Rory Miller – Page 4 – Conflict Manager

Principle Based Teaching, Part III – Rory Miller

Paul McRedmond describes his approach as “Awareness Based Teaching,” or ABT. Mechanically, breaking people is not difficult. The human body is not a mystery, or, at least, it shouldn’t be for any reasonably active adult. We all know what hurts. We all know which functions can’t be disrupted (breathing, circulation). And we all know how to move, whether it is pushing a car or swinging a hammer. The mechanics of breaking people are no different than any other mechanics. Physics doesn’t change in a fight.

Once you understand this, self-defense is mostly a matter of learning to see. Learning to recognize opportunities and available tools quickly enough and exploit them ruthlessly enough. Hence, ABT.

Training awareness is broad and deep. “Situational awareness” gets thrown around a lot as a phrase, but it is useless unless you have the training and experience to know what to be aware of. Seeing things is not and never has been the problem. It has always been noticing the important things and recognizing the unimportant so that they can be disregarded. So, breadth: Awareness spans from understanding the uses of terrain to working in the social milieu and down to the nuances of targeting and power generation.

And depth: Each piece of awareness can be studied at many levels. Group dynamics can be a life time study and so can body mechanics and communication.

Principles-Based Training is dependent on awareness, in both the student and the instructor. Honing that awareness will be a lifetime endeavor.

The next aspect works on a more micro scale. You will be teaching physical skills. We know that teaching an endless series of technique is an incredibly inefficient way to teach. We also know that memorizing technique is almost worthless in a fight. Attempting to process information consciously is far too slow.

Caveat, though. There is one potential problem with this teaching method: If your measures of success (grading) is based on what your students can parrot back, students trained this way will not test well. They will be able (for example) to improvise jointlocks under pressure, but they won’t be able to name a single lock or demonstrate a named lock.

Whatever you teach, there is a way to break it down to make it easy for the student to grasp intuitively. Breaking it down to the right chunks, combined with the right training methodology, make for much faster gains in applicable physical and interactive skills. I call the classes of technique broken down to the sweet spot for fast learning “Building Blocks.”

This will be idiosyncratic. No two people will break down what they teach in the same way. All practitioners who have gotten to the unconscious competence level of skill will have slightly different intuitive understanding of what they do and why it works. In other words, there is no perfect list. This is about what works, not about what looks pretty.

For instance, “striking” is not one of my Building Blocks. I teach striking in three parts– “Power Generation” + “Targets” + “Conformation.” Conformation is just a fancy way of saying “How to use the right weapon so you don’t hurt yourself.” And Power Generation is a combination of three things as well– Conservation (structure) Stealing (using gravity, the environment and the threat’s motion) and Generation (the things you do with your own muscles to hit hard.) Broken down in this way, the student gets comfortable (and decent power) with a variety of handstrikes in about three hours.

But remember it is a deep study as well. Three hours to good, solid hits. But years to get the nuances of each piece and a lifetime to explore all the other ways to hit hard.

That’s my breakdown, my building block. It would be perfectly valid and work just as well to break it down as Hand, Forearm and Elbow; Power Generation and Targeting.

Homework. Breakdown whatever you teach into chunks that make sense to you. Try breaking them down in different ways. For instance, I teach takedowns as Momentum Ploys; Sweeps (Static and Moving, moving broken down into draw, cross, or stop); true throws (full entry, half entry, and reverse); Leverage; Locks (up and down); Base destruction and; Combinations of the above. But it is perfectly valid and would work just as well to break them down based on balance principles as simply “Getting the Center of Gravity off the Base”. Move the center of gravity, change the base, combine those two. If I had a class full of physicists, I’d probably go with that as the chunk. Again, there are many ways to be right.

I’m going to go a little meta on you for the next set of things to understand. You must understand what you are doing. For physical skills, when you go hands on, there are only three valid reasons.

You are either:

Trying to escape

Trying to get the threat under control

Trying to disable the threat

You must understand these because these are three very different things. The body mechanics are different. Grappling and locking arts are incompatible with a strategy of escaping. Doing damage to the threat involves kinetic energy going towards his core, which is the absolute wrong direction for your kinetic energy to be moving if you are trying to escape.

The physics of these three reasons are different, thus the body mechanics will be different.

