In Sion, does understanding the other side's priorities mean giving in?
When disagreements concern resources, deadlines or availability, managers often negotiate before checking what actually matters to the other party. The managerial question is precise: can clarifying those priorities help secure an agreement without abandoning one's own requirements?
What the literature establishes
Leigh Thompson and Reid Hastie (1990, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) show that negotiators can misperceive their counterpart's interests, notably by assuming more systematic opposition than actually exists. This perception obscures compatible interests and differences in priorities that could support mutually beneficial trade-offs. Disagreement over a demand therefore does not establish that all interests are incompatible.
Understanding someone's reasoning is not sharing their feelings
Adam D. Galinsky, William W. Maddux, Debra Gilin and Judith B. White (2008, Psychological Science) distinguish perspective taking, which focuses on another person's viewpoint, from empathy, which focuses on their feelings. In their negotiation experiments, perspective taking does more to facilitate the discovery of agreements and mutually beneficial trade-offs; empathy does not deliver the same benefits. The useful mechanism is therefore not simply emotional closeness, but understanding what shapes the other party's choices.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that putting oneself in the other person's shoes is enough to resolve a conflict. Yet imagining their priorities does not guarantee knowing them: an assumption still needs to be checked against what that person confirms or corrects. Understanding that a deadline matters more to them than how the work is carried out creates room for negotiation without requiring acceptance of their demand. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not guarantee
These studies rely on experimental negotiation settings, not an evaluation of persistent conflicts in organisations in Sion. They do not establish that better understanding is sufficient when resources are genuinely inadequate, information is concealed or power imbalances constrain what people can say. Safety, legal obligations and harassment cannot be reduced to an exchange of preferences.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR's « Gestion du conflit » programme, an exercise applicable in Sion asks each party to state the priorities they attribute to the other and have these confirmed or corrected before proposing a solution. Scenarios might concern a hydropower maintenance window, care delivery arrangements, grape harvest scheduling or staff availability in alpine tourism, explicitly distinguishing non-negotiable obligations. Over a predefined period, divide the number of disagreements with this confirmed clarification by the total number of disagreements reviewed, then record agreements reached and unresolved issues separately. This record verifies a practice and allows its local usefulness to be examined; it does not, by itself, prove that the exercise causes conflict resolution. To go further: explore the Conflict Management training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Conflict Management in Sion
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