Conflict Resolution Learning, The Four Agreements, and Moving the Goalposts

So, for now, it’s hard for you all to go back through past posts. Fortunately, I can and I found one that I think has been overlooked again, again from John, who got me started on the ESA post here. I think John hit on a rich vein of gold for discussion, that may end up being deeper and more meaningful on this topic than anything we’ve had to date. Because I think it’s so important, and fundamental to helping Legal World and Physical World people to stop talking past each other, I’d like to bring up the Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

You can read about where the Four Agreements various places including here. The author of the blog post, John Johnson, is a professor of psychology so perhaps it is the “best available science”, which, clearly, we should all use!. Suffice it to say that many people have found these helpful in working through relationships with others. Perhaps organizations can’t do these for various reasons, and that would be worth exploring. But I think that fundamentally “not doing what you say you are going to do” is the basis for serious trust problems, that clearly we have on both “sides” and in the middle.

They are:
1. Be impeccable with your word. Moving the goalposts of what you say you want to resolve an issue is one example, or not monitoring when you said you would, or not following BMP’s.

2. Don’t take anything personally.

Sharon’s 2a Don’t mean anything personally. Castigate the behavior not the person (or the sin and not the sinner if you prefer that language). I think it’s important not to get caught up in that and I will provide an example. I think using “organization x” “district ranger y” will help depersonalize the issues.

3. Don’t make assumptions. (see how real this is? Matthew thought I was doing that yesterday)

4. Always do your best. (not sure that this relates to our discussion, but still worthwhile)

Anyway, back to John who said here

When I took natural resource conflict resolution courses at the University of Montana (several years ago) the instructors talked about your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). If your BATNA outweighed what you’d be getting in the collaborative, it was time to think long and hard about going with the BATNA.

What do folks think about a situation in which a group starts in a collaborative process but then determines that their interests/needs won’t be met through a collaborative process? In other words, if you go into it looking to collaborate but determine your needs won’t be met are you then allowed to go to court?

So John caused me to think about a couple of things. One is that perhaps we could get a volunteer to teach a mini- course for us in conflict resolution. I learned from Keith Allred at the Kennedy School SES training. But the training I wanted to take from the USIECR was fairly expensive and I couldn’t justify it with waning budgets and looming retirement. So we should probably explore that further.. if we could all learn together. Maybe a project for a graduate student? Retiree?

The second is that we learned about BATNA’s and did exercises using labor relations. But using those same thoughts frames the question as “us versus them.” Before I retired, we had an excellent all day training on the “Partnership Agreement.” One of the things they talked about (I think in terms of administrative grievances or discrimination complaints) was “”negotiating in good faith.”

So here’s my example. This reminded me of environmental organization X. We had worked on Colorado Roadless for seven years. At each comment period they moved the bar. In fact, I had developed a table of all the different times they wrote (this is public) and told us what they wanted. Each time we gave it to them, and they moved the bar, which I showed in the table. They must think it is OK to do this, because they were getting more of what they wanted (or is that making assumptions?) But they were not being impeccable with their word as far as I can tell. Does the end justify the means? (I don’t know why it was so important to please them- they had the ear of R and D administrations, but that’s another issue).

So my answer to John’s question, is “just be upfront with your needs. Write them down. Share them. Then litigate if you don’t get your “needs” met. But don’t tell us that the real problem is that folks wrote one page instead of five pages on cumulative effects, when you really don’t want to cut down trees there.” It is perhaps too strong to say that that that behavior is dishonest, because the system works that way, but that’s how it feels to some of us in Physical World.

12 thoughts on “Conflict Resolution Learning, The Four Agreements, and Moving the Goalposts”

  1. A good summary in many respects of why we have such wide mistrust between both the agency and the greenies.
    Forest plans, when first developed, contained a “promise” by the forests that a key factor in success was to be monitoring of success, results and adjustments accordingly. The agency went into this well aware that the monitoring requirements woven into the FP would be costly and time-consuming.
    We all know now, years later, that in most cases the monitoring aspects of these first FPs were largely ignored. “Too costly”. “We don’t have the funds or manpower.”
    Therein lies a major source of the environmental community’s lack of trust.

    Reply
    • I have participated in at least three major proposals to USFS and the Joint Fire Sciences Program in association with a senior scientist at PNW Research Station. All three (and a couple of others) were shot down instantly, after months of preparation. Apparently predicted flame lengths of burning fuels and the effects of surface burning on soil microbe populations were held to be of far greater interest and value to the American public and their official resource managers.

