Perspective Management: Want to solve conflict in your organization? Try a new perspective on for size. By / Deirdre McCarthy Gallagher The project was behind schedule, and the Local’s business manager had heard reports that the contractor was pushing his union team to move at a pace that was unrealistic and unsafe. One afternoon, a union member was rushing from one part of the site to another and dropped some tools. While he was picking them up, the contractor walked over and started berating the worker at the top of his lungs. The business manager stepped between the two and said, very loudly, “That’s enough! This is unacceptable. I won’t let you treat my team that way!” The contractor curled his fists and decided it wasn’t the right time to explain that the same worker had dropped tools twice already that same day and had been told to slow down and be more careful. Workers separated the contractor and the business manager, but their suppressed anger cast a chill over the worksite. 8 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
Conflict in the workplace is often a matter of perspective. In the face of difficulty or challenge, we first become aware that something is happening through our senses, hearing something that someone says or seeing something that someone does. Because our work environments are complex, with competing demands, we develop shortcuts to make sense of what we see. Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, talks about this in terms of fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking operates automatically and quickly with little effort and no sense of voluntary control—finding the sum of 2+2 or riding a bicycle, for example. Slow thinking, on the other hand, requires us to devote attention and mental energy to the task at hand—as we well know, filling out a tax form or parallel parking are slow thinking tasks. Fast thinking is continuously at work, generating impressions, intuitions, intentions, and
