Part 13 of the Transforming Communication interview:
… Richard: …And when I say detailed skills I was reminded of this one we were talking before that, from the research we now know that there are some very detailed skills. It’s about things as small as adjusting your voice tone, things as small as adjusting the expression on your face, things as small as breathing in time with someone else.
It is literally, as that negotiator in Oslo said, about creating a love affair, or creating a sense that this person and you value each other.
Michael: I think that is also a big takeaway. Just valuing the imput of the other person as well as your own.
Richard: Totally, yeah.
Michael: So, you were talking earlier on, Richard, about the, what I suppose some people would perceive as the failure of the Oslo Agreement regards Palestine and Israel. There’s another example regarding the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and what happened there. So, it would be really great if you could tell me, and everybody listening, all about that.
Richard: That’s another example that I actually studied myself. And in developing this training, let me say first of all that I kind of drew together some threads from various experiences I’d had before, various situations I’d looked into, such as what happened in Northern Ireland, such as what was happening in the Middle East, such as what was happening in Bosnia Herzegovina. And I also drew on my background in fields such as Neurolinguistic Programming which is a field that studies relationships between people and what goes on inside the brain as people relate to each other.
Now, one of the things that I noticed in Northern Ireland is that the mediation process there that was organised largely by George Mitchell, Senator from the United States, that this process contained a lot of the skills that I was wanting to teach people. And so certainly there, this setup that I described before as rapport was created between the people who were negotiating there.
These were people who started off the process thinking that the people on the other side of this table were murderers refusing to sit with them at the start. And so, George Mitchell had his work cut out at the start just getting these people to stay in the same hotel.
He required them to stay, for example, in similar rooms, and required them during the breaks not to talk about politics or religion. That’s a very smart move because one of the things we know about conflict resolution is that conflict resolution works best when people actually treat each other as human beings rather than as someone they’re having a conflict with. There’s a subtle difference between those two things.
And so, what that process actually set up was an opportunity for these people to meet each other first as human beings and then to listen to each other and then to find what are the common outcomes, common goals. In doing that, George Mitchell did a lot of what I would call from Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP I would call reframing. Reframing means putting a different frame around something so that it looks different.
This case, for example, involved the fact that when bombings actually began happening again in Northern Ireland while the peace process was on, some people said: well, that proves it’s never going to work. What George Michell said was: this proves that we’re getting close to a settlement. Because that’s why these people are getting frightened, why they’re doing these things.
That’s a very skillful way of framing it, and people who are good at resolving conflicts do that kind of thing themselves. They listen to what the other person says. The other person says, for example: I hate you and I’m going to make sure that you suffer. And they say: You’ve had a difficult time with this, and you want to get to feel better about it.
So they change the meaning of what’s said towards the positive. People who are not successful at creating conflict resolution change the meaning often towards the negative. They hear the worst possible meaning in it. So, teaching people how to hear different meanings is part of this process as well.
Now, I modelled, in NLP terms we say I modelled what happened in those kind of situations. Let me give you a couple of examples of what happens when something is modelled like this. By modelled I mean I worked out what did they do there. What are the exact skills so that you can then teach those skills step by step to someone else and they could do them.
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What are those examples? Find out in part 14 of the Transforming Communication interview…
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