How to Win A Facebook War
The world feels like nothing but “sides” these days.
Left vs right.
Red vs blue.
People like us vs people like them.
We tend to see ourselves as facing each other rather than standing next to one other.
In mediation, this perspective is completely counter to the goal, which is to find a number and set of circumstances that both the employer and insurer, as well as the injured worker, feel comfortable enough with to move forward. If we as mediators pick a side and take a stance “against” the other one, nobody wins. Not even the “side” we’re on. A “win” in mediation is all parties choosing to move forward. Period.
This same perspective is useful outside the world of workers’ comp, too, though.
Perhaps most notably, in our Facebook feeds and churches, on the sidelines of our kids’ soccer games and in the HOA meetings of our neighborhoods. The “win” in these keyboard wars and arguments of morality is not either “side” coming out on top, it’s all sides choosing to move forward, effectively eliminating the “sides” altogether, and standing together side by side rather than facing off, on our own “sides”.
Sure, it feels good to divide ourselves up and draw lines between Us and Them. It feels good because it makes things easy. “Either/or, “because it/he/they said so,” “that’s just the way it is,” are all infinitely easier than having no lines or sides at all. “Maybe,” “I’m not sure,” “both might be true,” are so much more gray and blurry.
But it’s the only way forward. It’s the only “win.”
Sometimes in a mediation, we’re asked, “Whose side are you on?!”
The way we sustain ourselves as a business and honor ours and others values answers that question very obviously: neither, we stand with all. We’re on the workers’ side and the employers’ side. This sounds like a non-answer and makes some people frustrated. How can you be on both sides? It’s actually quite easy: you don’t pick one or the other, you create a place where both sides merge into one. Instead of lines that divide, you pick the line that invites all: the line of the circle.
We didn’t set up our pricing to be symbolic or significant of any greater social tenant, but it is interesting to consider our fee structure (a flat rate for either resolved or unresolved) as a metaphor for the way our social climate could work if our communication was structured similarly. We sustain ourselves on resolution: a voluntary common ground between both “sides.”
What if this was the aim of every Facebook comment, political rant, or social disagreement? Not for one side to “win,” but to eliminate the “sides” altogether and voluntarily get to common ground as quickly as possible. What if we could only sustain our civilization in this way?
Some say it sounds Pollyanna.
The “land of the free and the home of the brave” probably sounded like that at first, too.