*prerol music*
Herald: OK, then welcome come back everyone. With these void spaces of the
Internet into which we've all been forced to migrate. This is our last talk for
today: "How to solve conflict in a community of equals" by Merlijn. We'll
talk about specifically how to solve conflict in a community in which there is
no leader based on his own experiences from hacker camps and the hackerspace in Gent
in Belgium. So without further I do. Merlijn the stream is yours and start the talk.
Merlijn Sebrechts: Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me here
to share my experience, so to give a little bit of background about why I'm
doing this talk. About seven or eight years ago, I came into hackerspace Gent.
And at that time it was still flourishing. But in 2014, the hackerspace imploded
because of internal conflict. And this is something that seems to happen a lot with
hackerspaces and with other organizations which are less structured, don't have
clear leadership or a clear hierarchy. But in 2014, one of the original founders of
the hackerspace started the idea to actually create workshops around finding a
system to fix our community. I was very interested in that initiative. So I joined
the so I joined the workshops and together with the other people from the
hackerspace, we started building a system that basically got the best out of people,
but that was still very close to anarchy, very a very chaotic system. This is my
cat, Simba. He will be also here for the talk, probably. And in throughout the year
2014, we started writing down how the system would work. First very informally,
and in 2015 I decided to become a board member of hackerspace Gent with the
explicit goal to implement this system. And the first thing I did was basically
change the role of board members into removing any of their leadership
responsibilities, but keeping the goal of maintaining the core infrastructure of the
hackerspace and acting as a counselor in order to fix conflict. And it's this
second role that I will talk about in this in this talk. Throughout the following
years, we kept on hacking the system, hacking our own hackerspace, and finally
everything we wrote down, we bundled it into the "hackerspace blueprint", which is
basically a small booklet describing how to run a hackerspace using doocracy. But
it's written very generically so that it can also be used by other organizations
which want to know more about how to actually run a doocracy, how to run an
organization where nobody is actually leading the organization. In 2019
throughout the previous years, that hackerspace kept becoming better and
better and the environment and the atmosphere and the hackerspace kept
becoming better. But in 2019 we had this real point of like this is the point at
which the space is running itself as a board. We don't need to actually intervene
anymore. The only thing we need to do is make sure the bills are paid and make sure
our Internet still works. But the doocracy worked. And so I started I
organized a bunch of talks and and discussions all on our experience with
building this community. And time and time again, I got the exact same question, how
do you how do you actually solve interpersonal conflict. And. So, as I
said, "The Hackerspace BLUEPRINT". It only talks about how to build this community of
equals. It doesn't actually talk about how to solve conflict in this community. The
only thing that's described in "The Hackerspace BLUEPRINT" is to use the
private talk pattern, but it's not actually explained by the private talk
pattern is. So in this talk, I will explain what a private talk pattern is and
and how to use it to solve conflict. Solve conflict without having to use authority,
without having to use explicit leadership or forcing people to fall in line. So the
private talk pattern, we didn't invent it. This is an old hackerspace pattern. Which
is something that a lot of people, a lot of different hackerspaces and notice that
they were using the exact same method in order to solve conflict and in their
hackerspace. And so it became like a design and design pattern for
hackerspaces. This is a good way to solve conflict. And so it works in two stages.
The first stage is that when there is a conflict, you first talk to the involved
parties in private. You listen to them, you let them know how the group feels
about their behavior and you find you trying to find the root cause of the
actual conflict that's going on. The second part is that you done moderate a
discussion between the different parties involved in the conflict. The goal of this
discussion is to help these parties understand each other and to discuss and
write down concrete solutions. Now, I could end my talk here, but I don't think
it would be very useful because there's actually a lot of beneath to using this
pattern. Well. And so I'm going to get more information about each stage and
about the kind of mindset that you need in order to use this pattern. So the first
question is, obviously, who should do this, who should organize these talks?
Well, you you should do this because you're the person listening to this talk.
