Dear Brett:

After considering your question, here’s what floats to the top for me: what a wonderful thing you have going in your Residence Life environment!

I have been (literally!) preaching lately that disagreement is a gift from God. God designed us this way. It’s part of the providence God built into creation so everyone could have access to means to meet their needs. Rather than handing us all the things we need, or even engineering the world so our needs would fall into our laps, God set things up so we are required to work together interdependently to meet our needs.

Disagreement among humans is good because no one is in a position to know everything – not even a tiny fraction of everything there is to know about our world. So we were designed to spread out and look at the universe from a billion different angles. And we were designed to encounter a lot of people in our lives who see things differently, and we were intended to learn from (and teach) each other. And most of all, we were designed to learn with each other.

You are SO much better off than you would be if you all agreed. Life is more interesting this way, and you and everyone around you is better equipped to adapt to the world and find ways to meet everyone’s needs.

So my first piece of advice: help your group see their disagreements for what they are: abundant riches. Help them celebrate the breadth and depth of their disagreements.

But – here’s the catch – disagreement doesn’t work like a gift when we distrust one another. If I think your odd views are a sign of dysfunction, dishonesty, or malice, I will not embrace your disagreement as a gift. I’ll try to eliminate it instead. Many of our disagreements lead to defensiveness, fear and anger because we see them (or they actually are) attempts by others to deprive us of something we need.

So my second advice is to help your people get to know each other, to enjoy each other, to cooperate with each other. Help them to build trust for each other, to see each other fully. If possible, help them to be vulnerable to each other, to take risks and come away uninjured – to learn to trust each other.

My third advice is to give people who disagree with each other a challenging task they have to do together. Give them practice in interdependence. At first these tasks might be to accomplish something that does not force them to confront their disagreements. But optimally, when they’re ready, it could be life-changing to give them a task that requires them to confront their disagreement, and still find a way through to meet the need at stake.

My fourth advice is to memorialize these victories. Mennonite mediator Ron Kraybill taught me this one: every group should have a trophy case. Maybe not literally, but functionally. In that case they should display mementos of the times they engaged their disagreements and found a way to cooperate: to achieve a task, or find an agreement.

My underlying advice, for all these steps, is to help your group hone their active and reflective listening skills. I gather you’ve already done some work in this direction, including highlights from Roger Fisher and William Ury’s classic Getting to Yes. That should give you a nice base on which to build. A group that polishes the skill of listening until they can state their opponent’s views to their opponent’s satisfaction has equipped itself to do amazing things.

Thanks for your questions, Brett. I hope this is helpful.