Sunday Story: That Time We Lent Out His (Our) Video Games

Welcome back to Sunday Story, and this is a nice and easy read - no fears of the collapse of capitalism or the arrival of non-human spacecraft or any other major disruptions this week. This week we’re talking about a minor disruption - conflict - that affects all of us. One of our specialities is training people how to manage conflict through our online course and through our in person training - going our mailing list to find out when we’ll be in your neck of the woods next!

This week’s Sunday story is all about two people can be looking at the same issue, but because their base assumption is slightly different, it can cause conflict, and it’s centred around a small child and his video games.

My wife, son, and I were at home sitting around the kitchen table catching up on the day as one does. My son has recently gotten into video games - Lego Jurassic Park is a favourite and he’s on track to getting all of the achievements, so he’s taken to it quite well. And he comes by it honestly - though our time has been limited in recent years, my wife and I are both fond of gaming and have had a few consoles and games throughout our relationship.

As Teryn was telling us about her day, she mentioned how one of Kincaid’s friends had just gotten a new Nintendo, so Teryn had loaned him one of “our” games - key word there, “our” games - so that he’d have something to play. It was only for a few days, but Kincaid looked up and looked surprised and even a little sad.

Being the “conflict aware” sort of guy I am, I noticed Kincaid’s reaction and asked him what’s wrong. He shared that he didn’t know that Mom was going to loan out one of his games because she hadn’t told him that.

What followed was a minor conflict - not a “family shouting at the dinner table” conflict - but one where we had a lot of fun discussing the disagreement and figuring out why they were on different pages. Remember, there’s a big difference between a conflict and a fight. A conflict is simply two people with perspectives that don’t match up - they can be talking about this with love and kindness as they sort it out, and it’s as far away from a fight as you can imagine. Or, they can be yelling and shouting, but in our experience, that level of emotion is much more common when there’s an actual fight. The key difference between a conflict and a fight is that in a conflict, it’s about figuring out the problem together and finding a resolution. In a fight, it’s about winning - and the resulting fallout of a fight usually means nobody truly wins.

Anyway, so our family was having quite a robust discussion about whether or not my wife should have spoken to my then-4 year old son before loaning out the video games, and their perspectives were different, with my wife feeling it was OK to make that decision, and my son feeling like he was the only one who should have made that decision. And this is one of those situations where they are both right, from their particular point of view. Teryn and I have had “family” video games for over a decade, and we never checked in with each other before loaning them to friends. On the other hand, Kincaid saw the games as “his”, since he perceived them as gifts he received from us, and felt that he should get a say on when his gifts get loaned out. Both of these perspectives are perfectly reasonable, so who is right when both are kind of right?

This specific example is my family, but I’m quite sure you have been in conflicts like this, where your perspective was different than the perspective of someone else, and neither seemed to be budging, but both had merit in their position. What does one do in a situation like this?

One of our core maxims is perfect for this situation (and a great many other situations): Seek first to understand. I don’t mean simply understanding the positions of both parties in a conflict - in this case, the positions were really clear, and both were perfectly valid. You need to go deeper, and seek first to understand what facts and factors caused the person to arrive at that position.

In this case, the answer is already spelled out - from Kincaid’s perspective, the video games were his property. From my wife’s perspective, the video games were shared property. Because these base assumptions were different, both people had assumed different positions on what ought to be done in this situation. This proved to be the ticket - when we spoke with my son about how he’d feel about loaning games out if they were family property, his thinking completely evolved - he felt that not only was what mom did perfectly OK, but he then wanted to share more of our family property with other friends because sharing is a nice thing to do (he offered a neighbour the opportunity to move in with us, for example, much to our surprise - thankfully she declined!). Had we instead focused on the initial issue - deciding who had the "right" to loan out the video games - we may not have bridged over this impasse caused by different assumptions, and the end result would have been someone (probably Kincaid!) feeling like his perspective was disregarded in favour of his mom's.

Maybe someday he'll go pro - that's not just for hockey and football anymore!

Seeking first to understand is like a conflict resolution superpower, and the trick to it is to keep asking yourself that other famous toddler phrase: “Why?”. Your goal isn’t to just understand how the person in conflict is feeling - your goal is to understand all of the factors that made them feel that way. This includes how they’ve been treated and the presence of any actual injustices of course, but it also includes their attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about the situation - things like ownership, as this example demonstrates, but it can also be other things like cultural practices or even differing personal needs.

To give you another example, I remember facilitating a resolution between two people who were in a high degree of conflict. One roommate didn’t like how the other roommate chose to communicate via post it notes and comments on a white board about things like taking out the garbage, doing the dishes, and other household chores. The first roommate found this passive aggressive note-leaving highly disrespectful, and they were in deep conflict with their roommate because of it. Seeking first to understand, I spoke to the other roommate, who explained to me that they struggle with face to face communication because they find that when people give them feedback (like on doing the dishes or other co-habitation needs), they tend to get very anxious, stressed out, and have trouble responding in that moment. For them, written feedback was kinder, nicer, and more polite because it gave the recipient space to process this information privately - even though for their roommate, the exact opposite was true.

Both came from different family backgrounds, and the norms of behaviour were different. They didn’t question the reason why these behaviours were different, they just interpreted them according to their own world-view, and in that world view, those behaviours were harmful. Only when they were given the opportunity to understand why the person was doing what they were doing did the conflict resolve.

And if you are wondering about how we loan out video games now - our solution was pretty simple. We agreed that most of the games are family games that can be loaned out by whoever, but we’ll check in first with each other in case someone else wants to use it. And if it was a game bought with Kincaid’s allowance, only Kincaid could loan that one out. That’s one of the best parts about seeking first to understand - often it results in a solution that would have prevented the issue from happening in the first place AND prevents it from happening again, because all of the elements of the conflict are accounted for in the resolution.

As a leader, always seek first to understand - this is true in most things, but especially conflict. Don’t limit yourself to only understanding the surface reasons for the conflict - look deeper and try to understand the foundational attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives that contribute to those reasons - and you’ll find that you are a conflict-ready leader in no time! And if you want bit of extra help, we’re standing by with world-class training and resources for you!

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.