You're clearly interested in how to solve this conflict. And so you're probably a
very good person to actually organize this. There is no formal authority needed
because this pattern is about offering your help, you are not forcing the
conflict to be solved. You are not forcing people to solve conflict. You are going to
people and you're saying, hey, look, it's clear that there is some conflict here and
this conflict is an issue to everyone involved. So can I help you solve this
conflict? And when you open your help, most people actually accept it without
questioning it. However, it's very important that the person who does this,
they need to be seen as someone neutral to both parties. This is this becomes an
issue. For example, if you've already chosen sides in the conflict, then the
other party will not see you as a trustworthy, a neutral person. This can
also be an issue if you're like very good friends with one of the parties of the
conflict. Then again the other party will not see you as neutral. The second thing
is, is that you have to be prepared to listen, everyone joins every conversation
with a whole bunch of preconceptions, especially when a conversation is about
conflict. Everybody has an idea in their head about what the issue is of the
conflict and how it should be solved. However, a lot of times those issues tend
to those preconceptions, those preexisting ideas tend to be wrong. And when you
actually listen to people, you can actually figure out what the root cause is
and you might be surprised. And it's hurting is that it's very important to
stay authentic because the people involved need to trust you. And the only way to get
them to trust you is to show them that you're authentic and that you are
genuinely willing to find a solution that benefits both parties. Then the next thing
you need is you need the right mindset and the first part of the right mindset is
that conflict needs to be solved. As humans, we have this tendency to, when we
see conflict, to just try to ignore it and hope that it goes away by itself or most
reasonable humans. This is their first initial response. However, by ignoring
conflict, you actually allow it to grow. And when it grows, it becomes more and
more difficult to actually solve it because more and more people get involved
and it becomes harder and harder to find the actual root cause of the problem. So
you need to solve it and you need to solve it as early as possible. It's much better
to to solve this conflict, to intervene too early than too late, because given
that this is a process that is beneficial to both sides, there is not really a
downside to intervening to early. You're not forcing anybody to do anything, you
just want to hear them out, you just you just want to know more about the conflict.
Then the second thing is that the only people who can stop the conflict are those
involved. I said that the first response is to ignore conflict. Well, the first
response is to ignore conflict when you were interacting with the people who are
involved with the conflict. And then when you get to people who are not involved
with the conflict, you start talking about it, then you start discussing it and and
start discussing what might be done to actually solve the issue. And most of the
times, these discussions happen without the people who are involved in the
conflict or without the people that other people are having issues of it. And this
will almost certainly fail, these attempts. Talking to third parties has has
very little value. You can do it in order to get some ideas, but you always need to
include the people involved in the conflict in these discussions or your
attempts will fail. Then the third mindset point is that the contributions of a
single individual or a few individuals in your organization are never worked having
that conflict. A lot of times and people in their head, they start to make a
balance of like, yes, this person is creating conflict in our organization, but
this person also contributes a lot to our organization so that in our heads, that
gives them some kind of right to make conflict, but they are never worth it. You
do not owe it to them to allow them to create conflict. If you are afraid that by
talking to them about a conflict, they will lower their contributions, then you
should know that you are trading short term gains by compromising long term
viability. In the short term, they might keep contributing. But in the long term,
this will poison your community and your community will not be long term viable,
given that this is the track for hackers against climate change. Climate change,
for example, is an issue that requires long term solutions and that requires
communities who keep putting pressure on everyone over the long term. And so. Or in
terms of conflict, you should always optimize for long term viability, not for
short term gains. And the thing is that solving the conflict even becomes easier
when these people are actually really contributing a lot to your organization,
because you can start your discussion by with saying we really value your
contributions and we want to keep you here. And that's why we want to solve this
conflict. You're not a bad person. You're clearly not a bad person. There's just
this conflict that needs to be solved. The second part of the right mindset is that
complex needs to be solved and you need to see solved as like solving a puzzle or
solving a math equation. You can't force people to stop conflict. You need to
figure out how the pieces are not connecting to each other. And you need to
figure out how you can connect the pieces in a way that a puzzle works. As an
example, punishing people will get you nowhere, even though it is like an innate
response that we have when, when when conflict arises. We want to see people
punished, even though this this doesn't actually improve the situation to punish
people. And when you dig deeper into the conflict, you see that that's most
conflict is created by by bad communication, by cultural differences and
by differences in expectation, not by people being bad people. And so there's
actually no reason to punish anyone when you're trying to solve a conflict. So
every time you want to do a certain measure like banning people from joining
your community space for a while, you always need to ask yourself, how does this
improve the situation. Temporarily banning people can be very useful. It can be
useful to de-escalate conflict. It can be useful to to to make sure that stuff
doesn't blow up before it's at rest. But you should always do it in order to solve
something, in order to get a certain result, not in order to punish people for
what they have done. The whole point of this is that when conflict is solved is
actually solved, everybody involved should win. Nobody should feel like they are the
looser because almost always people do not actually want conflict and people do
not actually benefit from conflict. The third thing about having the right
mindset is, that you need to get into these kind of discussions and these kind
of talks with people with the mindest, that most people are good.
