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The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
One in every twenty difficult conflicts ends up grinding to a halt. That's fully 5 percent of not just the diplomatic and political clashes we read about in the newspaper, but disputations and arguments from our everyday lives as well. Once we get pulled into these self-perpetuating conflicts it is nearly impossible to escape. The 5 percent rule us. So what can we do when we find ourselves ensnared? According to Dr. Peter T. Coleman, the solution is in seeing our conflict anew. Applying lessons from complexity theory to examples from both American domestic politics and international diplomacy -- from abortion debates to the enmity between Israelis and Palestinians -- Coleman provides innovative new strategies for dealing with intractable disputes. A timely, paradigm-shifting look at conflict, The Five Percent is an invaluable guide to preventing even the most fractious negotiations from foundering.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 3, 2011
24 people are currently reading
394 people want to read
About the author
Peter T. Coleman
13 books21 followersDr. Peter T. Coleman holds a Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University. He is Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University where he holds a joint-appointment at Teachers College and The Earth Institute and teaches courses in Conflict Resolution, Social Psychology, and Social Science Research. He currently conducts research on peace and conflict, including on optimality of motivational dynamics in conflict, power asymmetries and conflict, intractable conflict, multicultural conflict, injustice and conflict, adaptive mediation dynamics, and sustainable peace.
In 2003, he became the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and in 2015 was awarded the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award by APA and a Marie Curie Fellowship from The EU. Dr. Coleman edits the award-winning Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000, 2006, 2014) and his other books include The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011); Conflict, Justice, and Interdependence: The Legacy of Morton Deutsch (2011), Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012), and Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (2013). His most recent book, Making Conflict Work: Navigating Disagreement Up and Down Your Organization (2014), won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from The International Association of Conflict Management.
He has also authored over 100 articles and chapters, is a member of the United Nation Mediation Support Unit’s Academic Advisory Council, is a founding board member of the Gbowee Peace Foundation USA, and is a New York State certified mediator and experienced consultant. He also founded the MD-ICCCR Science-Practice Blog, the WKCR (89.9 FM) monthly radio program Peace and Conflict at Columbia: Conversations at the Leading Edge, and is a frequent blogger on Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dr. Coleman’s work has also been featured in media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, This American Life, Time Magazine, Fox Business, CBS, Fast Company, and Chicago Public Radio.
In 2003, he became the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and in 2015 was awarded the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award by APA and a Marie Curie Fellowship from The EU. Dr. Coleman edits the award-winning Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000, 2006, 2014) and his other books include The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011); Conflict, Justice, and Interdependence: The Legacy of Morton Deutsch (2011), Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012), and Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (2013). His most recent book, Making Conflict Work: Navigating Disagreement Up and Down Your Organization (2014), won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from The International Association of Conflict Management.
He has also authored over 100 articles and chapters, is a member of the United Nation Mediation Support Unit’s Academic Advisory Council, is a founding board member of the Gbowee Peace Foundation USA, and is a New York State certified mediator and experienced consultant. He also founded the MD-ICCCR Science-Practice Blog, the WKCR (89.9 FM) monthly radio program Peace and Conflict at Columbia: Conversations at the Leading Edge, and is a frequent blogger on Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dr. Coleman’s work has also been featured in media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, This American Life, Time Magazine, Fox Business, CBS, Fast Company, and Chicago Public Radio.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 17, 2020
This is an extraordinarily rich and stimulating book examining ways to approach the most destructive and protracted types of conflicts, ranging from marriages gone bad to the Middle East. The author, a specialist in conflict resolution, wrote it for a general audience based on the collaborative efforts of an intellectually diverse group of researchers from a broad range of disciplines based at Columbia University. So the book connects the dots between insights from complexity theory in science and mathematics, physics, psychology, political theory, and philosophy.
