The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

"Peter Coleman is an academic at Columbia University who studies conflict and conflict resolution. He’s written more than one book, but this is his most interesting, I think. It’s about really intractable conflicts like Palestine and Israel, where it’s hard to even define what the disagreement is about because all sides see it so differently. There are many points of conflict, all intertwined with each other and there tends to be a great weight of history weighing down on them. He calls these conflicts the 5% because, he says, 95% of conflicts can be sorted out or resolved if you are a skillful negotiator. You take a rational approach, ‘This is what you want, this is what I want, we’ll find some sort of a compromise’. He says that’s great and that there are some good guys doing that. But then there’s this small fraction of incredibly complex, foggy conflicts where everybody seems to be lost inside. This book is about how to think about those conflicts. He gives some tips on how to resolve them. He doesn’t pretend it’s easy, you can’t just follow a three-step plan. What you can do is look at lots of examples and see some things that work. One of the insights I took from it is that conflict is a moving process in which whatever you do is always affecting what the other person does. The way you behave will influence the way the other behaves: if you show emotion and get angry, that’s going to make the other person angry, as well. You can think about that scaled up, when more parties are involved, emotion ripples across these networks. One of his themes is that diplomats and negotiation experts underestimate the role of emotion in conflicts. Emotion is hugely important and things that seem trivial—like the tone you use or the references you make—can be central to resolving or not resolving a conflict. He points out that really hostile, unproductive disagreements tend to get stuck in straight lines. He’s put pairs of people in a lab and studied their conversations about contentious issues. The ones that are unproductive, where they walk away saying, ‘that was horrible’, tend to be like trench warfare—they just make the same arguments over and over again. There’s very little variety in emotional expression, or in tone. They’re very simple constructs, in other words. With the ones that go better, there’s a lot more variety, both in terms of the types of evidence that people are using and the types of arguments they’re making, but also in the tone. There’s more humor, for instance, there are flashes of anger, and then there’s some laughter. They’re just more expansive and both parties are more flexible. I thought that was a really valuable insight, because I’ve been stuck in lots of arguments where I feel like people are following a script, and I’m following a script, too. I know when I say this, the other person is going to say that. And then I’m going to come back here and they’re going to go there. It’s like ping pong. His advice is to find a way to disrupt the script and introduce variety into the conversation, maybe making a joke, or acknowledging that something your opponent has said is right and that you agree with them in a way that surprises them or takes them off guard. Whatever it is you can do to stop it becoming this kind of algorithmic exchange, to loosen the boundaries of the conversation, is going to be more creative. No. It’s not that all conflict is good, it’s that conflict can be a force for good. Obviously, conflict can go horribly wrong and that’s why we avoid it. And intractable conflicts are probably the worst outcome of all, they’re continuous and, at the same time, completely unproductive. But when breakthroughs are made, it’s usually because somebody has been creative in the way they think about it and introduced some sort of fresh element. In the book, I write about the Oslo Accords, where they came fairly close to an agreement. That was a lot to do with the fact that they went to Norway, and got the parties involved together in a completely different place that wasn’t Washington, DC, or Paris, or Rome. It was a wooden house in the countryside. They changed everything about the atmosphere of the conversation. It failed, in the end, but they made a lot more progress than these meetings usually make."