ROBERT C . BORDONE ’94
Bridging the Divide
Harper Business
Faced with conflict of almost any sort—personal or political, in the home or workplace or the public square—most people try to avoid it. (I’m one of them.) And in situations where avoidance is impossible, our instinct is to treat even minor disagreements as life-and-death battles or, more often, to steer the conversation toward common ground, minimizing differences and shutting down the stressful business of argument as soon as possible.
We’re doing it all wrong, says Robert C. Bordone, coauthor with Dr. Joel Salinas of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. Bordone, founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, and Salinas, a behavioral neurologist at New York University, combine their expertise to help us “befriend” conflict, allowing us to sit with and grow from it. The result is productive conversations that don’t always lead to resolving an issue but can foster deeper understanding and empathy between adversaries. It’s a start.
Accessibly written for the general reader and exhaustively supported with examples from Bordone’s advanced negotiation practice and Salinas’ knowledge of the latest brain science, Conflict Resilience could hardly be more timely. Especially since the onset of the Covid pandemic, we live in a divided society in which our fractious national politics increasingly filters down like acid rain on our interactions with neighbors, coworkers, even family members. Everyday conversation has rarely felt so fraught, the stakes so fearfully high.
This wise and realistic book provides no easy answers, but it does offer a three-part framework for negotiating conflict in ways that make it more doable, practical, and potentially useful. The first step involves both naming the issue and digging deep into its layers, especially the underlying emotional ones. (Logic, the authors say, is rarely sufficient.) The second step encourages exploration, curiosity, and courage. The third step is about committing to and “owning” the conflict, including whether it’s resolvable at all and where to go from there.
This leads me to a concern I had while reading this book, which is whether it will be useful in situations in which one or both sides of a conflict are not acting in good faith. If people use the conflict itself to bludgeon their opponent—to “own” him or her, empathy be damned—what hope can there be for a positive outcome? What happens when a positive outcome is not the true goal?
