Another trick to make conflict suck less

 
 

If you haven’t read our first trick for making conflict suck less, I recommend that you have a look here. It’s a concept I call the “emotional right-of-way,” and it’s a tool I developed that I haven’t seen anywhere else (if you’ve heard of anything similar, I’d love to learn about it— feel free to leave a comment).

I also highly recommend when possible, before and during conflict, that you use any techniques available to physiologically calm yourself down. While you’re in a conflict, your body chemistry completely changes in a way that makes constructive conversation significantly harder. So check out some unique tips on how to convince your body that it’s safe here.

But the tool I want to mainly discuss here is something I call: The “We’re On The Same Team” sandwich (AKA the WOST Sandwich). It’s a technique designed to help both parties think in a more collaborative mindset instead of a competitive mindset, which is much likelier to yield higher quality solutions as well as just being more pleasant and connecting overall. The other thing I like about it is that it helps you still get your point across while giving you as good a chance as possible of feeling heard by the other person.

The WOST Sandwich entails several steps:

  1. State a place where you agree, and try to do so authentically.

  2. Frame where you disagree as a question (or statement with an implied question) coming from a place of curiosity and humility

  3. State another place where you agree, and try to do so authentically.

This works for a couple reasons. First, according to research, humans experience something called a negativity bias. It means that on average, our minds tend to focus on things that we perceive as negative. So, if I’m in a conversation with you and you give me one compliment and also insult me once, I am much likelier to focus more on the one insult. So, given that folks are likelier to focus on the negative, the WOST Sandwich dilutes that negative with a couple positives in order to make sure that the other person’s focus is just as much on where there’s agreement as it is where there’s disagreement. The WOST sandwich is basically compensating for humans’ natural tendency to focus on the negative by actively shifting focus to the positive.

The other reason the WOST sandwich is effective is that it takes advantage of a couple quirks of human memory called the primacy effect and the recency effect. The primacy effect refers to the fact that people have a better memory for the first thing they learn within a chunk of information, and the recency effect refers to the fact that people best remember the last thing they learn within a chunk of information. So if I asked people to remember the words “cat, ball, lamp, window, sky,” the most remembered words would likely be “cat” and “sky.” This plays into the WOST Sandwich because the parts that we want the other person to remember are the places where we agree. According to the negativity bias that we talked about earlier, the other person will likely already have a pretty good memory for anywhere they perceive disagreement, so we don’t need to stress that as much to them. That’s why we mention the places where we agree at the beginning and at the end— to compensate for the negativity bias.

Here’s an example of what all this can look like: Let’s say that someone tells me, “I seriously can’t believe all the pregnant folks lining up to get vaccinated against covid. I have seen rates as high as nearly a 500% increase in miscarriages and still births since February. Why does nobody care?” After using some techniques for calming down, and determining who has the emotional right-of-way, I could use a WOST Sandwich by saying something like:

  1. Wow, that’s awful that the rate of miscarriages has been so high recently— I’m absolutely shocked and horrified to hear that.

  2. I thought that most folks of childbearing ages weren’t vaccinated until later than February, so I wonder if other factors could have been at play for that steep increase.

  3. Whatever it ends up being, I share your frustration that there isn’t enough attention on women’s health issues. It’s nice to see someone else who cares.

If you’re having trouble making the places where you agree feel authentic, feel free to check out a tip we discussed previously on this blog about how to write more authentic e-mails— the same trick works especially beautifully here.

As we mention at every Skip the Small Talk, please remember that things don’t need to go perfectly for them to still go pretty darn well. If the other person is still agitated after a WOST Sandwich, that doesn’t mean you didn’t do a great job— often, people calm down internally but don’t show it for a while. So feel free to give it a try in your next conflict, and see if you can notice any impact it has, not just on the other person, but on you, too.

If you do ever try it, I’m curious to hear how it went! Please tell me in the comments if you feel comfortable sharing.

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