Moving from Advocacy to Collaboration

I have spent the last few articles talking about how the use of the “advocacy” model is difficult to apply in daily life because unless, special steps are taken to assure the ENTIRE model is preserved ( rules for the presentation of evidence, 3rd party mediation, objective evaluators of evidence) , it is easily manipulated and ceases to serve its purpose as a critical decision making activity. So, how do we drive advocacy into collaboration when we see it?


We ask questions about content. Questions about content, when asked with sincere curiosity and openness, will begin to turn the discussion immediately from an exercise in satisfying an agenda into one that seeks to test all perspectives until the best decision can be made with the information at hand. The more information, the better informed the decision will be. In order to get back on a collaborative track, begin by doing the following:

• Assure yourself that the discussion is important. Use your energy to solve the things you consider “time-worthy”.

• Make sure you understand what the controversy is about. To test this, see if you can express it in one or two simple sentences and get agreement with the other party. If you can’t, you need to work on defining it (with them) until you both agree on the basics of the controversy.

• Understand what the purpose of the discussion is for each of you. Find a mutual purpose – something you both wish to achieve by resolving the issue. If your purposes are not mutual (usually they are), then at least be able to articulate what each of you would see as an ideal outcome from the discussion.

• Seek to understand exactly what the other party’s perspective is. Be able to articulate it so that they can agree that you understand it.

• Exercise empathy to understand why the other party may feel the way they do. Recognize that you may NEVER agree with their point of view, but understanding it, understanding why they hold it, and understanding that they have the right to hold it will help you see each other as respectful and reasonable. All of us are more willing to continue trying to reach an agreement with someone that we feel is respectful and reasonable than someone we feel is not.

• Be humble enough to recognize that your own view may be flawed, and courageous enough to work through it with someone else to make a new, stronger perspective.

• Welcome those moments in which you find errors in proposed path forward; the sooner you find the defects in the logic, the sooner you can strengthen it.

• Be aware of changes in the discussion that signal a move from discussion to distance. Reduce the distance between you and your counterpart by making sure that they know that you are committed to working things through with them and achieving your mutual purpose.

You can invoke this point of view at anytime in any discussion. You can control the degree of collaborative activity in the discussion. This is communication for the strong; the weak would prefer to manipulate. As your skills improve, so will your results. I will speak in detail of some collaborative approaches in the next newsletter.

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