An Accord Will Take Antagonism, Resonance, Invention And Action

reprinted from The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1999
An Interview with Jay Rothman

Jay Rothman ( jrothman@ariagroup.com ) is director of the ARIA Group, a conflict-resolution consulting firm; a visiting scholar at Antioch University; and author of "Resolving Identity-Based Conflicts in Nations, Organizations and Communities."

He spoke with Commentary Page editor John Timpane.

Question: SEPTA management and the Transport Workers Union seem to have settled into hardened positions. At that point, it's hard to make any progress. How would a conflict-resolution specialist handle such a situation?
Answer: That's one of the main challenges and frustrations of my field. Because people are conflict-averse, they won't engage a dispute until it hits them over the head. But once it's at that point, it's going to be very hard to make progress.
Once, a firm invited me in, and the CEO said: "We need you. We're having an internal conflict in upper-level management. We're at each other's throats." But he didn't call again for six months, when he called to say they decided they could handle it themselves. Six months after that, he called again to say, "Come. Help us. We're having fistfights."
So I came in and spent the first three months working backward, wasting time.
Question: So we must work backward from this point?
Answer: Yes I have a framework called ARIA. The A stands for Antagonism. The first thing to do is to surface that antagonism in a carefully controlled setting, in which people can't lave and can't hit each other.
Then, we have to keep working until the participants are weary and are ready for something different. The "different" is the R, for Resonance. We explore the why beneath the what.
Perhaps the workers will say: "We want better wages, better benefits, and we want to stop being exploited by management." Perhaps management says: We want certain concessions, we want workers to work to certain rules, and we want our authority to be recognized."
Then we ask each side why it wants these things. Perhaps the workers say: "We want to have a dignified life. We want to be seen as worthy citizens. We want a sense of our own voice and efficacy." And management says: "We want to be seen as being effective. We want to hear our own voice expressed and be effective."
We say then, "Both of you are driven by very similar motivations."
The first level was getting people to express their concerns-which can be difficult, because often they want only to express resentment of the other side.
But then we need to get what they care about-and often you'll find resonance between the two positions. The two sides are trying to make the city work; trying to be fair; working for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Question: But there are still real disagreements.
Answer: That's why we move to Invention, the I of ARIA. At first, we're inventing solutions for the underlying concerns: how to crate a voice for the workers and more sense of authority for the managers, how to build a system to meet these underlying needs.
Now we come to the scarce resource issue — dollars and cents. Now we start the hard, concrete bargaining-but on the basis of positive momentum built on respect for and fulfillment of the need for dignity on all sides.
We do this inventing, via pretty standard brainstorming, "with mixed groups of union and management leaders. It can be tough. We're trying to come up with solutions big enough to matter, small enough to work, always building confidence in the relationships.
Then we move into A for Action: planing what we do when we leave the room-how we talk to reporters, constituencies and one another.
I've used the word aria as both an acronym and a metaphor. It's a song, usually the high point of passion in an opera. An aria can arise from the best and worst of passions.
Conflict resolution can help us dig out, uncover and express who we are and what we care about, and find ways to get to those things cooperatively.