It took me a long time to read, and I read the first half of the book twice, just because there is so much there and it's a lot to digest. However, the writing style is very clear and does an impressive job of conveying complex concepts in straightforward language that doesn't require any specialist background to understand. And it's so illuminating for thinking about current affairs that it's one of those books I would ideally like to assign to every U.S. citizen for homework reading, if I were in charge of voter education. As one friend with a political science background once observed to me, a lot of people "new" to thinking about politics became very much more interested in understanding and reading about it and discussing it for the first time after the 2016 U.S. elections. That was partly because so many people were in shock about the election results and were struggling to understand how those results defied most predictions and polling. But with the daily onslaught of extreme and shocking news developments, without a conceptual framework based on studying political theory, it's been challenging for those like me in that boat to make sense of the patterns and possible solutions.
The book starts from the observation that in the history of conflict resolution efforts, most conflicts can be resolved by applying a set of standard principles, such as identifying and satisfying the interests of the parties. But a small percentage of conflicts, around five percent, do not seem amenable to these traditional methods, and instead become drawn out, and turn into mutually harmful repeating patterns or toxic cycles with lose-lose outcomes. So the goal is to look at why those conflicts are intractable and the different approaches needed to shift the patterns toward peace and resolution.
The "why" of these conflicts becoming intractable has a lot to do their complexity as dense webs of interacting causes and effects, some of which become causal hubs or "attractors" for the conflict. These webs - which the book calls "attractor landscapes" - are dynamic through time and continually developing, so part of why traditional approaches don't work is because the traditional approaches depend on an idea of conflict elements as static and use short-term strategies for resolution, as well as linear thinking that doesn't apply well to non-linear looping and interconnected elements of attractor landscapes in intractable conflicts.
Some important concepts here are the ideas of reinforcing feedback loops, where a set of interconnected influences reinforce and strengthen each other; and inhibiting feedback loops, which push back against or restrain a given pattern of influences. An example of inhibiting feedback might be norms of nonviolence in civil protests, reinforced by laws against violence and enforcement of those laws, which interact to inhibit escalatory spirals of violence during periods of civil unrest. Another key concept is that of a self-organizing system, where the attractor landscape has enough reinforcing feedback loops and few enough inhibiting feedback loops that the attractors to conflict become very strong and the system takes on a life of its own, such that attempts to intervene from either the outside or the inside wind up just feeding the conflict further and dragging would-be interveners into the conflict as participants.
Coleman identifies certain aspects of psychology that combine with the dense complexity of conflict landscapes to make them difficult to disrupt - specifically, people's tendency is to want to simplify the complexity into an easier and more coherent narrative. Often this psychological drive to find coherence leads to "us versus them" thinking where people conceive of the conflict as all boiling down to "THEY are the problem, WE are the good people, THEY are the evil/inhuman/worthless monsters/trash, the way to solve the problem is to eliminate THEM or beat THEM." Another aspect that is key is the role of emotions in these conflicts. The emotional backdrop tends to be intense, involving trauma, grief, rage, fear, and disgust. A weakness of traditional conflict resolution is that it tends to privilege rationality and devalues or deemphasizes emotions and non-rational factors.
The prevalence of oversimplifying good-versus-evil narratives in these conflicts tends to get in the way of people grasping the full complexity and the self-reinforcing, dynamic structure of the conflict attractor landscape. So, mapping the interplay of the structural nodes of the conflict through time and getting a handle on where the reinforcing feedback loops are, is key to figuring out ways to tinker with those patterns and reverse the strength of the feedback loops. Strategic thinking about the landscape as a whole can identify multiple points where new inhibiting feedback loops can be introduced, such as new laws, new institutions, newly agreed-upon norms, and so on. It can also help identify where removing some influential factors and introducing other influential factors can be most effective to change the overall pattern rather than simply participating in existing dynamics.
This is a book to create hope of finding solutions instead of just falling into despairing beliefs that existing toxic patterns in society or in our interpersonal relationships are inescapable. One of the most important insights here is that the potential for peace and positive, beneficial attractor landscapes always exist simultaneously and within the negative attractor landscapes. Conversely, we can never be too complacent about peace and good order or healthy relationships, since the potential always exists there for being drawn into mutually destructive, protracted toxicity.
