Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas: How to Deal With Conflict

In our divided world we face or avoid conflicts on a frequent basis. I turned to Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas to find out the best strategies to deal with these, including having them take on a mock conflict between each other on the merits of Covid research.

Audio file

You can also find this on Spotify and Apple podcasts with Ground Truths.

The video is also posted on YouTube

Transcript with Audio Links

Eric Topol (00:06):

Well, hello. It's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and we're going to get into a new book called Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In, and we're lucky to have its two authors, Bob Bordone, who is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, and Joel Salinas, who is a physician, neurologist, a clinician scientist at NYU. So welcome both Bob and Joel.

Bob Bordone and Joel Salinas (00:34):

Thank you for having us. Yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

Eric Topol (00:37):

Yeah. So first, how did you guys get together? This is a pretty diverse, you got law and medicine, usually they don't talk to each other very much.

Bob Bordone (00:46):

Well, we were very fortunate. I mean, we basically were friends, but part of that friendship, I think emerged from work that I do around conflict issues in the Mass General system and then just the larger, bigger Mass General, Harvard community. Yeah, so this began really as a friendship where we were each swimming in very different waters, but then as we would start to talk, we realized there was a lot of connection and maybe the possibility to bring two different disciplines together in a way that might be practically useful and make an impact. And even when we started writing this, which was during Covid, what seemed to be some pretty polarizing times that were unlikely to resolve by the time the book would come out.

Eric Topol (01:44):

Yeah, well you sure hit it with the divisiveness and the polarized world that we live in is perhaps worse than ever, certainly in all my years, and probably long before then as well. So this topic of resilience, it's a very interesting concept because some people might think of resilience as just being tough. So go into a conflict and just go heavy tough. That obviously is not what you're writing about. And I guess maybe we can start off, what was the goal here? Obviously, there's other books that have addressed this topic, I'm sure, but yours is somewhat unique in many respects because it brings in the science of it and many strategies perhaps that have never been developed. But when you got together, what was the mission that you set out to do?

Joel Salinas (02:38):

Yeah, well maybe I can start out and then you can add on. So my research has been all around understanding how social relationships influenced brain health, and one of the things that I was seeing was social isolation and loneliness had been steadily increasing. Want to figure out what kind of interventions or what are the factors that are involved here? And I think one of the things that has stood out is just the difficulty with being able to navigate conflict in different contexts. And so, the idea around conflict resilience is really, even though there's been lots of books on what to say and what specific tactics to use, I think that there was this skillset around just being able to sit with the discomfort of that disagreement, which will ultimately help make it much more useful to take on those tactics. One way to think about it, if it's like all these tactics are like learning how to cook with a set of recipes in the kitchen, what we're really proposing here is that you also need to be able to stand the heat of the kitchen to even be able to cook.

Eric Topol (03:47):

Okay. Go ahead, Bob.

Bob Bordone (03:49):

Yeah, and I would say I was starting to write about my first kind of piece on this topic where I use the word conflict resilience was in 2018, and it really came from an observed dynamic that I was seeing in my teaching of Harvard Law School students. I was on the admissions committee, I'd been on the admissions committee for many years. I knew that we worked very hard and were quite successful in fact, at bringing together a very diverse student body, including politically. And people sometimes maybe think of elite law schools as being very progressive. But Harvard Law School, the biggest student organization is actually the Federalists, which is the conservative students. And despite that effort, what I noticed in the classroom was a reduction in conversation, diversity of viewpoint across the board, interesting classrooms became boring. And even though I was teaching around conflict and negotiation and difficult conversations, I would read in students' journals things like, I want to avoid conflict or I don't want to get into it.

Bob Bordone (04:59):

And so, it occurred to me that quite a part, as Joel said, from any skills, if we don't develop this capacity to sit with disagreement, then we will never get to problem solving. I'm in favor of problem solving. But this paper on conflict resilience, its original title was called Against Problem Solving. Mostly because I thought that if we had opened the possibility of problem solving as a precondition for entering the room, then we might never enter the room, particularly if we've told the demonized and dehumanized story about them. And so, that somehow we had to make the case that sitting with the discomfort of the disagreement, even if it didn't mean problem solving, although we hope for that, even if we didn't mean that it was worthwhile and it was important. And so, part of what was really attractive to me about joining up with Joel is that he just brought all of this brain science aspect to it that I had this kind of teaching and kind of academic in the negotiation and dispute resolution research experience, but couldn't bring to bear the kind of brain science parts of, well, what is going on in our brain when we do want to run or when we get into that really unproductive battle.

Eric Topol (06:27):

Yeah, I agree that the unique part here is that whole scaffolding with the neuroscience, the behavioral science, and those five Fs that you mentioned. You alluded to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. Yeah, so avoidance of conflict has kind of been the default for many people now because we have political divides, we have anti-science versus pro-science divides and on and on. There's a quote in the book that I thought we'd start off with because it really lays the groundwork from you both. “The biggest hidden barrier to being conflict resilient stems from the inability or unwillingness to face and sit with our own internal conflicts - the negotiations between our divided and sometimes contradictory “selves.” Even more surprising is that although there are dozens of self-help books on negotiation and conflict resolution, almost none of them spend any meaningful time on this critical intrapersonal barrier to handing conflict.” So maybe Joel, maybe start you off here. I guess you were bullied as a kid, and maybe that gives you a little background here. Joel, tell us about that if you would.

Bob Bordone (07:46):

Hey, Eric. On our bad days sometimes I probably inadvertently bully Joel still today, but he's pretty resilient now.

Joel Salinas (07:53):

Yeah, I'm a Teflon. So I think I am generally co