Understanding Conflict Styles
During our last class, we learned about the strategies of disconnection: fight, flight, freeze and appease. We dug deeper into these four defensive structures by analyzing our own conflict styles when we face different situations with different people.
Creating our family genogram
Drawing out my family genogram was such a cathartic experience for me. This wasn’t my first time creating a family tree, but it was the first time I had to draw out the positive and negative associations between each family member. When I saw all these connections on paper, I realized there were so many things I wasn’t aware of.
I discovered that when I face conflict with my family members I actually have different conflict responses. I reacted differently depending on the person and context of a situation.
Conflict Exercise
Later we were given a conflict situation and did a role-playing exercise with our cohort. We switched roles until each person had played all of the responses.
Right away I realized it was difficult for me to act out a response that I normally would not do. When it was my turn to be the fighter, I found myself playing both the fighter and the appeaser. Interestingly enough this also happened with the other members of my group. We all fell back into our own personal reactions to conflict. After the last scenario, we found that dialogue was key to conflict solution.
Through these exercises, I realized that we need to learn how to listen and communicate with each other. As designers, we can’t jump into a problem based on our initial reactions. We need to understand everyone in the system. We need to understand their problems. We need to understand their goals. And in order to co-create, we need to listen and communicate with each other and the people we are designing for.
