[harrall]

One of my favorite subjects is politics. I enjoy reading books about politics, and keeping up on (geo-)politics, subscribe to political magazines and honestly don’t mind navigating office politics.

Because at the heart of it it’s all the same. It’s humans acting like humans. Every person (and organization) has desires and fears. When two parties get together, balancing everyone’s wants is fun. It’s like a complicated engineering problem, except with people requirements instead, and politics is the architecture.

I think people are rad and genuinely enjoy these kinds of problems.

[rukuu001]

This is great.

A group I used to work with framed it as needs and fears, and would produce a ‘conflict map’ when heading into a situation with multiple stakeholders.

The conflict map set out the needs and fears of each group, and indicated where they were incompatible.

That information was used to proactively resolve, or at least plan around those areas of conflict.

[dotancohen]

I'd love to hear more about the conflict map. It sounds like a useful strategy.

How was it a map?

[homarp]

https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/c... has an entry on 'Needs-fears mapping'

[rukuu001]

That's an awesome resource thank you.

The conflict maps I was exposed to were much simpler - just a bunch of wobbly circles surrounding a centra issue or event. Wobbly circle intersections denoted needs/fears incompatibility implying potential conflict.

[dotancohen]

Thank you. There is a lot to absorb there.

[ranguna]

My own experience is that it's hard to do predictable engineering in more social environments because requirements can change from one hour to another and there's no reprocurssiom, you just have accept it and move on.

Although this also happens in office environments, there's more accountability and continuous planning, making requirements changes something that is undesirable.