs it to go. 

[00:12:11] Paul: And the other thing that points out is obviously like when people come into these sort of situations, they've got a preferred solution upfront, right? They know this is the outcome that I want because I believe that will solve our problem. One of the things that happens as we actually build our skills around this.

[00:12:30] Paul: We discover other solutions that would now work for us. Like when we are less skilled at navigating these things, that's when there's less trust in the group. We've talked about this before. People wanna have more rules, right? They wanna articulate. So if we're in a situation where there's, we don't, haven't really learned how to operate together, right? Where there isn't trust, then we're gonna demand these sorts of rules. Those are gonna be solutions.

[00:12:54] Paul: As we start to build that, as we start to learn how to navigate ambiguity together, we actually have less of a need of that kind of thing. It opens up more possible solutions for us. The more skillful we are, the more possible solutions to the thing would work for us. Which is not something that we often think about. And so, to your point, like we wanna do just enough, but also the, like, as we get more skillful, we don't need as much in some ways.

[00:13:26] Karen: And I think that's about if we get solid in our relationships, we can rely on them to do a lot of challenging things for us. That would take a whole lot of other process. I mean, it's just way more work to collaborate in a place of mistrust and no safety and misunderstanding than it is to do the same work. Collaborating in a space where we do trust each other and we are good at communicating and we do understand each other, it just makes a world of difference. 

[00:13:54] Paul: Well, and I think that's one of the cases where I think it's important to differentiate. We've kind of drifted into a little bit of a different topic here, which is there is the situation, the problem that we're trying to deal with, there is the current sort of state of the relationships which has been damaged by the existence of the problem.

[00:14:13] Paul: And so one of the things that happens in this, and this kind of, you know, is that foundational piece that we talked about at the beginning of like, how do you restore the health of the relationships enough that you can start to actually do some work on this. Then there is the ability to build and maintain those relationships.

[00:14:31] Paul: And that's kind of the skill building stuff that we're talking about. It's important to think about ultimately what we're doing is we're trying to resolve the problem that's been damaging the relationships. We're also, then we're trying to build it back up, right?

[00:14:44] Paul: But in some cases we may recognize like, there is no solution to this problem. Like there's no way to make it go away. This is where I go back to John Gottman's research on like 60% of recurring arguments in relationships have no solution. Like there is no answer that just addresses everything.

[00:15:03] Paul: And so the skill is actually learning how to be together when you disagree about it. But of course, if you don't have the skill of being able to disagree and recognize that the problem's never gonna go away and still be okay with that, then of course you're always looking for an answer right. Sort of thing.

[00:15:20] Paul: You're looking for a solution. So I think that it's always kind of three things that we're tracking then is that like, what's the state of the problem? What's the state of the relationships and what's the level of skill and like, which one of those are the things that we wanna be working on at any given time?

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:15:35] Karen: Yeah, so we started with the question of what do we do when the house is on fire? Which by which we mean there's some big conflict. There's some big disagreement, argument, fissure in our group that we're trying to work through. And that often Paula or I gets called in to help with that situation. And the question is, do we work on the conflict first or do we work on the skills that would have helped us not get to this point before first?

[00:16:01] Karen: And the answer is probably you have to do both intertwined. Most of the time, I'm gonna start with some pretty basic skill building that's really aimed at getting trust reestablished. At least beginning to get it reestablished, getting enough trust and safety in the room that you can do the rest of the work. As you dive into the content, it's this bit of, okay, is there a piece that we can handle? The whole thing is too big for us with the skills that we have, but what's the next piece and what's the skill that we need for that?

[00:16:34] Karen: So either we teach the skill and then we do the piece, or we teach the skill and then use the piece as part of the teaching of the skill to practice it. But that's kind of the path you have to take through. I very rarely give a roadmap of, okay, processes, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do this because, I don't know, step two until I've done step one and can reassess, okay, where's the group now?

[00:16:55] Karen: How much safety do they have? How much trust do they have? Which parts of the problem have been teased off and resolved, and which parts are now either loudest, blocking other parts or just available. There's the capacity and the skill to do them. What's the next piece that we address? And what we think is that while we love to do this with things not on fire, we'd like to do this when the first little flames show up and before the whole house is on fire.

[00:17:22] Karen: That would be our ideal. We recognize that that's not often the case. If we could do what people often expect that we'll do, which is come in, wave our magic wand, come up with the solution, the agreement, the judgment that's gonna solve it all. That we would then satisfy people enough that they aren't interested in learning the skills and they just land back in and again.

[00:17:44] Karen: And if we could come in and magically teach everybody the skills, but ignore the conflict piece. There would be some people who'd be totally happy with that 'cause we're not in conflict anymore and it's great and we have these skills and we feel good. And there would be other people who felt really betrayed by that because they had a need for resolution around that thing and they didn't get it. And in fact, we don't think you usually can do either without the other.

[00:18:10] Karen: So fortunately we don't really have to decide like one way or another, we're gonna do some of both. And the things you wanna watch out for are, don't just put a bandaid on it. You're not just trying to whitewash it. You're trying to really get to what are the underlying issues. You're trying to build some core foundational skills that are gonna build trust, safety, and understanding ongoing in the group, and that you do enough to get some ongoing skillset and enough to get resolution enough. Doesn't mean everybody got what they wanted, but everybody is relatively peaceful and feels like they've been heard and addressed and gotten what they need out of it.

[00:18:50] Karen: And then not too much. So you don't also wanna say, well we're gonna do it really thoroughly and do three extra meetings that you didn't need and just fatigue everybody because that also will make them not want to use the skills ongoing and you're gonna end up with problems again. So it's this very tricky moment by moment thing and it some of the most powerful work groups can do. 

[00:19:08] Paul: Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:19:12] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.