What is Functional Confrontation?

I see you cringe at the word confrontation (me, too!). When I think of confrontation, I think of conflict, of getting into a fight, being criticized, having to defend myself. Ugh, who wants all that? The truth is, we avoid confrontation all the time because we find it uncomfortable; we’d rather deal with being put upon than actually expressing our dissatisfaction with a situation, or worse yet, getting into a power struggle with someone… and losing.

But here’s the thing: confrontation and conflict are not the same. Let’s start with each word’s etymological roots: both begin with con-, which in Latin means “together” (like our favorite cafe con leche). So far, so good. But here’s where the meanings split, because in Latin, -front- in con-front-ation means “face”, whereas -flict in con-flict means “to strike.” Aha. Facing something is not the same as striking it.

When you confront a topic with another person, that means you face it together, possibly from different points of view, but not necessarily with aggression or hostility towards each other. As someone’s wise grandmother once said, “If you’re about to fight with your husband, remember that it’s you and him against the problem, not you and him against each other.”

What is Functional Confrontation?

When your Snake Brain, the ancient part of our brains that exists to identify threats and opportunities, detects a problem, it sounds an alarm: something is wrong here, things aren’t happening as expected. But if you’re smart, rather than letting your primitive Snake Brain react, you’ll put your much more developed and complex Sage Brain in charge of solving the problem.

Functional confrontation describes how the Sage Brain can respond to this alarm in an effective, non-violent way.

When we’re angry, we’re usually jonesing for a fight, but the whole point of functional confrontation is to avoid a fight! Of course, sometimes it seems like it makes sense to fight. You can read about some reasons why people do so here. We use the term functional confrontation because it functions, it works. Fighting doesn’t work, it just creates violence: people expend energy trying to pummel each other, and both sides end up beat up and exhausted – what a waste. Functional confrontation helps both sides solve a problem and allows everyone to keep moving without trying to hurt each other.

In functional confrontation, we engage the Sage Brain to figure out what obstacle is in our way, and what the appropriate action might be to clear or circumnavigate it. Functional confrontation is not a reflex, it's a process we engage in when we have the time and awareness necessary for complex analysis and problem solving.

The Rules of Functional Confrontation

If you want to fix the problem and not just fight about the problem, follow these three rules:

First, be specific about the grievance.

The guiding principle of functional confrontation is to be specific. If you are only able to frame a grievance in terms of a generalization, it’s a clear sign that you’re stuck in the Snake Brain: the alarm is on or off, and your reaction is all-or-nothing. Generalizations kill functional confrontation because there is no defense for broad accusations.

“You’re a liar!”

“No, I’m not!”

Okay, now what? Now you have two angry combatants ready to go to war. 

It’s hard to admit that you’ve made a mistake if you also have to accept that a judgment about your character comes with it. Two reasonable people can acknowledge a mistake and move on, but if you are branded as dishonest (or stupid, or naive, or manipulative,...), admitting to a mistake becomes very costly.

Moreover, “you’re a liar!” has no reasonable comeback, except maybe, “What did I lie about?” Ah, now you can pinpoint a specific difference in understanding.

“You told me you’d have the contract to me by the weekend. It’s 5 p.m. on Friday and I still haven’t seen the contract.”

“Oh, when I said, ‘by the weekend,’ I meant before the weekend was over, so by Sunday evening.”

Situations like this often arise where it’s not clear who was “right”; and for that matter, it’s not even clear if the parties are being genuine about their understanding of the agreement. With functional confrontation, it doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters now is that you are able to come to a clear and common understanding with each other, and move forward in a productive way.

For a confrontation over a misunderstanding or mistake to work, the accusation must be about a specific grievance. Otherwise, how will you identify the misunderstanding and clear it up? How will the person who made a mistake know what went wrong? 

