From Conflict to Convergence: Coming Together to Solve Tough Problems

CHAPTER 9Nurture Trust

Once you've mapped the terrain of your problem, you may feel like you've got everything you need to take the plunge into developing solutions. However, knowledge about the issue and stakeholders is only one set of the tools that you'll need on this journey. You'll also need to create a strong sense of common cause and, ideally, camaraderie with the wide range of stakeholders you've asked to join you in your problem-solving group.

Absent trust, the parties will be less open to hearing each other's ideas—even the good ones. So first take time to nurture trust between them. Opportunely, perhaps you started to do this simply by including them while mapping the terrain of the problem. But there's more trust-building work ahead.

US, UNITED

Humans are hard-wired to form groups. This tendency stokes much mistrust when we feel like we're on one side of an issue and someone else is on the other—for example, labor versus management, liberals versus conservatives, new lecturers versus tenured professors. When social identities are boiled down to just two categories, they often harden into “us” the in-group versus “them” the out-group. We can then be prone to seeking out and exaggerating the negative aspects of the other side, partly to feel better about ourselves and partly to feel more secure about our social identity.

Our brain's penchant for dividing the world into “us” and “them” doesn't mean social identity groups are inflexible, however. We can form new groups ...