Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1.5
Why people get into disputes
All of this would be avoided, or be much simpler, if it were not for the
people. People are complex, different, difficult, have preferences and
opinions. They are ideal dispute-creators.
There has been a lot of research into personality types and how dif-
ferent people react differently to conflict. For our purposes I summarise
them into three headings:
Communication
Personality
Interpretation
1.5.1
Communication
Bad communication is almost always the start of conflict and, if not the
start, it is the cause of conflict escalating into disputes. The main causes
are as follows:
The form of communication. The written word is the worst form of
communication. So often the meaning of the writer is interpreted
differently, leading to misunderstanding and conflict. In an age of
email and text-messaging, this means that communication is poten-
tially at its worst. The spoken word (by telephone) is marginally
better because the tone, the pace, the emphasis all colour the words,
so the chances of misunderstandings are reduced, and if they do
arise, clarification can be obtained immediately and conflict avoided.
Even then, we are only about one-third effective in our communi-
cation. Body posture, gestures, contact and personal space are all
part of human communication. We understand so much more of the
message being imparted by reading a person's body language. This
can be demonstrated by observing people speaking a foreign lan-
guage, or viewing people in conversation who are out of earshot. So
much of their conversation can be interpreted without hearing the
words.
Attitude. We are generally bad listeners and want instead to have our
say: determined to get our view across, to convince the other person
that our position is right. Most of us show little interest in the other's
point of view, give minimal response to what the other person has
said and probably follow up with a change of subject or with our own
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