Generalizations, like calling someone a liar, make you an emotional vigilante: by coming at your foe with sweeping labels, you act as judge, jury, and executioner of their character. But when you confront someone about a specific grievance, there is room for discussion and even room for disagreement. Having different points of view is manageable, not threatening; having your character assassinated is terrifying and makes you defensive.

Second, be specific about the timing of the problem.

Hopefully we’re all familiar with the dangers of using “always” and “never” in an argument – they’re just not constructive. This is because “always” and “never” turn a single act into a permanent character flaw: “You always expect me to do everything,” is heard as, “You’re lazy and are happy to impose all the work on me”; “You never show up on time,” turns into, “Clearly you have no respect for anyone because you make us all wait for you.” “Always” and “never” have instantly turned this person into someone lazy and disrespectful – whoa, those are big accusations!

What actually happened? “When I got home from my business trip last night, there was a week’s worth of dishes piled up in the sink.” Still not fun to have to work this out with your roommate, but at least it’s something specific that can be worked on. “Last Saturday, you agreed that we would meet at my house at 7 a.m. so we could leave for our road trip before traffic got bad, but you didn’t arrive until almost 10 a.m.” is another specific grievance that can be addressed.

If you hand out verdicts about people’s character flaws for single infractions – and you believe your judgment is correct! – what you’re essentially asking them to do is to change their whole character because of one mistake they made. But if you make your accusation about their behavior during a particular instance, solutions can be negotiated, apologies can be made and accepted, and everyone can move on.

Third, functional confrontation needs to be specific to your perception.

When you engage someone in functional confrontation, you need to describe how the situation is bad for you. By saying, “From my point of view…,” you acknowledge that things might look different from another vantage point. You are offering the person you are confronting an opportunity to give their response, making it clear that you are presenting your perspective, not an attack. Remember that your counterparty is unlikely to feel empathy with you if they see you as an attacker.

“During our meeting with the client, when you presented a solution different to the one we discussed yesterday, I was really uncomfortable. I felt like it made me appear unprepared, like we were out of sync and that I didn’t contribute to the team’s work.”

This is a much more productive beginning to a discussion than, “I can’t believe you switched things up on me and threw me under the bus during that client meeting!” You cannot speak to someone else’s motivations or intentions with any authority; the only person you can speak for is yourself.

But First, Awareness

We now have a framework for how to confront someone in a non-violent way, but just because we know how to approach someone with a grievance, does not mean we can pull it off when we’re in the throes of intense anger or paralyzing fear. Our Snake Brain sees red, we lose our good sense, then we end up in a fight. When we’ve already succumbed to our temper, engaging our Sage Brain seems impossible.

It’s not impossible, it’s just unlikely… at least without practice. And the first thing we have to practice is how to know when our Snake Brain is putting us in fight or flight mode. You can build awareness just like a muscle: it gets stronger with use, but that requires training.

When you practice yoga, first you train yourself to have an awareness of where your body is in space before you gain strength, stability, and flexibility. In that same vein, you have to practice being aware of what your body is doing when your Snake Brain sends you into fight or flight mode so that you don’t fly off the handle. Has your heart started racing? Is your jaw clenched? Do you feel a flush of heat to your face, or are your arms and legs tingling? All of these are tell-tale signs that your body is preparing for a fight.

If we can observe our own physical emergency reaction in this state, then we have an opportunity to interrupt our automatic reaction of striking back. You only have a choice when you have awareness.

Then, of course, there are the times when your Snake Brain hijacks your Sage Brain and tries to get it to do its bidding. Check out how to tell when that’s happening here.

Practice Makes… Better

The better we get at interrupting our fight or flight responses and engaging our Sage Brains, the more opportunities we will have to practice the three rules of functional confrontation. And the more we practice being specific about our grievance, timing, and point of view, the more naturally functional confrontation will come to us when the time comes.

Avoiding all conflict might be impossible – especially when someone else is looking to start a brawl – but we can try to minimize violence if we focus on functional confrontation rather than engaging in a senseless fight.