e.sketch@comcast.net

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Conflict Fiction

I write novels about conflict and this is a sample that illustrates my approach, in this case with a fictional negotiation in the 2050s with a Rogue AI that is threatening to destroy humanity. If you enjoy this please use the contact section and we can send you a copy of the full novel Negotiating Armageddon.
  • • After Action Review: A process based on learning from what has happened, derived from the US military process of the same name. Typically asks questions like ‘what went well, what could have been better and what you do differently next time?’, in the light of what you were trying to achieve (the mission). In order to learn from experience it helps to have a frame to make decisions and then this frame can help look at what has happened in a disciplined way and either we conclude that specific mistakes were made or that the frame needs modification. Simply staring at what happened without a frame is unlikely to lead to useful understanding.
  • • Autism: Conflict-Induced: The inability to read the mind of the other party in the conflict, so being reduced to playing games. Inability to form empathetic bridges, possibly caused by failure of mirror neurons to fire or cognitive override based on feeling generated by the conflict or past betrayal.
  • • BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement: The one bit of positional thinking the model encourages. Though the caution is that any BATNA is really only a BEBATNA (see entry).
  • • BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement: Best Estimate of the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement: Once you revert to the Game stage of decision making and drop the collaboration, the other side’s reaction to your action, which may determine the outcome, may be indeterminate. The Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates the perils of this and the crucial role of interrogating your data to establish the degree of certainty in your BATNA.
  • • BEBATNA: Best Estimate of the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement: Once you revert to the Game stage of decision making and drop the collaboration, the other side’s reaction to your action, which may determine the outcome, may be indeterminate. The Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates the perils of this and the crucial role of interrogating your data to establish the degree of certainty in your BATNA.
  • • Conflict Landscape A set of variables that define the territory of the conflict (“the map is not the territory”) and which can possibly be measured in ways that would be useful to participants in the conflict.
  • • The Creative Conflict Model A seven step process consisting of the following stages (and summarized in more detail in Chapter 14):

    1. Getting Real
    2. Establishing our Interests
    3. Empathy for the Other Side’s Interests
    4. Getting Creative about Solutions to the Conflict
    5. Getting Stereoscopic: Seeing the Conflict from Both Side Simultaneously
    6. Making a Good Deal 7. Learning from the process via After Action Reviews
  • • Clarifying your own Interests: The deconstruction or translation of our positions into our underlying interests using Stanovich’s analysis of TASS, memes and analytical reasoning and Neurathian analysis of our paradigms.
  • • Contrarian Analysis: Overriding our tendency to seek and emphasize data that supports our paradigms, the deliberate search for data that would disprove our paradigms as suggested by Karl Popper way. Essential part of Getting Real stage of the model. Also asking yourself and/or the other side: ‘what data would it take to make you doubt your position on this?’.
  • • Getting Creative: A disciplined process of ‘what ifs’ and other brainstorming techniques that build on deconstruction of self and other’s interests in earlier stages of the conflict model.
  • • Getting Real Stage: The initial step of specifying the frame of your conflict, the paradigm or lens through which you see it, the data that populates your frame (and if available the others frame and data sets), what you know, don’t know and maybe don’t even know you don’t know about the conflict situation you face.
  • • Deconstruction of Your/Other Side’s Interests: The process by which either your own or the other side’s position is taken to pieces by establishing the underlying interests that drive it.
  • • Empathy: Having an accurate theory of mind of the other person so being able to feel what they feel without necessarily agreeing or sympathizing with them. At neural level, your mirror neurons fire with theirs unless cognitively overridden. This could even mean: know your enemy in a way certain dominant powers in the world feel unable to try.
  • • Fundamentalism: Possession by a belief system that includes the instruction do not doubt this belief or something very bad will happen to you and do not subject this belief to testing against reality as this is the same as doubting it. Only hope in unpicking fundamentalism is probably with its internal contradictions, which may get worse or more evident as reality changes. Conflict involving two sets of fundamentalists are no fun at all to a third party unless extremely masochistic.
  • • Interests: The product of the deconstruction of positions. The underlying interests of the individual human or group of humans that may reflect TASS/gene interests, meme interests and analytical reasoning. Some prima facia reasons exist to favor vehicle (individual human interests) rather than gene or meme when they conflict, but the important thing is to surface and examine all of these categories and make a conscious choice, especially in conflict situations.
  • • Mapping a conflict landscape: This is the process that we should use to assess the conflict we confront. We assess the data, rationality, interests, parties and degree of trust that is evident in the landscape.
  • • Memes: A cultural artifact invented by Richard Dawkins and used extensively by Keith Stanovich, that spreads as a short cut of information/processing and exists largely to spread itself relying on the lack of reflection of the carrier. Rather like a computer virus. Especially problematic in conflict landscapes because of capacity to distort and prevent parties seeing their underlying interests: false consciousness in Marxist language.
  • • Getting Empathetic about the Others Side’s Interests The deconstruction or translation of the other side in conflict interests and the creation of a cognitive map of how they see the world/the conflict we are involved in and how they feel about it. Made easier and less threatening, if we have clarity on our own identity and interests. Use this to then reflect back on our own identity/interests.
  • • Paradigm: The way we construe the world and in particular how we construe the conflict we are in and the extent to which we are prepared to subject it to the reality test or want to it remain fundamentalist and unchallengeable to data or changing circumstances
  • • Position/Positional: A fundamentalist holding of a stance in a conflict that is impervious to analysis, or deconstruction. The situation that exists before deconstruction and the source material for the deconstruction into real interests.
  • • Post Autistic Game Theory: The attempt to enrich Game Theory with empathy to allow more generative, creative and non-zero sum higher level solutions to conflict situations.
  • • Reverse Engineering: The process of arguing back from a desired conclusion, so as selectively to find the data that would support the conclusion, and suppress the data that would counter it. Much used by intelligence services.
  • • Scott Fitzgerald Space/Stereoscopy: The ability to see an issue in conflict situation from both sides of the conflict, thereby seeing its complexity and systemic nature more clearly, and increased ability to find a creative synthesis or higher level solution
  • • Win-Lose or Zero Sum Game: The standard understanding of conflict that we are competing over a fixed size of resource and that one side’s gain is another side’s loss. In my experience, most conflict is not like this and indeed this idea generates wars and other forms of negative sum games in which the conflict over win-lose leads to massive losses on both sides
  • • Win-Win or Non Zero Sum Games: In my experience they are much more useful than Win-Lose Zero Sum Games. With a little creativity and dropping the rigid belief that conflict is Win-Lose, both sides can gain, though there is still the issue of who gains the most and there is no reason that this should not be contested but not at the expense of destroying all that is of value for both sides = war.
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