When You Feel The Urge To Create A Conflict, Create A Dilemma Instead
On February 12th, 2004, at the direction of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and in defiance of California Law, city officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in what would come to be known as the Winter of Love. Coming just in time for Valentines Day, it captured the imagination of the LGBTQ community.
Yet the backlash was swift. Within weeks, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Conservative groups swung into action and in 2008 were successful in placing Proposition 8, a law so harsh that many believe that it paved the way for marriage rights.
Saul Alinsky warned that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. Out instinct is to try to silence dissent, but that will always backfire. There is a better way. Rather than try to overpower those that oppose your idea, you can create a dilemma that forces them to discredit themselves. By inciting a crackdown, that’s exactly what Newsom’s ploy did.
How Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels Paved The Way For Women’s Right To Vote
The first march on Washington, dubbed the Women’s Suffrage Procession, was scheduled for March 3rd, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. It quickly turned to disaster. Provocateurs disrupted the procession, blocking its path and yelling epithets at the suffragettes.
The police were negligently slow to respond and a full scale riot broke out, discrediting the movement and its leader, Alice Paul. Later, when Wilson entered office, the suffragettes went to see him and urged him to do something about women’s rights. He refused, saying he had more important things to tend to, such as economic and foreign policy.
The suffragettes had every reason to be bitter and, certainly, could have chosen to create a conflict. But they did something better. They created a dilemma. Small bands of “Silent Sentinels” picketed the White House with phrases lifted from President Wilson’s own book, published just a few years earlier.
How could he object, without appearing to be a tremendous hypocrite, to signs that read, “LIBERTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL DEMAND OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.” and “WE ARE INTERESTED IN THE UNITED STATES, POLITICALLY SPEAKING, IN NOTHING BUT LIBERTY,” when he was, in fact, the very author of those same words?
Wilson had two choices: He could have voiced support for women’s right to vote or he could have had the women arrested to stop their picketing. He chose the latter, and, when the brutal treatment the woman endured in captivity became public, the movement won even more support, damaging Wilson politically.
The President would ultimately surrender. Just a seven years after the disastrous march, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote.
How Putin Lost To Legos
After Vladimir Putin’s sham election in 2012, protests broke out all over Russia. But in the Siberian city of Barnaul, the city authorities refused. The protesters faced a dilemma. They could stay silent and let an injustice pass, or they could protest anyway, risk arrest or even worse. They chose a third option: To create a dilemma for the regime.
They set up a protest, but instead of people it was toys—over a 100 lego figures and Kinder Surprise figures—holding signs that read “I’m for clean elections,” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin.” It was absurd, which was what made it fun! People came and took pictures, shared them on social media.
Now the dilemma was on the regime’s side. Do they allow the toy protest to go forward? Or do they show that the “powerful” regime is afraid of children’s toys. The response came quickly. “As you understand, toys, especially imported toys, are not only not citizens of Russia but they are not even people.”
It was, of course, hilarious and news traveled quickly. International media picked it up and ran with it. Who could resist the story of Vladimir Putin being made a fool out of by a bunch of children’s toys. A protest with real people in a remote Siberian city would have hardly been noticed at all.
A Sandbagging Sales Director
Some years ago, I was brought in to rebuild a sales and marketing operation. It immediately became clear that the sales director was a big part of the problem. Not only was she competing with her own salespeople, she was accounting for 90% of the revenues. Clearly, she was assigning all of the best clients to herself.
She agreed to distribute her clients among the team and focus on managing instead of selling, but never seemed to get around to it. It was obvious that she intended to slow-walk everything until my project was over and then return everything back to the way it was. Put simply, she was sandbagging me.
It was obvious that if I was ever going to get things going in the right direction, I would have to have to break the impasse, but that would be difficult. She was politically savvy, well liked and, because she accounted for so much revenue, was seen as critical to the viability of the company. Creating a direct confrontation with her would be risky and unwise.
So I arranged with the CEO of a key client for one of the salespeople to meet with a senior buyer. The sales director had two choices. She could either let the meeting go ahead and lose her grip on the department or try to derail the meeting. She chose the latter and was fired for cause. Once she was gone, her mismanagement became obvious and sales shot up.
Don’t Create Conflict. Create A Dilemma
When we feel passionately about an idea it becomes part of our identity, dignity and sense of self. That’s why any opposition can feel like an affront, an assault not only on the idea, but on our very being. That makes us want to lash out, to dominate, to overpower and smite our enemies; to show them that they cannot win and resistance is futile.
That never ends well. Usually, you just get pulled into a petty back-and-forth. Even if you prevail in the immediate conflict, you create animosity that is bound to turn back on you and undermine what you are trying to achieve. Whatever stories we want to tell ourselves, the urge to dominate is always about seeking status for ourselves, not devotion to a cause.
That’s why instead of creating a conflict, we need to create a dilemma for our antagonists. It starts with identifying a shared value and then designing a constructive act rooted in that shared value. That’s what creates the dilemma: Your opponents either need to let the act go forward or to violate the shared value.
To change the world, we need to learn to see it differently. We can’t just fight the same losing battles. We need to redefine the terms of our struggle in ways that tilt the playing field to our advantage. In the final analysis, that’s what makes the difference between people who want to make a point and those who actually make a difference.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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