Position, Interest, Need – uncovering latent consensus using PIN
Sometimes our work involves facilitating conversations among people who know that they disagree with each other.
They may be professional campaigners, politicians or lobbyists. They may be householders or developers. They may be in the room because a sudden row has blown up triggered by news of a forthcoming decision about funding, planning permission or a change in the law.
Whatever has led to it, the people I’m thinking of have already established a ‘position’ about the topic, and assume that their job in the meeting is to advocate and defend that position.
Defending a position
Defending a position leads to people asserting certainty about causes, consequences and facts, often more certainty than is justified by the current state of knowledge and analysis. It encourages people to dispute the facts put forward by others, and to question their motives. People defending a position often build such an edifice of certainty around themselves that it is very hard for them to move away from their initial position, even if they want to.
The things said about those who don’t agree with the position can be damaging to working relationships and lead to a decrease in trust, making subsequent conversations harder.
Win/win or win/lose?
Positional conversations assume a win/lose paradigm. But what if it were possible to find a win/win? You can only discover the potential for a win/win if you move beneath the positions and discover the interests and needs. (I could tell you about boogli fruit, but I’d have to kill you.) What has led people to develop their positions? What interests are served by those positions? What are the needs which are met through those interests?
Below the inversion
The classic PIN diagram shows a couple of people communicating (!) their positions to each other from mountain peaks. I was first introduced to this by Andrew Acland and Pippa Hyam in a course they ran for The Environment Council many years ago.
My version also has a layer of cloud cutting off the positions from the possibility of common ground. They can’t even see that the mountains they are standing on are part of the same range.
(The Munro baggers and assorted hill walkers among you will know that layers of cloud like this form when there’s a temperature inversion. HT to Alex Roddie over at Glencoe Mountaineer blog for the pic.)
Our job as facilitators, mediators or consensus builders is to help people talk and listen to each other about the stuff below the inversion.
Climbing down from a pinnacle can be a risky experience, and people need to feel safe about giving up their position and moving into unknown territory. The facilitator can create this safety by being very open about why they are inviting people to explore interests and needs, the process they are suggesting (including its consensual nature and the identical invitation being extended to others) and by accepting with respect the responses people give.
As people describe and listen to each others’ interests and needs, they can see more clearly the common ground that already exists: the latent consensus.
Latent consensus
There is bound to be some latent consensus! Good conversations can help add detail and hard edges to the motherhood and apple pie, lowest-common-denominator morass which some people are so afraid of when the word consensus is used. As relationships strengthen and respect and trust increases through good conversation, people can begin to build outwards from the latent consensus and create new common ground. This includes agreeing to disagree in a spirit of curiosity and respect, rather than a re-establishment of positions which must then be defended.
Because of course there will still be things people disagree about, below the inversion. But conversation can focus on understanding the disagreements (choices, preferences) more clearly. Which of them are symptoms of anxiety caused by uncertainty about facts or about whether they can trust the others? Which of them relate to paradigms, values and basic underlying assumptions? And which are options which can be selected following further research or exploration, and which can be lightly held as alternatives for a long time to come?
Avoiding positional thinking in the first place
If you can get in to the process early enough, it’s possible to head off positional thinking. Early stages can involve all the parties (stakeholders) in collectively defining and describing the current situation (or problem), including the things they like about it and the things they don’t like about it. People can develop a shared view of the better future (or solution) they’d like to see – and understand respectfully what the things are that they disagree about, too.
Options for the end goal may be created. Options for getting there may be created.
When presenting back options which have been created by sub-groups, we sometimes push people unwittingly towards taking a position when they might otherwise hold an open mind for longer. ‘Dot voting’ to show preferences too soon is one trap. Asking people whether they like an option is another.
A great way to avoid doing this is to ask for feedback on what people like and don’t like about each option, rather than asking them to make a judgement about the option as a whole too early. The facilitator can also ask them what they think they understand by it, and what seems unclear or they’ve had to make an assumption about.
Carousel, galleries with the option for post-it commenting, or world cafe can all be used to set up conversations like this and harvest the results for further pondering.