The goals of these three reasons are different, thus the best strategies and tactics will be different.

Evaluate your system as it stands and evaluate what you teach as you teach. Are you teaching your students how to escape, disable or control? And be very, very careful, because fighting is nowhere on that list and the goals, strategy, physics and body mechanics of fighting are just as unrelated.

And the last. You need to understand the strategy of your system. Your priorities. The biggest weakness in modern RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) systems is that they collect a variety of real cool techniques but usually have no strategic thread that ties them into a useable package. The human animal organizes information. Organized information, organized skills are far easier to use. Especially under pressure.

Principle Based Teaching, Part II – Rory Miller

Part 2: Principles

I have heard, since the very beginning of my martial arts career, that there are a very small number of principles on which everything else is based. It always sounded good, until I asked exactly what those principles were. Usually I got a blank look or a fragment of philosophy: “Hit hard!” or, “Him down now!”

It sounds obvious, it is obvious, but you can’t teach from principles if you don’t know principles. And if your system is based on core principles, every instructor in your system should have an answer to the question, “What are your principles?” And, all of those instructors should have the same answer.

What is a principle? A principle is a law of physics or a property of physiology that makes your techniques work. As such, they are universal and apply to all styles and systems. Leverage, for example, is a universal principle. I personally identify something as a principle if:

It applies to striking, grappling and weapons

There are no exceptions

Leverage, for instance. In a sweep, the greater the distance between the high and low force, the less energy is required. Every lock has a lever arm that should be maximized. And sticks hit harder than hands because the lever arm is longer. And no exceptions. Perfect leverage won’t always get the job done– it would take a truly enormous lever and an impossible place to stand to move the world– but good leverage is always superior to poor leverage.

This articles is going to get a little interactive, so go grab a pen and some scratch paper. I’d like you to sit and think and write down a list of your principles before we go further. I’ll ask Garry to insert an advertisement about here so that you don’t scroll down too fast.

Got your list? Good. Now let’s talk about what isn’t a principle. You’ll probably wind up scratching some things off your list, and that’s fine. Because something isn’t a principle by my definition, doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

Things that aren’t principles, but show up on a bunch of lists are goals, strategies, tactics, techniques, concepts, and aphorisms.

“Don’t get hurt” for instance, is a goal. It isn’t a principle. Getting injured makes everything harder, so not getting hurt is a good goal, but it isn’t even a plan. It is the result of doing everything right and a lot of luck. Where you want to end up is a goal, but it doesn’t help you get there, so it isn’t a principle. It isn’t even a strategy or a tactic.

“Do damage” Is a strategy. It is the vague path to your goal. Again, desiring to do damage does not increase the efficiency of the damage dealing itself, so not a principle.

Counter-punching is a tactic. It can serve your goals and implement your strategy, but it doesn’t make things work better. Rather, it is one of the things you use principles to make better.

“Use the appropriate level of force for the situation” is a concept. It is a way to think that can be very important and can inform every aspect of training as well as fighting, but it is not a principle. Nothing in that statement makes the level you decide to use more efficient.

Aphorisms are little bits of wisdom such as “Hard to soft, soft to hard.” They are sound-bite sized pieces of principles that are not understood. “Hard to soft, soft to hard” is only sometimes true. A solid stick, which is hard, does more damage to exposed joints and bones than to muscle. The principle behind “Hard to soft, soft to hard” might be, “Choose a target appropriate to the weapon.” Does this hold true for striking, grappling and weapons? Are there exceptions? Is there any time where using the wrong tool for the job or applying a tool to the wrong target is a good idea? “Choose a target appropriate to the weapon” fits my definition of a principle.

Note here that aphorisms will be one of the clues to discovering your principles. Dig in deep and find what the underlying truth is.

Another thing to note: Training trivia, like, “You must turn your foot at 45 degrees in this technique” is almost always a clue to a principle. When a principle is not taught or not understood, trivia must be memorized to fill the gap. Once the principle is understood, the trivia becomes unnecessary because the reason becomes obvious. And the principle will also show the boundary when the situation changes and the trivia becomes untrue and ineffective.

