Another Hint on Avoiding Conflict

In a recent post I suggested one way to avoid conflict. I’ve been asked to share more, so here it goes:

I call this hint the fallacy of believing that a deteriorating situation will always improve on its own. True it is possible that it might, but consider the consequences of a bad conflict situation if it doesn’t.

I’ve mediated many collection disputes. For example, for whatever reason one party owes another party a sum of money. Again, for whatever reason the debtor party experiences a change of circumstance and can’t pay as promised. The debtor party truly hopes and believes that the situation will improve and avoids contact with the lender. The lender sues and the parties are referred to mediation. If mediation is not successful and the dispute is heard by a judge in court, the lender will get a judgment plus court costs. The lender must still attempt to collect, which can be a time consuming, difficult and frequently unsuccessful process.

What I so often hear in private caucuses with lenders is ‘if the debtor had only come to me and kept me informed we could have worked something out.” Of course there’s no guarantee that would have happened, but not keeping the lender informed more surely results in conflict.

Construction conflicts often have a similar outcome. In one case, the contractor could not secure the HAV equipment the architects and engineers had specified. To keep the project on schedule, the contractor made a unilateral substitution of equipment that had been used on similar buildings. The substitution came to light in final walk-throughs. The owner demanded that the equipment be replaced with the originally specified equipment at the contractor’s expense. The contractor responded that what was installed was more than adequate and the equipment first requested might not be available for several months. In private caucus the owner told me that if the contractor had only shared that information during one of their regular construction meetings something could probably have been worked out.

In many disputes I so often hear similar words. Of course, that may not always be the case. But experience tells me not sharing bad news early will almost always result in a difficult conflict later on.