It took me a long time to read, and I read the first half of the book twice, just because there is so much there and it's a lot to digest. However, the writing style is very clear and does an impressive job of conveying complex concepts in straightforward language that doesn't require any specialist background to understand. And it's so illuminating for thinking about current affairs that it's one of those books I would ideally like to assign to every U.S. citizen for homework reading, if I were in charge of voter education. As one friend with a political science background once observed to me, a lot of people "new" to thinking about politics became very much more interested in understanding and reading about it and discussing it for the first time after the 2016 U.S. elections. That was partly because so many people were in shock about the election results and were struggling to understand how those results defied most predictions and polling. But with the daily onslaught of extreme and shocking news developments, without a conceptual framework based on studying political theory, it's been challenging for those like me in that boat to make sense of the patterns and possible solutions.
The book starts from the observation that in the history of conflict resolution efforts, most conflicts can be resolved by applying a set of standard principles, such as identifying and satisfying the interests of the parties. But a small percentage of conflicts, around five percent, do not seem amenable to these traditional methods, and instead become drawn out, and turn into mutually harmful repeating patterns or toxic cycles with lose-lose outcomes. So the goal is to look at why those conflicts are intractable and the different approaches needed to shift the patterns toward peace and resolution.
The "why" of these conflicts becoming intractable has a lot to do their complexity as dense webs of interacting causes and effects, some of which become causal hubs or "attractors" for the conflict. These webs - which the book calls "attractor landscapes" - are dynamic through time and continually developing, so part of why traditional approaches don't work is because the traditional approaches depend on an idea of conflict elements as static and use short-term strategies for resolution, as well as linear thinking that doesn't apply well to non-linear looping and interconnected elements of attractor landscapes in intractable conflicts.
Some important concepts here are the ideas of reinforcing feedback loops, where a set of interconnected influences reinforce and strengthen each other; and inhibiting feedback loops, which push back against or restrain a given pattern of influences. An example of inhibiting feedback might be norms of nonviolence in civil protests, reinforced by laws against violence and enforcement of those laws, which interact to inhibit escalatory spirals of violence during periods of civil unrest. Another key concept is that of a self-organizing system, where the attractor landscape has enough reinforcing feedback loops and few enough inhibiting feedback loops that the attractors to conflict become very strong and the system takes on a life of its own, such that attempts to intervene from either the outside or the inside wind up just feeding the conflict further and dragging would-be interveners into the conflict as participants.
Coleman identifies certain aspects of psychology that combine with the dense complexity of conflict landscapes to make them difficult to disrupt - specifically, people's tendency is to want to simplify the complexity into an easier and more coherent narrative. Often this psychological drive to find coherence leads to "us versus them" thinking where people conceive of the conflict as all boiling down to "THEY are the problem, WE are the good people, THEY are the evil/inhuman/worthless monsters/trash, the way to solve the problem is to eliminate THEM or beat THEM." Another aspect that is key is the role of emotions in these conflicts. The emotional backdrop tends to be intense, involving trauma, grief, rage, fear, and disgust. A weakness of traditional conflict resolution is that it tends to privilege rationality and devalues or deemphasizes emotions and non-rational factors.
The prevalence of oversimplifying good-versus-evil narratives in these conflicts tends to get in the way of people grasping the full complexity and the self-reinforcing, dynamic structure of the conflict attractor landscape. So, mapping the interplay of the structural nodes of the conflict through time and getting a handle on where the reinforcing feedback loops are, is key to figuring out ways to tinker with those patterns and reverse the strength of the feedback loops. Strategic thinking about the landscape as a whole can identify multiple points where new inhibiting feedback loops can be introduced, such as new laws, new institutions, newly agreed-upon norms, and so on. It can also help identify where removing some influential factors and introducing other influential factors can be most effective to change the overall pattern rather than simply participating in existing dynamics.
This is a book to create hope of finding solutions instead of just falling into despairing beliefs that existing toxic patterns in society or in our interpersonal relationships are inescapable. One of the most important insights here is that the potential for peace and positive, beneficial attractor landscapes always exist simultaneously and within the negative attractor landscapes. Conversely, we can never be too complacent about peace and good order or healthy relationships, since the potential always exists there for being drawn into mutually destructive, protracted toxicity.