Good? So power down the screen, pour yourself a cup of coffee or whatever, and take another stab at writing your list of principles. I will share mine at the end of this article, but it is imperative that you write yours first. Humans, like all animals are lazy. If you see a good enough list, part of your brain will turn off. If you see my list before you write yours, you will either turn off or, at best, your list will be polluted with my ideas. If, however, you see my list with a strong and complete list of your own, the ideas can cross-pollinate and become stronger. Don’t cheat yourself on this.

Rory’s list of principles:

Leverage: the longer the lever arm, the more power you can apply.
Structure: Using bone instead of muscle. Bone doesn’t get tired. Bones are levers. Use and understand your opponents skeleton and your own, offensively and defensively.
Balance: Understand the elements of balance (Base and Center of Gravity) and how those elements apply to you, the threat and the combined four-legged animal you become when you make contact.
2-Way action: When possible, hit things from two directions: push and pull locks; crash and sweep takedowns; exercise and eat right to get fit.
Gravity: Gravity doesn’t telegraph, it is stronger than you and you can’t accelerate at 32 ft/sec2. Whenever possible, use your weight instead of or in addition to your strength.
Action/Reaction: He who moves first lands first. Take and keep the initiative.
Gifts: Each of the Threat’s attacks comes with momentum you can exploit. The world is full of obstacles and weapons you can use. Learn to see.
Space and Time: A big one and complex. This includes ranges, fighting against emptiness instead of force, creating and using deadzones to be safe in a fight, controlling pace, mentally altering your opponent’s perception of time and distance, creating freezes, feinting… this one is big.
Line and Circle: The geometry of conflict. Linear and circular movements have different possibilities, power generations, strengths and weaknesses.
Environment: Use everything around you, from terrain to the social attitudes of the audience. This has strategic, tactical and immediate applications.
Targeting: Some places hurt more than others. Hit the one that hurts most.

There aren’t a large number of principles. I think if my understanding were deeper, the list above would be shorter, not longer. A future article will talk about how to apply the concepts to training. For now, it’s important that you have your list.

Fighting is complex, but it’s not complicated. Here’s what I mean. There’s a lot that goes into it– physics, physiology, social constructs, internal states of all parties involved– but the effective solutions tend to be simple. Physics in school can be hard and take a lot of math, but in the end there are only six simple machines and almost all work from variations of one principle, leverage.

And that’s why, as simple as training through principles can be, as quickly as students can make gains, it can still be a life long study. There is incredible depth available at this game. When I first learned of structure, it was simply a tool to keep energy from being lost. “All of your joints and muscles give,” I was told, “and when they give, that power is not going into the enemy. So hit with bone, not with muscle.” Like most young men, I couldn’t even tell structure from stiffness at that time.

Fast forward thirty years and in a short introduction to structure we still covered power conservation. But also power, unbalancing, bone slaving, void defense, vectors along bones versus angled against, structure disruption, resting in grappling, and structuring against a lock. All just structure.

And as cool as all that is, I know I’m barely scratching the surface.

Principles-Based Teaching, Part I – Rory Miller

Part One Laying the Foundation

Managing conflict can be approached as a huge and complex field. You can find books of techniques, lists of indicators to watch for. You can fill your mind with endless datum and detail. This approach, whether in a verbal communication class or a martial arts class, is common. It is also, in my opinion, largely ineffective. It is teaching and memorizing trivia so that one can give the impression of understanding. This gives the student reams of knowledge and completely bypasses understanding. This approach is the downfall of much of the technique-based training in the martial arts, producing people that can throw a visually perfect punch, but can’t fight. Useless to the student, but the teacher has nice clear lesson plans and infinite detail to correct.

Conflict management can also be ignored: “It’s a natural part of your life, something you see every day. You don’t need to be taught this.” This approach leads to improvement only through trial and error, and error can be expensive in conflict. It doesn’t even require a teacher, and I have seen it used as an excuse not to teach critical skills to rookies.

And conflict can be deliberately mismanaged and mistaught: “I don’t need to learn how to manage conflict! Everyone else just has to learn to be nice to me.” Which is not just an expression of pure selfish ego, but designed to keep anyone who takes that stance as helpless and dependent as possible.

All three of these approaches are easy to teach. I mean that the process is easy for the teacher. They are not good ways to develop complex skills in the students.

Principles-based teaching is more challenging for the instructor. The instructor can’t get away with just parroting what he or she was taught. It requires a depth of understanding.

