There is a lot of information available to improve a company's bottom line by focusing on things like new marketing strategies, increasing quality, decreasing costs, increasing morale, making the work place a safer place so on and so forth. As I am heading into a mediation to try and minimize an ever increasing attorney's fee it got me to thinking about things like conflict resolution and ultimately what a sense of fairness means at least in a business realm (and yes I know fairness with regard to attorneys and legal battles are loosely tied together.) I have seen little emphasis in the business world about such topics and it certainly affects the bottom line. I assume we do not see references in the business world about fairness because it is not a very black and white topic, in fact it can be a very gray one. It is typically a subject explored by philosophy, and my experience with philosophy is it rarely has much use in the real world.

In our occupational lives as well as our personal lives (I will not touch this) we are constantly in situations where we must determine what is fair and then act accordingly. Employee disputes, customer disputes, and measuring performances are all examples where we must determine or measure a reality or fairness. Many times I often wonder how we are equipped to make such judgments given it is not explicitly taught in an academic sense (obviously not everything we know is academically taught) it merely seems to be a more implicitly learned characteristic or perhaps an instinct. Maybe it is learned from our parents, observations from life experience, or some part of our genetic code. In many ways I think that fairness is very tightly intertwined with reality or at least what we perceive as reality. Therefore we must have some idealistic version or ultimate sense of reality in our mind to determine our interpretation or someone else's as being accurate or inaccurate.

Disagreements and arguments typically arise when there is a discrepancy between our version of reality versus an opposing version, the larger the discrepancy the larger the disagreement. To further muck up an already unclear situation I have just read a book that describes how people are predisposed to make decisions without the sort of pragmatic process we may assume we are going through to come to a decision (and no guys there is no joke about women here). The brain makes the decision, via other techniques much more quickly and our pragmatic process is more of an afterthought or justification. Did you ever notice how after a conflict most people go to talk to someone afterwards? Is this because we are somehow aware of this book's observation and we are somehow looking for that justification? The book also goes on to describe how the mind will believe something that is somewhat arbitrary as strongly as the brain would believe 2+2=4. In case you are curious they arrived at these conclusions by an fMRI brain analysis. I do not know about you but this sounds very disheartening but nonetheless true. For example when is the last time you reasoned with someone and truly changed their belief or vice versa?

Once I read that book I kind of thought I am surprised people agree with each other as much as they do. But unfortunately that is not the type of thinking we are accustomed to in an occupational day to day reality. When we have a disagreement with someone the first question we are NOT asking ourselves is "what is their version of reality now?" So what is the bottom line? I have no clue I am just a roofer, but if I was going to take a stab at it my guess would be there is no sense of an ultimate reality or fairness so don't obsess over it and secondly in most conflict resolutions everyone is going to feel partially screwed so just expect it and maybe it won't hurt so bad.

I wrote most of this article including the last paragraph prior to the mediation. Now that the mediation is over I can confirm I definitely feel partially screwed. After going through three of these I can honestly say I think there is a simple mathematical formula that could be used to settle these disputes prior to spending thousands in lawyer's fees and many hours of wasted time. Maybe I will retire after developing the first mediation app.

Kirk Tiley
Tiley Roofing, Inc.
CRA President