October 23, 2014
This is an important book that contributes to a new way of thinking and acting in ‚high friction’ contexts. I am convinced its relevance stretches beyond the field of conflict resolution, vast as it is. Anyone who is struggling with ‚wicked problems’, working to introduce radical innovations, building social movements or engaged in transitioning complex systems (health care, transportation, food production, …) will benefit from studying the insights embedded in The Five Percent.
A key insight that is brought to light by this book is that intractable conflicts are to a large extent intractable because we make them so. By default our psychological and emotional responses drive us toward consistency and coherence in our perception. Conflict reinforces this drive which becomes unhelpful during prolonged confrontations. Complexity science provides a language and a conceptual framework to describe and model these self-organizing behavioral patterns.
The science also points to a set of principles and practices that can help to counterbalance and unravel these negative force fields (or ‚attractors’). Under the overall heading of Attractor Landscape Model Coleman groups interventions to change the dynamics of intractable conflicts in three clusters. Each of the clusters negotiates a set of basic contradictions: complicate to simplify; build up and tear down; change to stabilize.
Yet this rather neat structure should not fool us into thinking that we are dealing with a template-like methodology. Think of the Attractor Landscape Model as a set of rules of thumb rather than tools. Putting this into practice is inevitably a messy affair. Intractability and wickedness requires us to relinquish the traditional, linear problem-solving paradigm and engage in a more fluid and iterative strategy. We need to be prepared to question our basic assumptions at all time.
One of the paradigmatic shifts encapsulated by this book is a deconstruction of the unhelpful dichotomy between conflict and peace. Neither peace nor conflict are monolithic. Peace is not tantamount to blanket societal consensus. And conflict is not the wholesale absence of social capital. Coleman points out that even in the most entrenched conflict there are ‚latent attractors’ of positivity. An important question underlying the Attractor Landscape Model is how this hidden potential can be identified and reinforced.
Paradoxically the only reservation I have about this book is its richness. Content and style are approachable enough but there is simply a lot in this book to chew on. It strikes me as rather labyrinthine after a first and even after a second reading. Coleman advocates the use of sophisticated visualization techniques to generate a holistic view of intractable conflicts. He might have relied on these methods to help the reader navigate the sprawling landscape encompassed by his book. Despite that slight misgiving I wholeheartedly recommend The Five Percent to all professionals engaged in complex, high-friction processes of change.
A key insight that is brought to light by this book is that intractable conflicts are to a large extent intractable because we make them so. By default our psychological and emotional responses drive us toward consistency and coherence in our perception. Conflict reinforces this drive which becomes unhelpful during prolonged confrontations. Complexity science provides a language and a conceptual framework to describe and model these self-organizing behavioral patterns.
The science also points to a set of principles and practices that can help to counterbalance and unravel these negative force fields (or ‚attractors’). Under the overall heading of Attractor Landscape Model Coleman groups interventions to change the dynamics of intractable conflicts in three clusters. Each of the clusters negotiates a set of basic contradictions: complicate to simplify; build up and tear down; change to stabilize.
Yet this rather neat structure should not fool us into thinking that we are dealing with a template-like methodology. Think of the Attractor Landscape Model as a set of rules of thumb rather than tools. Putting this into practice is inevitably a messy affair. Intractability and wickedness requires us to relinquish the traditional, linear problem-solving paradigm and engage in a more fluid and iterative strategy. We need to be prepared to question our basic assumptions at all time.
One of the paradigmatic shifts encapsulated by this book is a deconstruction of the unhelpful dichotomy between conflict and peace. Neither peace nor conflict are monolithic. Peace is not tantamount to blanket societal consensus. And conflict is not the wholesale absence of social capital. Coleman points out that even in the most entrenched conflict there are ‚latent attractors’ of positivity. An important question underlying the Attractor Landscape Model is how this hidden potential can be identified and reinforced.
Paradoxically the only reservation I have about this book is its richness. Content and style are approachable enough but there is simply a lot in this book to chew on. It strikes me as rather labyrinthine after a first and even after a second reading. Coleman advocates the use of sophisticated visualization techniques to generate a holistic view of intractable conflicts. He might have relied on these methods to help the reader navigate the sprawling landscape encompassed by his book. Despite that slight misgiving I wholeheartedly recommend The Five Percent to all professionals engaged in complex, high-friction processes of change.