      Our proposals offered landscape-scale monitoring programs that were cheap, easy, and dependent on modern technology (digital photography, remote sensing, Internet communications, etc.). Further, the results were specifically intended to be shared with any member of the public with an interest in them, with a specific focus on students, teachers, and resource managers. Yep. Full disclosure and transparency, just like they advertise and avoid like the plague.

      On one of these proposals we received copies of the “peer review” for funding we got from a couple of anonymous government employees (“not actual peers”). To say the reviews were “cursory” would be generous. The were obviously insulting, done in collaboration (“blind”) with one another, and dismissive. And two of the three mentioned me specifically by name, were less than a paragraph in length (for a 40+ page proposal!), did not even address the abstract (less than one page, at the beginning), and were almost verbatim in their statement of a faulty assumption given as the “reason” for the rejections. I’m guessing both reviewers were 6-figure government employees (GS-14s? I’ve never been a government employee) and are among the reasons monitoring is so “costly” and why the government doesn’t have the “funds.” Trough eaters are expensive, and very protective of one another is one lesson I learned from this experience.

      They have the funds to monitor. They have the manpower. They have no interest. You tell me why, Ed.These are not isolated experiences and a major reason why I have little “trust” for the findings of most agency scientists (there are shining exceptions, of course). Or most other taxpayer science, too, for that matter. From the outside, it appears to be a self-serving racket with high overhead and marginal value. Just like Eisenhower warned.

      Reply
  2. Not to get all bureaucrat-y but JFSP is part of the branch of the Forest Service Research and Development. Monitoring forest plans is supposed to be done by National Forest funding, NFIM (does this BLI still exist or did it get combined with PN..can’t remember).

    Anyway, there are all kinds of different research monitoring and forest and district monitoring, but it is not organized 1) so that people can easily see everything going on and 2) it is prioritized within silos.

    Some argue that giving the bucks to R&D to do it all is a good idea (mostly in R&D) because they have success with FIA (note that there is a user’s panel). However, there is some risk that every discipline will define what they are interested in (what will get them published.. conflict of interest) and produce nothing useful for practitioners and communities at all.

    NFS people want to keep the money but struggle with a culture that says give the money to the District and you will get the best results. NFS generally struggles with coordinating among silos and units. Because if it is done at a higher level it won’t be done well, and you will lose the funding. I think that’s basically it. In fact.. it sounds like an issue of trust. Others are welcome to give their thoughts on this.

    Right now there is an effort to improve things, led by Tony Tooke and Rich Guldin. Before I retired it was a little vague and frameworky for my taste, but I’m sure that it is fleshed out by now . Maybe they will ask the broader community for input and maybe they already have? Links appreciated.

    Note: the brilliant Jack Ward Thomas tried to tackle this problem while he was Chief. So far it has not been amenable to solving, I think because of the dynamics I described above.

    Here is a link to the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework I think it was the precursor of the ongoing effort. Anyone who understands all this from the FS is invited to post. We are patient here at NCFP, so can wait for Department clearance, if necessary.

    Reply
  3. Bob, I can’t tell you why the NFMA required monitoring that was promised, planned and hyped as the answer to making the forest plans effective was not funded or done.
    In my limited experience, when critics called them on missing monitoring here in north Idaho, they sometimes discovered that some limited monitoring was done (never enough to meet requirements), but the results never released or provided openly to the public. Had to be squeezed out of them. Probably because they didn’t fully achieve the monitoring the FP required, and they were afraid to daylight this omission.
    I have been surprised that forest plan critics haven’t used this glaring omission in achieving basic federal reg requirements as grounds for litigation more than they have.

    Reply
    • Ed,

      The answer to “why forest plan critics haven’t used this glaring [failure to monitor] omission in achieving basic federal reg requirements as grounds for litigation more than they have” is the Supreme Court’s decision in SUWA v. Norton.

      Lewis & Clark environmental law professor Michael Blumm’s post-mortem explains well how the decision makes “public land plans virtually irrelevant and a large waste of taxpayer dollars.”

      This is why I proposed the K.I.S.S. NFMA rules on this blog — to make forest plans meaningful again by compelling the Forest Service to make enforceable on-the-ground decisions in its plans.

      Needless to say, the Forest Service chose precisely the opposite direction in its revised NFMA planning rules.

      Andy

      Reply
  4. Regarding monitoring; What kinds of skills are required for “monitoring”, and just who will do that monitoring work, including the essential paperwork? I would think that “monitoring” will require a very broad skill set. Remember, temporaries get only 1039 hours each year, for their regular work. Remember, timber management departments are already stripped to the bone. Any proposal or demand for monitoring MUST address these realities.