Hanlon's razor also says: "Never attribute to malice that
which can be adequately explained by incompetence." It's a very complicated way
to say that if you have two possible explanations for some of these behavior
and one of those explanations is this person is trying to do bad things. And the
second explanation is this person is incredibly incompetent, then probably the
explanation that involves incompetence will be the right explanation, because
most people are good. So most of the times when you need to choose between these two
explanations, choosing the incompetence one is the right one. And so when you are
in talks with people always in the back of your head, think about where can I find
the incompetence? What is the incompetence that that created this issue? And so I've
talked about cultural differences. For example, not being aware of cultural
differences is an incompetence. Not having the right communication skills is an
incompetence. If you try to search for the incompetence, most of the time, you will
get to the root cause of the conflict. So the first step in the private talk pattern
is the private talks, the individual talks, the goal of the private talks are
first to let the person vent. Because in the end, we want the two in both parties
to talk to each other. But that's not possible if there are too many emotions.
So these individual talks are in order to let these emotions out and make sure that
these people are hurt. When they are hurt, when they vent these emotions to you and
they have the feeling that they are heard by you, then these emotions will be become
smaller. And then the next talks, they will be able to have more rational and
less emotional and less explosive conversations. The second goal of these
individual talks is to build trust and understanding. And this has to be both
ways. You have to be able to trust them. And they have to be able to trust you. And
this understanding is very important. First of all, you need to understand their
point of view. This doesn't need to be on a level of like I would do the exact same
thing if I was in your place. But you need to understand why they're doing it. And
then second of all, they also need to have some kind of understanding of what the
problem is from the other side, like like as outsiders. How do you look at this
problem? Then the last step of these individual talks is to find the root
cause, find the root cause of the conflict. So, a lot of times and I've seen
this happen a lot in hackerspaces, a lot of times. When you look at the surface of
the conflict, it seems to be that that that it's about certain behavior like this
person said. This person was very dismissive of my work, for example. But
then, when you dig deeper, you find out that there are actually other problems
which caused this and a lot of the times some of the root causes that these people
don't actually trust each other. One of the ways to find this out is to to ask a
person. So say the other person said something that hurt you? If somebody else
would say the exact same thing, if a friend of you would say the exact same
thing, how would you interpret it then? Would you interpret it differently? And if
they would interpret it differently, then, you know, that's the root cause is not
this communication, but the root cause is the actual trust, the root causes that
everything the other person says is seen through a very negative light. Everything
the other person said is interpreted in the most negative way possible. And so if
that is the root cause, then you just need to build trust between these people and
that will solve most of the conflict. So let's do some practical tips for these
individual talks. First of all, it needs to happen in a neutral place. If you have
like a clubhouse or a place that you frequently gather, you can't do the
private talks there. You need to do it somewhere else. It's better if the place
is public in the worst case for everybody's safety, but also because
because it helps people have some level of control over their emotions. For example,
a local bar or a comic-cafe or a board game club is always very good. Find
something that these people are comfortable with. Second of all, you
always have to do these talks, either face to face, away from keyboard or by using a
good video chat solution, because body language and tone is incredibly important.
You need to be able to see each other. You need to be able to see each other, facial
expressions, and you need to hear the tone of each other's voice. And the quality
needs to be good, first of all, in order to have this extra channel of
communication. And second of all, in order to remove the frustration, because this
kind of private talks can be very frustrating and can be very taxing both to
the person involved in the conflict and the person who wants to solve the
conflict. And so having decent audio and video make sure that removes that
frustration. And so then you can focus on the frustration of the conversation
itself. Third of all always take notes during this conversation. It helps
build trust. It shows them that you are actually taking what they are saying
seriously and they can be very useful to reflect on the conversation afterwards.
Then you can initiate a private talk simply by being direct and authentic. Just
say: "I'd like to talk to you in private to understand this issue better". Things
like I'd like to help and I want to understand your point of view. Those are
very good things to say in order to initiate a conversation, make sure that
it's very clear to them that you are there to help them too. It's also important to be
authentic and to be humble. Don't say things that you don't actually mean.
However, you have to get into the conversation with the mindset to listen,
with the intention to listen. And so this might be, this can be a bit controversial,
like these two things might be against each other because it's it's very hard
when you see a conflict to get into this first conversation with the idea of I
don't actually understand what a conflict is about. But even if you think that you
know what the conflict is about, very often when you try to find the root cause
of the conflict, you find out it is actually something else that is different
from from what you told. And so be humble about your own knowledge about the
conflict. Then the individual talks itself. First, it's very important to explain that
they are valued. Try to think about the valuable things that this person brings to
your community or the valuable work that they are doing. And then second of all,
just ask them to explain their point of view and listen, let them blow off steam
and start to build trust by showing them that you want to understand them by
validating their feelings, but stay authentic and don't pick sides. It's very
important not to pick sides. It's very important not to pick sides because
otherwise people will think that you are not neutral and it will be a lot harder to
fix this conflict. Then towards the end of the conversation, trying to find the
actual root causes of the conflict and summarize that. Summarize them verbally
and try to write them down and ask the other person's opinion about, do you agree
that that this is the root cause and this really requires digging deeper? I
explained the example before where a lot of times when somebody doesn't trust
somebody else, they will start to interpret any communication in the worst
way possible. And so in order to figure out how to dig deeper, to figure out if
this is the cause, you can ask, like if your friend would say the exact same thing,
would you have the same reaction? Most of the time the people answer: "no, no". And
if I would think maybe I misunderstood it because this is my friends, they don't
want to say something so negative about me. Then this point is optional, but it
can be useful to explain other people's views if you already have some idea of
other people's views, it can be can be useful to also discuss this in this first
initial conversation, and especially explain your views like this conflict is
dragging our community down. This is the reason why I want to solve this conflict.
And finally, ask them how they think it could be solved. Sometimes these are
completely ridiculous ideas, but sometimes they also have some very good ideas about
how the conflict could be solved. The second step in this in the private talk
pattern is the discussion of the two parties together and never do a group
discussion. I would try to always do it with two people. And the goal of this
discussion is to get these people talking to each other, because a lot of the times,
a lot of conflict is created by people not communicating properly with each other.
And that at a certain point, the communication just stops completely, and
that's the point where stuff starts to explode. The second goal is to work
towards understanding each other's viewpoints, but this requires people to
actually talk to each other. And then the third goal is to define concrete steps to
solve the issue. It's very important that these steps are concrete so that you can
later coach them and see if these steps are being followed. So the setup of the
discussion is the same as the setup of the individual talks, which the distinction
that it's very important to be the first person there. If it's in real life
location, come there 30 minutes beforehand or come their on time, depending on if
it's common in your culture to be on time or not, or if it's an online video call,
make sure you're the first person that initiates the call. Because if these two
people are there without you, it will become very awkward. Then the course of
the discussion. The first thing you need to do in this discussion is to explain the
root cause and then discuss and write down concrete steps to fix the conflict. They
need to be concrete because you need to be able to track progress and and every party
needs to be. There can be no confusion about whether or not there is progress. If
those steps are not concrete enough, then you can start to start to have a
discussion about whether or not there is actual progress about whether or not the
steps are being followed. If they are concrete enough, then there's no
discussion. A bad kind of concrete step is keep the desk smartly clean desks in
hackerspaces, specifically clean desks are often an issue. But one of the big issues
is that people's ideas and people's expectations of how clean the desk should
be are very different. And so keep the desks more clean. Will will mean different
things to different people. So make it concrete. For example, clean does desk
completely every time you leave the space. This step is something that might be
overshooting. So in hackerspaces, for example, it's often allowed to have some
clutter on the desk if you're working on a long term project, but there are always
people who have who succeed that limit, who have who leave way too much clutter on
desks and who take up all the desks in the entire space and having a clean desk,
having them clean the desk completely every time they leave the space is
something that is like an overshoot. It is too clean. Then what do we actually want
as a space. But it is that way because that makes it much, much easier to track
progress that make it makes it much more concrete. If they are out of the space and
the desk is still cluttered, then they didn't do it. Then they broke their
promise. Another good step is when this person says something to me, and I think
it's insulting. Talk to it, talk about it to another person, and maybe the other
person can translate what the person means if during the discussion you see that the
these people really start to communicate very well, then a step could be. But I
think you are insulting me. I will say it to you and then we can discuss it together
and then we can clear it out that they don't actually mean it in an insulting
way. Finally, understanding each other and having that discussion and starting
communication is often already a very big part of the solution. So if you don't have
a lot of clear steps that might not be such a big issue, because simply talking
to each other solves a lot of issues. I think 90 percent of all teen drama series
would be solved by just having the characters talk to each other. And this is
sadly the case in real life too. So after discussion, right down the concrete steps
that you agreed upon in a discussion and send it to everyone. Send it to everyone
involved, then the short description of this was the core issue. This was the root
cause of the conflict. And this is what we are going to do to address it. Put it on
paper, even though you don't have any authority, even though they don't have to
follow it, simply having it written down and having them agree upon it during the
discussion will make it much more official for themselves. You don't need authority
for this. Second of all, it's very useful to keep coaching and do the follow up.
Make sure that the conversation between these two people keeps going, otherwise
the anger and frustration will start to get bottled up again and then at a certain
point they will start to interpret all communication again, very, very
negatively. And then the conflict happens again. So the overall idea of the of the
private talk pattern is that most interpersonal conflict is solved by
talking to each other. However, emotions make that very, very hard because people
just stop talking to each other because they're afraid of the confrontation and
because when they talk to each other, the emotions make stuff explode. And so first
you do the initial private talk where you get out all the emotions and and and you
make sure that people understand that that's you make it clear that you
understand them and that you hear them. And then during the second talk, you get
these people together and you get them to talk to each other. A second smaller idea
of the private talk pattern is that conflict is extremely hard to solve in the
group. During meetings, meetings are one of the worst places to solve conflict at
having private personal talks is much, much better than doing it in the group. So
I have to add a disclaimer to this. I started the talk by saying most people are
good. Well, some people are bad. If people have genuine malicious intent or
inherently incompatible with your community, you have to kick them out. The
private talk pattern will make it very clear who is like this, the private, after
going through this entire process, it will be clear whether or not these people
actually have genuine malicious intentions or whether these people are inherently
incompatible. If it's the case, kick them out. But again, you're not kicking them
out to punish them. You're simply kicking them out to protect the community. Most
times the community is the common of the organization, you might have a certain
goal, but you can only reach that goal when you have a healthy community. And so
in order to protect this community, you need to make harsh decisions and kick
people out. Of course, given that these communities are, for example, run on
doocracy or run on consensus decision making, you can't decide to kick them out
yourselves. But use the processes that are in your community to kick people out when
after this process it's very, very clear that they're inherently incompatible. So
thanks for listening to the talk, I hope it was useful and I hope some people can
solve some conflict in their communities. Obviously, this entire talk was based on
my own experience, which hackerspace Gent in Belgium. And so your mileage may vary.
This worked for us. This worked very well for us. Every time we tried it, it
actually worked. But tweak it, make it your own, make it so it works for your
community. My name is Merlijn Sebrechts. I'm from
hackerspace Gent in Belgium. If you want to know how to build a community of
equals, go to hackerspace.design and read the hackerspace blueprint. And it also has
links to other talks I did about doocracy. And then finally, this talk was partly
inspired by a video by Jono Bacon: "A new way to look at conflict resolution." And
surprisingly, I think a few months ago he released that video and surprisingly, the
process that he used in professional organizations and companies to do conflict
resolution looks a lot like the private talk pattern. Jono Bacon was the former
community manager of the Ubuntu Linux project. And so he's a very experienced
person and knows a lot about how to build communities. So if there are any
questions, let's hear it on. Herald: OK, thank you for your talk. There
are indeed many questions, and the first is you've mentioned repeatedly that this
is, of course, based on your own personal experience. But, what do you think that
this model of something like it could also work on a larger level, on a perhaps
regional or even super regional scale? Merlijn Sebrechts: Are you ... I am I'm
going to interpret that question as like having having different countries solving
conflict between different countries. I'm not sure. I'm not sure because this matter
to specifically for interpersonal conflict, conflict between different
people, although the idea of finding the root cause is still very useful. I'm not
sure if it's possible because you can't talk to a country as an individual. The
country is composed of many different people, and so it is the total behavior of
this country is some emerges from the behavior of all the individuals. And it's
very, very hard to find a single individual that you can talk to that
represents this total group. Herald: I'm not sure if the question was
actually meant that way. If it wasn't, please write it again in the chat and I'll
ask it again in a more specific way. And the next question is, what if we don't
have a common basis for such a system anymore and we cannot start with personal
conversations anymore? Because just letting things implode and then start
rebuilding everything from scratch is probably usually not an option. So would
you have any ideas on how one could proceed then?
Merlijn Sebrechts: I'm also not a big fan of starting completely new. What we did is
that we actually didn't start from zero. We during the hackerspace workshops, we
started from the the system that we had and we started to think about what do we
like about the current system and what do we dislike about the current system. And
we started to gradually change it. And throughout the years with gradual changes
and by keep having these having the hackerspace workshops every single time,
and we encountered issues, we were able to gradually change and improve our
community. So even though, like the big implosion happened in 2014, the big
resurgence didn't happen at once. It happened over the course of a few years
and it happened by slightly improving it and slightly changing the system every
every year and took a very long time in order to to make that complete change. So
I would my concrete advice is to start doing workshops in order to fix the
system, in order to fix your community, start doing workshops and see what comes
out of those workshops. Herald: OK, so at least hope is not lost,
I guess, even if it can be difficult. And then the next question is, isn't it a
problem that you mentioned always identifying a root cause of a problem?
What do you do if the cause of a root problem is somehow subjective and cannot
be agreed upon? What should one do then? Merlijn Sebrechts: I think there always
needs to be some common base. And in our hackerspace, the common base is that the
hackerspace itself and the hackerspace community is the thing that we need to
protect. And so if there is ambiguity of the cause, the cause of the conflict and
we simply start to look at what behavior is advantageous to our hackerspace and
what behavior isn't. And we use that as the common ground and we start to build
from there depending on what the goal is of your community. The common base will be
different, but I think in every community there will be this common base, even if
the common base is simply that it's the existence of the community is the thing
that everybody wants. Herald: OK, then, thank you again for your
great talk. There is one last question, which is someone wanting to see the cat
again. Merlijn Sebrechts: The what?
Herald: The cat. Merlijn Sebrechts: They're sadly not
anymore. It seems they've gone downstairs. Herald: OK. That's all we have is the
waving cat in my screen, which is. We'll have to make do. OK, thank you for your
talk and, have fun at the remote chaos experience alone and everyone watching
this. Of course, this was our last talk for today. We'll see you again tomorrow.
Until then. And happy hacking.
*postroll music*
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