To Resolve Conflicts, Talk

Take my advice, I'm not using it.

I learned years ago that if I have a conflict with someone, the best approach is to sit down and talk with them.

Here I will discuss two times I’ve followed my advice and once when I didn’t.

Years ago I worked as a programmer at NASA/Ames Research Center. I supported researchers doing fluid mechanics experiments. One such experiment involved a crossed hot-wire instrument that was moved in a grid around an airfoil to take precise measurements of the flow of the air in three dimensions. The problem was that each calculation was complex and took a fair amount of time. Ideally, we would have solved all the possible combinations and put them into a big table. Then, during the experiment, we would have simply looked up our result from the table. Unfortunately, we couldn’t employ this approach because the table was too big for our computer’s memory.

However, on my way home from work one night, I realized we would put part of the calculation into such a table, which would fit into memory and, even while part would still need real-time CPU cycles, this would substantially speed up the whole process. The researcher I worked with, Russell Westphal, saw the value in this approach and we decided to publish it.

Unfortunately, there was a visiting researcher who claimed to independently discover this same shortcut, and he said he was going to publish it.

I invited him to sit down and talk about it. We talked about the problem of slow calculations. We agreed that the new approach solved a key problem. Then I described when and where I came up with the idea, how excited I was, and how I tested it to see if it would work. Eventually he conceded and told us to publish it.

While the previous example was a success, I didn’t follow my own advice later in life and one sticky situation ended badly.

My company was consulting with a successful biotech company. We had developed a creative idea to help the company generate better trend-based forecasts for its marketed products. The idea was ours. The models we built were ours. The code we developed was ours.

Later, after the project was transferred onto another employee at this company, we were asked by him to make some modifications. We wrote a proposal, which he approved. We set about making the modifications and successfully finished them right before the Christmas holiday season.

Initially, he was happy. But then he contacted me and said the model didn’t do certain things. I reminded him that the features he was requesting weren’t covered in the model revision project. He put his foot down, insisting that we add those features immediately for free. I replied that we would be happy to do so under a new project. He dug in his heels. Being three hours away from him and the promise of a restful holiday dissuaded me from visiting him to talk about this conflict. Via email we reached an impasse.

The net result? He effectively fired us. Everything we had created for our important client, the result of our own creativity and hard work, was passed to another consulting company. Not too long after this, our work dried up at his company.

Even though I was 100% right, I should have reached out to him and driven the three hours to work out a better solution. I hadn’t followed my own advice.

The third example I will describe ended well.

I’m the president of the road association in the neighborhood where I live. If homeowners don’t pay their dues and the treasurer has run out of patience, the job falls in my lap.

Not only was this particular homeowner not paying his dues, but his dog had gotten into a messy altercation. He was not helpful when I talked to him on the phone. And so I invited him to my house after work. When he came, my wife and I were gracious and offered him a drink. Then we sat down to listen to his side of the story. After letting him talk at length, I explained my side.

We ended up having a very enjoyable conversation. He talked about his work and his home life. He described living in a cramped house with some adult children who were having life troubles. He told us his best friend had just died in a crash.

By the time he left, I felt fortunate to have gotten to know him, to make the connection and, most of all, I felt sorry for him. Earlier in the process he had been deceptive, but he wasn’t a jerk. He was like most of us, without the answers and yet traveling through life, trying to figure it out as he went.

Note to self: if I have a conflict with someone, sit down and talk to them.