Unilateral Decisions About Highest Good: Unintegrity Pandemic Variety #7
Making unilateral decisions about highest good occurs when I talk myself into believing know what is best for you and I will do whatever I must in order to bring it about. A variation on this is where I know that what I want isn’t best for you but I am going to talk you into believing it is so I can get what I want. But that is more about lying, Unintegrity Pandemic #1.
Forms that unilateral decisions about highest good can take include: imposing our will on others (excluding containing violence, of course), unethical manipulation, confusing dogma with fact (dogma is a point of view put forth as authoritative without adequate verification), and Fanaticism Disorder (covered in Unintegrity Pandemic Variety #5 above).
Example of Unintegrity Through Unilateral Decisions: U.S. Stonewalling Collapses the Doha Round of World Trade Organization Negotiations
In 2006, I was invited to Geneva, Switzerland, to give a workshop on collaborative negotiation and leadership skills to a number of World Trade Organization (WTO) ambassadors from developing countries. It was a wonderful experience and I hope it proves to be a beginning rather than a flash in the pan. Shortly after I gave my workshop, the round of WTO talks collapsed. I can safely say I had nothing to do with that outcome, but because of the workshop I gave, I had an extraordinary opportunity to learn a deal about how negotiations occur in the WTO.
From my perspective there are essentially three types of negotiation strategies: manipulation, compromise and collaboration. Manipulation means I convince you that the solution I want is in your best interests when it in reality serves my interests more than yours. Compromise is successful if you and I come up with an agreement in which we both feel equally ripped off. Collaboration means you and I share the core intentions beneath our positions, and then co-create a solution that honors both our intentions, even if that takes a different form than either of us would have thought of on our own. All three styles produce agreements but the collaborative style is by far the best at building truly healthy long term relationships.
Four important things I learned through working with the developing country WTO ambassadors were:
1. What they knew about negotiation they learned through the WTO
2. They knew a fair amount about feeling on the receiving end of manipulation and some about compromise, but very little about collaboration
3. They very much preferred a collaborative negotiating style
4. They wondered what it would take for the largest developed countries such as the United States to become willing to use a collaborative negotiation style.
I was therefore not surprised by the reason the press was given by the WTO about why the Doha Round of talks later collapsed (in the WTO, rounds of talks are named after the city in which the agreements for a round of talks are created). The reason given was that the United States was perceived as “stonewalling” the negotiations. Essentially, “stonewalling” is saying “my way or the highway.”
In this case, not only was the United States taking that position, but that the position it was taking was the best one for all concerned. Funny how very few other countries seemed to agree with that. This is a classic example of Unintegrity through making unilateral decisions about highest good. There is a simple word for this: arrogance. This kind of arrogance is yet another form of Unintegrity that is not being called what it truly is.