    Reply
  5. It’s interesting that FS people on this blog (and retirees) are willing to say all is not well when we do not do what we say. No one seems to be responding to my example, though, about moving the goalposts and the honesty of actually saying what you want and sticking to it.

    Reply
    • Sharon,

      Apologize…in all honesty I’m not tracking. I’m afraid I’m too simple to understand the concept of “moving goalposts”, maybe this is it though?:

      I once submitted a paper decision document to a Line Officer for review/signature. She made a lot of pen-and-ink edits, and asked for an e-copy the next time. I made all the suggested corrections and submitted to her an e-copy. She actually (substantially) edited her pen-and-ink edits from before!

      I’m not sure my relative degree of culpability as relevant to this post but I volunteer to be a “test case” though, in the spirit of learning. Feel free to dredge up any of my comments and challenge me on them, I won’t take it personally.

      Reply
  6. Sorry, sometimes when I try to be diplomatic, I am unclear.

    By “moving goalposts” I meant specifically when an environmental organization (this is my experience) says it wants one thing and then when you agree, wants something else. The paragraph I quoted below.

    What I was trying to get at in my above comment was that I noticed that when the FS isn’t “impeccable with its word” about monitoring, we (Ed, Andy, you, me)all agree that it’s a problem.

    The FS tries to address the problem, but in my opinion, founders on the shoals of its own culture.

    On the other hand when an environmental organization appears to be not “impeccable with its word,” we haven’t yet heard a similar “that’s wrong”. I’m hoping that the people who represent those groups and could give us insights were having cocktails or beer on Friday, or spending time with their families and so have been unavailable.

    In any relationship, when things go wrong, it’s not usually entirely one side’s fault. I think we need to go deeper and explore the values of both sides to make headway in “getting more work done” and “of course obeying all environmental laws” that Wyden articulated.

    So here’s my example. This reminded me of environmental organization X. We had worked on Colorado Roadless for seven years. At each comment period they moved the bar. In fact, I had developed a table of all the different times they wrote (this is public) and told us what they wanted. Each time we gave it to them, and they moved the bar, which I showed in the table. They must think it is OK to do this, because they were getting more of what they wanted (or is that making assumptions?) But they were not being impeccable with their word as far as I can tell. Does the end justify the means? (I don’t know why it was so important to please them- they had the ear of R and D administrations, but that’s another issue).

    So my answer to John’s question, is “just be upfront with your needs. Write them down. Share them. Then litigate if you don’t get your “needs” met. But don’t tell us that the real problem is that folks wrote one page instead of five pages on cumulative effects, when you really don’t want to cut down trees there.” It is perhaps too strong to say that that that behavior is dishonest, because the system works that way, but that’s how it feels to some of us in Physical World.

    Reply
  7. There are bigger challenges ahead related to this “walk the talk” issue. I know of one way to stop many western timber sales dead in their tracks by forcing them to follow their own rules. I think it is a matter of time before the serial litigators find the loophole I know of. The Forest Service needs to take a frank look at their rules and policies, to determine which parts of their programs are necessary to fully comply with NEPA. They need to look at their vulnerabilities, which do exist.

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  8. I know this is a bit delayed, but having just participated in a negotiation competition, I thought some observations pertinent.
    To achieve your goals, you do not want to tell the “opposing” part what your most-preferred outcomes are, nor do you want to tell them what your bottom line is. A true negotiation involves two or more parties that know negotiation is the best alternative (not the BATNA or the Worst ATNA). As they negotiate they dance to achieve the best deal they can within the range of preferences (most preferred – bottom line).
    It is important to recognize when a true win-win negotiation situation is likely (integretative negotiation- both parties seek a “reasonable” deal) versus a win-lose situation (distributive negotiation-one party is likley to get a better deal).
    I don’t know that most FS-Enviro Group interactions are scenarios in which true negotiation principles apply because other options usually exist (litigation, pull-out from conversations, contact state/fed reps, write op-ed, create a campaign,….).

    However, when a negotiation is actually happening, you can “play fair” and reveal your bottom line and most-preferred outcome, but you are never sure that the other party will “play fair” in return; if not you will only get your bottom line (they will get the better deal). Only by virtue of regular negotiations between the same parties (which have a history of the following); or one-time agreements involving shared complete information (like in a business transaction) and an absence of other tactical options and a common negotiation goal, can a negotiation be successful. How often do FS-Enviro groups find themselves meeting all of these factors?

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  9. Craig, thanks so much for weighing in, your perspective is one we need.
    I wonder if there are ways that Congress could design something like “a one-time agreement involving shared complete information” or design another way to encourage open and honest (and more or less final?) negotiations?

    Do you or others have ideas?

    Reply

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