Diagnose this situation

What went wrong?

I recently was a witness to and participant in the following conversation. I’ve been thinking about how what I have been writing about applies to this situation. Let me know if you see anything else.

After an event a woman (whom I will call Maya) attempted to get people to sign a petition. The qualification for signing was that they be registered to a particular political party and that they live in a particular district. She spent some time explaining why the petition was needed.  Those around her weren’t close friends but they have known each other for a while.  She asked this one person (whom I will call Bob) what party he was registered in.  Bob said that he changed his registration every time there was a change in who was in power.  Maya responded, “You can’t do that!”.

One of the signees (whom I will name Pat) responded, “What do you mean, you can’t do that!  He just told you, he does it.” Around that time, Bob raised his eyebrows and left.

Maya tried to explain what she meant, but she sounded flustered. What she said is that the way people usually register for a political party (in our particular state, others are different) is by voting in a primary for a certain political party.  And that you can’t do that for changing parties.  

I was trying to figure out how that applied to her statement that you couldn’t change parties,  so I asked a question, “do you mean there is a waiting period?” She looked at me gratefully and agreed.

That was the end of that topic, but I left with a bad feeling.  This is not a tight knit group and what happened may have led others (especially Bob and Pat) to feel strife.  It certainly didn’t help to build cohesion in the group.  And we never got to the way of changing political parties that Bob was probably using, so we lost out on the information – but part of that was because Bob left.

I have been thinking about how the tools I have been writing about apply to this conversation, and how they might have helped this conversation bind the participants together instead of tearing us apart. 

First, I see that, by the position Maya was in – soliciting signatures for a political action-  Maya was in an expert role. But when she reached the end of her expertise, she continued as an expert, even though she wasn’t anymore. This is a role I often take by nature. I’ve written about how hard it is for me to say “I don’t know.”  If she had asked Bob to tell her how he did that and not continued in her role, the conversation would have made us all smarter and not created a division.  

Second, even though I have been writing about listening for emotions, I didn’t do that.  I haven’t improved that much despite the vow I took! But Pat’s contribution (“What do you mean, you can’t do that!  He just told you, he does it .”) was at least partially about Bob’s emotions.  She didn’t talk about the emotion, but she was tending to them. She was also validating what she saw as truth. She left with bad feelings.

Third, my contribution of asking a question was a good impulse adhering to my ASK, LISTEN, AFFIRM, and RESPOND model, but the question might have been better framed. As stated, it did seem to help Maya out of her predicament. But I could probably come up with a question that was more expansive and that might have gotten to the heart of the matter more easily and perhaps tended to emotions. I’ve been trying to come up with a better one, but I haven’t yet. This is hard!

What questions should I ask?

What else do you see here that relates to the tools I have been working with? What would you have done?

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