Diane Hamilton: Zen, Meditation, and Development (Archived Interview)

Once each side gets clear about what it actually wants and needs, you can look for the places those wants overlap. That overlap is where options start to appear, options that work for both parties. The common assumption is that a conflict has a winner and a loser, that you can't leave both sides satisfied. Consider a story in the U.S. news recently: a CEO in Seattle chose to cut his own pay sharply so that every one of his employees would earn at least $70,000 a year. People often shrink a conflict down to one thing, usually money. Here, though, you can see the man cares about more than his own paycheck. The financial security of his workers, and their sense of being looked after, is something he holds as an interest in its own right.

So a lot of the work is pulling a conflict apart, getting at the real wants and needs underneath it, and then widening the pie, if you want to put it that way, so there's more room to be creative about meeting those needs. That isn't always doable. It depends partly on where the people involved sit in terms of adult development. And when I say higher levels of development, complexity is really the better word than higher. Someone who can hold several perspectives at once tends to be better at inventing creative options. So who's in the room matters. But the Seattle example shows how it can play out.

Erik: For anyone who hasn't come across these stages of development, could you walk us through what they are and how they function?

Diane: Sure. Research into human adult development over the past forty or fifty years has settled a few things about how we grow and change once we're adults. The first point is that not everyone keeps growing. Plenty of people stay in a learning posture, and plenty of others level off. Their lifestyle, their worldview, the way they read situations, all of it settles into place and stops shifting.

For the people who do keep changing, what shows up is more perspectives coming online. You can hold your own position, and the other person's, and maybe step back into a third viewpoint on the same issue, all without much strain. Juggling several points of view becomes manageable, and you can even weigh one against another. Something else I've noticed about people at more complex levels: they're less gripped by identity. Their sense of self is more fluid. They don't clamp down on how they're seen or how they come across, and they can set those identity needs aside more easily than most.