“You must turn your toe out at 45 degrees in this technique,” is sufficient for technique-based instruction. The foot position is part of the technique, defines whether the technique is correct or not. The teacher and student can both see it. The teacher can grade it, and if it is taught consistently, the foot position will be part of the system far into the future. A tiny bit of information is all that is necessary, and no real thought whatsoever.

You must turn your toe out at 45 degrees either has a mechanical advantage or it doesn’t, simple as that. There is a simple law of physics or physiology that makes that foot position important (in that position/time/situation) or there isn’t. And if there is, that 45 degrees will be completely wrong in a different situation.

Technique based: “You must turn your toe out at 45 degrees in this technique.”

Principles based: “Generally, you want to keep your knees bending over your toes to keep your knees from getting injured.”

Learning your principles is getting into the “why” of things. Why do techniques work or fail? What are the physics of techniques in general?

The “why” leads to the “how.” Once you understand the principles and start learning how to apply them in action, the “whats” (the techniques) flow from that. They don’t need to be taught, because they can be automatically derived.

That may seem counter-intuitive, and it would be if the training methods of rote training were applied. More on methods later.

You need a few things to get skilled at this way of teaching:

You need to understand the principles of your system inside and out
You need to understand the goal of your training
You need to have a way to gauge (I did not say measure) progress towards that goal
You need to know your audience/students
You need a thorough understanding of how humans learn complex skills
And you need humility, because your students will get good, maybe better than you, very quickly

After outlining this teaching method to a very successful school owner in another country I got one of the best compliments of my life. “I see what you’re doing, but you couldn’t keep a school running that way. The students will get too good too fast. There’s no way to make a living at it.” Cool. But I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.

Understanding principles will come in a later article. If you want homework, though, here it is: Sit down and derive a list of the principles critical to your system.

How do I define a principle? Principles are the underlying things that make techniques work. It’s a principle if it applies to striking, grappling and weapons and there are no exceptions. Leverage, for example, is critical to all three and good leverage is always superior to poor leverage. Now, I went with my hand-to-hand core there, but you can pick anything– business, gardening, negotiations, auto mechanics– and there will be a solid core of principles.

Understand the goal of your training. This one blends with gauging, knowing your audience and humility. Quite simply, many people are not teaching what they think they are teaching. They intend to teach self-protection but put hours into how to win a one-on-one sparring match against a friend in a controlled environment.

Gauging your training. People like measurability. “That which gets measured gets improved.” But in certain fields, measurability has almost no correlation with applied ability. The arrest and control techniques taught at police academies are often complex, multi-step locks. Very easy to grade the students in class, almost impossible to apply in real life. In high school or college, were the people getting A’s in English or Communications the ones getting dates?

For physical skills, and particularly self-defense, there is no way to measure. The only applicable measurement would be whether someone survived, and the possible range of dangers makes survival in one situation likely irrelevant to the next. You can’t truly measure it, but you can and should develop ways to gauge progress and to see what progress is needed. Conflict management is an open-ended skill. Neither you nor your students will ever get to the end point where you know it all.

You need to know your audience/students. In my mind, the biggest division between martial arts and self-protection is that in MA I am teaching subject matter, and in SP I am teaching students.

Each student is different. They all have different abilities, strengths, talents, resources and weaknesses. They will be targeted for very different types of conflict. Further, they will each have different learning styles.

Understand teaching. Most of what we know or what we think we know about teaching comes from our own experience as students in schools, primarily grammar school and high school. Those were places of regimentation, top-down training, with huge power disparities between the instructor and student. Measurability trumped applicability. And everything was aimed at teaching children, not adults.

It would be hard to design a worse model for teaching assertiveness or conflict management. You can’t teach people to be strong while demanding that they obey.

Principles-based teaching has to be applied with principles of teaching. And principles of learning.

Humility. In conflict training, the instructor’s ego is probably the student’s most dangerous enemy. The instructor will be trusted, will be seen to have the answers. If the instructor needs or desires a sycophantic relationship, it will be toxic to the student. If the instructor is too prideful to acknowledge what he doesn’t know and makes shit up to answer questions, he actively endangers his students. All of teaching is about creating students who will be better than you. If you can’t emotionally handle not being the best, you have no business teaching.