April 2, 2015
The author, Peter Coleman identifies 5% of all conflicts as "intractable". He first gives real life examples of these conflicts (low income, high crime areas in the US, marriages that break apart and neither party will give way, etc.), analyses what they have in common:
-power of history is considerable
-perfect storm of many complex factors that all synergize to drive and intensify the conflict
-they do not respond well to conflict management strategies that are useful elsewhere
Then the author lays out his methodology for dealing with such problems, using the Attractor model, which I will not go into, suffice to say it is a very interesting and new analog for thinking about problems of this nature.
A few takeaways:
-some situations that are likely to develop into intractable conflict do not, if participants engage in a multi-faceted examination of the multiple levels that the conflict exists on.
-Participants who are more comfortable with ambiguity or paradoxes are more likely to find the conflict manageable or constructive, compared with participants who are more black and white about the conflict, who just become more entrenched in their position and personally confrontational as the conflict continues.
-Framing is paramount in thinking about the conflict: if the participants can recognize their frame, that is, their perspective, considerations, priorities, and patterns, they can discuss the underlying assumptions and have a more fruitful dialog
-Changing patterns: sometimes just identifying the patterns that lead to further conflict, and changing/disrupting them, may eventually lead to better outcomes, as it is often the existing patterns that drive the conflict deeper over time.
-power of history is considerable
-perfect storm of many complex factors that all synergize to drive and intensify the conflict
-they do not respond well to conflict management strategies that are useful elsewhere
Then the author lays out his methodology for dealing with such problems, using the Attractor model, which I will not go into, suffice to say it is a very interesting and new analog for thinking about problems of this nature.
A few takeaways:
-some situations that are likely to develop into intractable conflict do not, if participants engage in a multi-faceted examination of the multiple levels that the conflict exists on.
-Participants who are more comfortable with ambiguity or paradoxes are more likely to find the conflict manageable or constructive, compared with participants who are more black and white about the conflict, who just become more entrenched in their position and personally confrontational as the conflict continues.
-Framing is paramount in thinking about the conflict: if the participants can recognize their frame, that is, their perspective, considerations, priorities, and patterns, they can discuss the underlying assumptions and have a more fruitful dialog
-Changing patterns: sometimes just identifying the patterns that lead to further conflict, and changing/disrupting them, may eventually lead to better outcomes, as it is often the existing patterns that drive the conflict deeper over time.
April 15, 2012
We are lead to believe that all conflicts can be mitigated. Yet, there are times that we all come up against a standoff that no matter what we try just doesn’t seem to move. In fact, over time, each side tends to become more deeply entrenched.
These five percent of issues require a little more finesse than the regular conflicts. The issues are not simple. Yet, the emotional/personal/moral nature of the topic tends to promote an either or situation with no room for gray thinking.
In this way, coming to a positive conclusion isn’t about making people change camps. It’s more about exploring the complexity of the situation and letting both sides share their view. Eventually, each camp opens to the fact that the issue can be seen in different ways, without either side being right or wrong. Taking away the generalizations and the facelessness to see the human side of both sides of the problem.
These five percent of issues require a little more finesse than the regular conflicts. The issues are not simple. Yet, the emotional/personal/moral nature of the topic tends to promote an either or situation with no room for gray thinking.
In this way, coming to a positive conclusion isn’t about making people change camps. It’s more about exploring the complexity of the situation and letting both sides share their view. Eventually, each camp opens to the fact that the issue can be seen in different ways, without either side being right or wrong. Taking away the generalizations and the facelessness to see the human side of both sides of the problem.
August 5, 2015
The contents of this book are excellent and probably deserve a higher rating—yet something about its structure made reading too much of a slog for me to give it more stars. I hope more people will read it, nonetheless.
Want to read
September 23, 2011Seems really fascinating. Also trying to get someone to write a book review of this for negotiation journal...If I had the time, I would write it!
Want to read
October 6, 2015Recommended by Ben Cameron. Impossible conflicts devolve into three things: win-lose dichotomies, simplified sound bites and reinforcing feedback loops.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews