I Need Your Help

I was having lunch recently with a friend.  She started to tell me about a situation she was having with her neighbor.  It involved a tree in the neighbor's yard that was growing in a way that was damaging the wall between the two properties.  As she was relating the story to me, I started to get a little anxious.  You see, what she was describing is the way that a lot of pretty nasty lawsuits get started.  I worked on a case like that a while back.   It went on for years and reached some truly ugly levels with a couple of incidents where things got physical and police were called.  It was a textbook example of how not to manage conflict.  I'd heard many similar stories from other lawyers, and as my friend started to tell me about writing a letter to her neighbor to deal with the situation, I was worried that I was going to hear another ugly story.  Fortunately, as my friend related the words of wisdom she used to start her letter, I knew that wasn't a concern.

Dear Neighbor,

      I need your help ....

Four simple words, but quite powerful.  You take a potential enemy and enlist them as an ally, and sure enough, that's exactly how things worked out for my friend.

This is a great example of a concept discussed in the book Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury.  They suggest that when negotiating with someone you "separate the people from the problem."  Doing so makes it less likely that the person you are dealing with will react defensively.  My friend went a step further and asked for help.  Maybe I'm naive, but I believe that most people like being helpful when given the opportunity.  I've taken this approach with people lately, and it sure seems people respond well.  Interestingly enough,  I've had a couple situations where I haven't even explicitly asked for help.  Instead I just thought of the person in question as a partner instead of an enemy, and it definitely made a difference.  Not only does it help in my dealings with the other person, it helps me focus on what is now our problem.  

Working Together

I discovered a new favorite in the art world this week – maybe I should say favorites actually.  Following a link shared by a friend, I learned about Mica Angelea Hendricks and in particular was drawn to this post in her blog.  Mica tells the story of how one day her 4 year old daughter asked if she could draw in Mica’s sketchbook.  Not just any sketchbook, but Mica’s new, special, very high quality sketchbook.  Mica tried to divert her daughter’s attention to her own art supplies and away from Mom’s special book, but it was a lost cause.  Her daughter was holding a trump card, really the trump card.  “If you can’t share, we might have to take it away if you can’t share.”  Yup, that was check and mate.

Mica had drawn a lady’s head, and she told her daughter that she was about to draw a body to go with it.  Her daughter assumed those duties.  Mica initially resigned herself to just discarding this sketch, but when she looked at what her daughter drew, she loved it.  In Mica’s words:

Not surprisingly, I LOVED what she drew.  I had drawn a woman’s face, and she had turned her into a dinosaur-woman.  It was beautiful, it was carefree, and for as much as I don’t like to share, I LOVED what she had created.

And this is what they created:

They developed this system.  Mica drew the heads, her daughter would add the bodies and then Mica would add colors and highlights to finish the piece.  You can see lots of their work on Mica’s blog.

To me there are a ton of lessons from this story.  The one that jumps most to mind for me though these days is the beauty that can come from collaboration.

Collaboration produces results that individuals working alone would never achieve.  I know Mica only through reading her work but I’m very confident she would agree that she would never have gotten to dinosaur-woman here on her own.

I’m a big believer in collaboration.  Like with Mica and her daughter I often find that when I work together with other people on projects that we produce results both unexpected and beautiful. 

Reboot

     Things have been dormant in the blog for some time - over a year actually.  My how time flies.  It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, but I haven’t been able to fit what I had to say within the format I defined before – so I let things sit.  Lately though I’ve had more of an urge to do some writing and I’ve decided that rather than struggling to fit my ideas into the format, well I’ll just redefine the format.

So, going forward the format is simply that this is my personal blog.  I’ll use it to write about things that are important and interesting to me, and that means that I’ll still write a lot about music and I’ll still write a lot about law and conflict resolution – these are my passions.  But if something else pops in my head and I get the urge, I’ll write about that as well.  Basically, I’m trying to set the rules aside, and let things flow.  Looking forward to seeing where it goes.