This is the end of Part One, laying the foundation. I’m going to make a suggestion. If you can get a copy, watch my video “JointLocks” available from YMAA.com, Amazon and, I believe as an app. It’s not really about the locks. My stealth purpose for shooting that video was to get a solid example of the principles-based approach in front of people. Locks have a reputation for being difficult. The method we show in the video has gotten untrained rookie cops improvising locks under stress in one hour of training. If you get a chance, watch the video, but for the training method, not just the locks.— Rory

“Depth of Game” – Rory Miller

Editor’s note: In last month’s issue, Erik Kondo wrote a wonderful article on the “12 Principles of Conflict Management”. One of the founding principles of CRGI is that we want our readers and students to see that we challenge and disagree with each other all the time. That there can never be “experts” in a field as complex as conflict. We challenge each other because we all know that being sure is complacency, and complacency is the first step on the road to failure. Our discussion can be your discussion too. Read everything critically, do not just swallow and regurgitate the last thing you read, however cool. So in this issue both Rory Miller and Garry Smith respond.

In the April issue of Conflict Manager Erik put out a great article on the 12 Principles of Conflict Management. He listed 12 principles that all successful conflict managers use:

Respect (Tolerance, Empathy, Consideration)
Clear Communication (Minimal misunderstandings, Directness)
Appropriate Enforcement (Just-Right for the situation)
Truth (Actuality, Reality)
Knowledge (Deep understanding)
Dynamic Problem Solving (Critical Thinking, Neo-cortex utilized, Situation specific analysis)
Evolution (Constantly evolving and changing, Double Loop Learning)
Continuum of Responses (Spectrum, Scaling, Progressive/escalating use of force)
Control of Emotions (Limbic system controlled)
Trade-offs (Cost/Benefit analysis, Give/take, Negotiation, Compromise, Cooperation)
Open-minded (Responsive to feedback, Open to differing viewpoints)
Accountability (Responsibility, Agency, Acceptance)

It is easy for a simple list to become a dogma. It is also dangerous and these principles are not just words, they require a depth of understanding in order to utilize them effectively and to know when your own principles are being used against you.

During our discussion via email Garry suggested that we could look at this, literally as though we were having our eyes tested. I have no idea what he means by this, so I’m eager to check out his article. I do, however, know that we all see things differently and it’s a grave mistake to assume that different=wrong.

1: Respect (Tolerance, Empathy, Consideration)

Respect based on understanding is important. Sympathy, not empathy (or is it the other way around? I get those confused). It is fine to understand other’s feelings or point of view but do not get sucked into them. We have, in this culture, been taught, largely as unthinking dogma, that all points of view are equally valid, and that since tolerance is a virtue, unlimited tolerance must be saintly.

That’s not just wrong, it is dangerously naïve. If you support unlimited culturally diversity, you must also support female genital mutilation. You simply can’t have it both ways. So understand that everyone has limits on their tolerance. If they don’t there can never be a negotiation, just a drawn-out surrender on all points. Without boundaries you will stand for, your only possible conflict management strategy is to beg and hope that the other party, for their own reasons, will drop you a scrap. To have any depth of game, you must have firm lines on what you personally will not tolerate. And if you are tolerant on many issues, watch for where others use your tolerance to manipulate you for their own gain

2: Clear Communication (Minimal misunderstandings, Directness)

Because of my personality, I agree with this very much. The world becomes very smooth and simple when “yes” means “yes” and “no” means “no.” That said, I’m mature enough to understand that this is not the norm for many people.

In many cultures, directness is considered rude. In some subcultures, especially many of the criminals that I dealt with, stories are often told in a circular manner, slowly building up to the point (See A Framework for Understanding Poverty: A Cognitive Approach by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D).

You have to understand cultural nuances before you can define what clear communication even is.

3: Appropriate Enforcement (Just-Right for the situation)

Realistically, enforcement belongs at the very end of the list. But I’m following Erik’s lead here.

Understand this deeply. Negotiation only works, negotiation doesn’t even exist, except for the threat of what will happen if negotiation fails. You never do hostage negotiations without a tactical response on standby and a country without an army may make themselves feel important by mediating a treaty… but negotiation without an alternative is begging.

And understand as well that rules, policy and law have no existence other than to the extent that they are enforced. Without enforcement, they are imaginary. Just sympathetic magical spells cast by modern shamans. Only believers in the cult are bound by them, and only to the extent that they choose to be bound.

4: Truth (Actuality, Reality)

This takes skill. Simply, very few people have practiced distinguishing facts from conclusions. Feeling sure about something is no indicator of accuracy. Because people conflate emotion and fact, very few disputes are about reality, but about interpretation. If you have not practiced, you will do this as well, and be part of the problem.

5: Knowledge (Deep understanding)

This topic can go as deep as you are willing to take it. Being a subject matter expert in the subject under dispute is valuable. Do you want an electrician mediating between two surgeons on the best way to do a knee surgery?

But you can be skilled at the mechanics of resolving disputes themselves and dissect the disagreement even if you don’t understand the underlying problem. But that takes skill, humility (because the solution will not come from you and you have to accept that), and sensitivity (to recognize the change in attitude when the disputants approach agreement.)

And understand the difference between memorized trivia and understanding. The ability to spout facts is often misinterpreted as understanding those facts. Don’t fool yourself or allow yourself to be fooled by others.

6: Dynamic Problem Solving (Critical Thinking, Neo-cortex utilized, Situation specific analysis)

Ideally, this is where the other twelve principles lead. Rational thought solves problems. Emotions applied to problems often end in either a dominance/submission dynamic (that’s what the limbic system likes) or in overt violence.

But critical thinking takes skill. The best exercise (and test of skill) that I know: if you are rational, you can convincingly, logically and sympathetically argue all sides of an issue. If you can’t, you are working from your limbic system.

7: Evolution (Constantly evolving and changing, Double Loop Learning)

Growth and evolution is the hallmark of all effective people, not just conflict managers. For continuous growth, you must be honest about what has worked and failed and why. Many conflict managers use and teach the tactics they like to use, which may not be the tactics that work best.

In the moment, especially in a tense situation, you must constantly assess what you are doing and adapt. A good manager can change tactics as soon as she sees the signs things are going downhill. A poor conflict manager stays on “proven” strategies even when they are clearly not working.

8: Continuum of Responses (Spectrum, Scaling, Progressive/escalating use of force)

Conflict is a big subject. In the civilized world, skill at negotiation is often enough– you have access to lawyers and, if necessary, police to enforce agreements. But understand that if your skills don’t extend from the immediate persona you project without saying a word; to your ability to argue, trick, negotiate, debate, and command; to your ability to use force from pushing to deadly force; then your skills are incomplete. There are entire levels of conflict that you cannot manage.

Do not arrogantly believe that a very high skill at one type of conflict will translate to any skill at all at a different level. And within the verbal skill set (reference deep understanding) do not believe that your skill at dealing with social problems will help dealing with someone working from an asocial perspective. The skills will not only backfire, they will be used against you.

9: Control of Emotions (Limbic system controlled)

For most people, the default wiring is to assume that any conflict with another human being is a social and/or emotional issue. And we have a tendency to deal with emotional issues from an emotional perspective. Are you smarter when you are angry? Afraid? In love? Do we have any evidence whatsoever that any emotion makes you better at solving problems?

10: Trade-offs (Cost/Benefit analysis, Give/take, Negotiation, Compromise, Cooperation)

The Win-Win solution is set up as the ideal solution in any negotiation. A pure win-win, where everyone gets exactly what they want, is rarely possible. Anything you gain comes at a cost to someone else. A pure win-win would never need to be negotiated, just the possibility pointed out.

Which means you must have a clear idea of what you need and what you want. A clear idea of what you can and cannot sacrifice for what you want. And understand everyone else’s motivations just as clearly. Your ability to manage the conflict will lie almost entirely in your ability to navigate between these edges (gains and losses, acceptable and unacceptable) for all parties.

11: Open-minded (Responsive to feedback, Open to differing viewpoints)

Closed minds don’t grow. Learning is a lifetime activity and I would argue the primary purpose of being a human. That said, it’s entirely possible to learn crap. An open mind with no filter is just as useless, and more dangerous, than a completely closed mind.

All of these principles inter-relate. Your understanding of knowledge, actuality and– above all –critical thinking must temper your tendency to open-mindedness. Listen with an open mind but accept only with critical, rational judgment.

Without mechanisms to test, evaluate, and accept or reject new information a naïve open mind is not just a problem, but a tool that can be used and controlled by people who will not have your best interests at heart.

12: Accountability (Responsibility, Agency, Acceptance)

It is not enough to be able to negotiate or debate or even fight. You also need to be able to identify and measure success or failure. You need to have a mechanism to follow up and make sure the problem resolution is holding. You need to be able to do something if the situation is disintegrating

Without these mechanisms, any solution to any conflict is merely a ritual. The words are said and the treaty is signed…and it will forever be a piece of paper and no more.

You must develop follow-through and in most cases you must grow a reputation for follow-through or else people will be happy to resolve conflict with you, fully confident that they will have free reign as long as they pretend to agree.

Remember, each person in a conflict wants certain things and they want those things at minimal personal cost. If they know or learn that you are satisfied with the appearance of agreement, they will be happy to give you that. The cost of pretending to agree or even to acquiesce is minimal. And the gains from just doing what they want after you have accepted the agreement can be immense. Actions always trump words and without the action of follow-through, any agreement is nothing but words.

In conclusion:

Even this only scratches the surface of these principles. To be good at conflict management or to be skilled at any complex skill is a matter of depth and breadth. There are no simple answers, no one-to-one correspondences. If I were to simplify the list, I would say being a successful conflict manager rests on:

Clear goals. You must know what you need, what you want and what you would like.
Clear parameters. You must know what is absolutely unacceptable, what you wouldn’t like and what you could live with.
Awareness. You must be aware of these within yourself and just as aware of the goals and parameters of the other people involved.
Assessment. You must have skill at reading other people and the situation so that you can know what is working and what is failing. Over the long-term, you need a mechanism to apply this to continuously refine your skills.
Adaptability. On many levels.
Follow-through.

Reality, Belief and Tribalism – Rory Miller

There are very few facts. There are very few truths. There may be one best way to do a thing, but in an infinite universe the odds that your way is the best way is, roughly, zero.

There are very few facts, and no one gets emotional about facts. Diamond scratches talc, never does talc scratch a diamond. Longer levers increase power but cost distance. 2+2=4 (for all normal values of 2 and 4. That’s a math joke.)

Anyone have an emotional reaction to 2+2=4? Anyone? Nope. You may have an emotional reaction to the person writing the equation on the chalkboard. You may have such an intense reaction that you want the equation to be wrong, but there is no reaction to the equation itself.

So, rule number one: There is no feeling associated with truth. If you feel sure the only thing you can be certain of is that you don’t know. You can feel sure that your politics are righteous or that your religion is truth or that your system is best, but as long as you feel that way you know it is NOT an objective truth.

And our lives are filled with things we do not and cannot know. Not just the BS Philosophy 101 questions of “Do you really know if the sun will rise tomorrow?” Important stuff. You don’t know what anyone really thinks about you. You probably aren’t even aware of the differences between the values you feel and the ones you express in action. You don’t know who you will be under certain stresses.

And people hate being uncertain. Unknown is unsafe. Freedom is a nice idea, but historically people piss away freedom in a heartbeat if someone will offer security.

So, rule number two: People are uncomfortable-to-terrified by uncertainty and they are surrounded by it at all times.

This problem is compounded in martial arts and self-defense. At the high end of the conflict spectrum, there is a lot less experience. Everyone has been in an argument, far fewer have been in an argument that escalated to blows. Even fewer have been targeted by a predator or been required to use deadly force or participated in a riot. Some people spend years in martial arts, studying what to do if attacked. And they have no idea– it is impossible to know the first time– what they will actually do if attacked. You can tell yourself anything you want but until you pull a trigger, you cannot know if you are capable of it.

This uncertainty compounds with the high stakes of life or death conflict. But it compounds with something else as well: identity. For better or worse, violence has achieved a level of mythic weight in our society. The “wisdom” of a “warrior” is held to be more profound than the wisdom of a father, mother or schoolteacher. It’s not more profound, it’s simply more rare. And thus easy to fake, but that’s for another essay.

But the idea of who we will be under pressure, in conflict, is a powerful aspect of our identity. The image in our own mind and other people’s minds of who we are. And if the conflict has only been imagined, a terrifyingly large chunk of that identity is also imaginary. If uncertainty is frightening, what level of fear and insecurity comes from the deep and denied knowledge that you don’t even know who you are? You are your own imaginary construct.

So, rule three: People like to feel sure, even if they can’t be sure. And the best way to feel sure is to surround yourself with people who agree with you and shun the people who make you question your beliefs. This is the first step into the insular world of “tribalism disguised as truth.”

It’s a sneaky worldview. You feel sure. You are surrounded by people who sound sure. The only evidence you hear confirms what you already know to be true. If someone with a different point of view somehow strays into your territory, the tribe has more than enough voices to shout her down, and if you can’t win on logic, you can win on volume (because lots of loud people equals consensus, right?) or you can always drive her away with personal attacks. And ad hominem is always harder to see when you are the one using it.

You never listen to what your opponents say, you listen to what your friends say your opponents say… and those arguments are always easy to shut down.

With only a few tactics, you can drive away words, opinions, or even facts that might challenge your tribal identity. Tribalism disguised as truth is a powerful and subtle thing. http://www.lairdwilcox.com/news/hoaxerproject.html

And there is a nobility to it. Patriotism is tribalism. Taking a stand against all comers for the good of the team is classically praiseworthy. “My country right or wrong.” Generally, surrounding yourself with a tribe suppresses doubt. I believe it actually suppresses the part of the brain that analyzes doubt. But when the doubts well up, loyalty is a virtuous way to slap them down. Not thinking, not challenging, is not only easier, it will be reinforced and praised by the tribe.

And all the while the tribe will insist that the tribe and only the tribe is smart, is logical, is beyond and above politics and emotion. “So say we all.”

http://thespeaker.co/group-acts-love-group-hate-motive-attribution-asymmetry-explained-nu-research/

Rule number four: Groupthink is rewarded and thinking for yourself is punished. It’s not always that simple. Tribalism is at its strongest when you believe that you are a persecuted minority. If everyone is out to get you, solidarity is even more important. Viciousness in defense of “the truth” is warranted. And with this attitude it is easy to see anyone trying to be reasonable as an enemy, offering unwelcome data as an attack, and the most reasonable possible debate as oppression and persecution.

And maybe that’s rule number 4.1: From the tribal point of view, anything that doesn’t confirm the preconception is seen as an attack and anyone who disagrees is seen as an oppressor. And that fully justifies the tribe in attacking and oppressing even more, in “self-defense.” In my experience, weak individuals or groups who get the tiniest bit of power become far more vicious bullies than strong people ever do.

So here’s rule #5, and it’s a sad and horrible thing: The truth has no tribe. There are a lot of reasons for that. First and foremost, tribalism is based on difference and there simply isn’t any difference in the truth. I teach that flurry attacks result in an O-O bounce so that the threat’s OODA loop never resets and he freezes. Richard Dmitri teaches “The Shredder.” Long ago, when a boxer tried to take me out I shot both forearms between his attacking fists in a triangle shape into the side of his neck. It was a flinch that came from nowhere, it worked beautifully, and I’ve been teaching it ever since. Tony Blauer had a genius idea, researched his ass off, and created SPEAR. Whatever our backgrounds, however we name things, there will always be a convergent evolution towards what works. Because bad tactics get people killed. So many of us will arrive at similar truths, and if everybody is teaching the same things, it gets really hard to say, “We’re better than you guys.”

But the tribalism needs to say it. So if the techniques are same, you can focus on the research methods. Or the membership. Or the training methods. Or the buzzwords. To be different. And if you’re different enough you can call the other tribe wrong even if their stuff is just the same.

The second reason the truth has no tribe is because tribal identities are more powerful than individual identities and people who feel sure, in general, seem stronger than those who admit uncertainty.

It takes a lot of maturity? discipline? humility? to say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.” But the ability to say those words is the essence of seeking truth. It’s very hard to build a tribe around the embrace of ambiguity. Trust me– that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with CRGI (and that, right there, may be a sign of the tribal brain sneaking in). But small numbers embracing doubt will always be at a disadvantage from big numbers embracing certainty.

Except– and this is an article of faith for me, I have no stats to back it up– except embracing doubt and seeking truth will most often have truth on it’s side. And I find that powerful. To quote Avi Nardia, “I’d rather be a student of Reality than a master of Illusion.”