Buck the Industry Norm! Invest in Relationships to avoid lengthy, drawn out and costly disputes.

Don’t worry, I won’t give you 5 steps to do this or that. But I will leave you with a profound thought for the day.

I just want to share a conversation I had, just yesterday, with a fellow engineer, a very senior level engineer, who is at the C suite level in an organisation in the mining sector. And he was right up there, you know, with the CEOs of global giants.

And he was telling me about a dispute that he was involved with between his employer organisation and a Japanese client they had several years ago. He went on to describe how both parties entered into a lengthy and complex contract arrangement, and at some point, it came to blows.

Both sides really, you know, dug their heels in over a multimillion-dollar dispute. Really! One side believing the other was in the right and their adversary was in the wrong, and it was over huge sums of money. Many millions of dollars.

But anyway, my fellow engineer, at the time decided that they were going to search the whole of their own home country, for the best legal representation that they could find. And they did just that, and they paid, you know, exorbitant amounts of money for their services. This dispute went on and on for years, and in the end, you know, after millions of dollars’ worth of professional fees spent, not to mention the amount of time and loss of productivity that everybody within that organization spent in order to represent their cause in this dispute.

Despite all of that, it ended up in a settlement, because they wanted to stem the financial haemorrhaging that was going on.

My question to this senior engineer in the C-Suite was, how much time do you think would have been worth investing up front, right at the beginning of this relationship that you were about to embark on with your potential employer over there in Japan?

He looked at me with a puzzled look and gave a lengthy pause. His response was that he knows what I’m saying. But this goes against the grain of what is normal practice. Besides, he added, we knew what we were doing was right, and the other side thought what they were doing was the right thing to do by their own estimation.

I went on to make my point, by using my experience in the engineering and construction industry:

“A dispute of this nature”, I began, “is, at the corporate level involving many teams of people to forge forward. However, when you go back to the origin of the problem in contention, it will come down to the relationship between two people from different background, different interests, cultures and drivers. When teams are engaged, as the timeframes and financial pressure influence the environment, the project takes on life force of its own and wades ahead.

“What if,” I went on, “at the early days of the project, your organisation invested time and effort into really understanding one another, i.e. where you come from, what sort of experiences you've had in similar kinds of arrangements, exchanging experiences and ideas as you go. How do you think the outcome would have been different?"

Puzzled, contorted neck twists.

The point I was making was that building relationships that work well together is an essential investment at the beginning of any process on any project.

When I hear the word “dispute”, I mean, it has very legal connotations; it conjures up images of big organizations competing with one another over disagreements. But when you look at this at a human level, right down, you know, at the level of people interacting with people, this is essentially a conflict of misunderstanding.

This is a relationship that never really found the foundation of connection, empathy, or allowed for the nurturing of relationships for the long term. It was all about short-sighted, short-term gains. But it ended up lengthy, drawn out and very costly.

So anyway, that's just a thought for the day. I'll leave that with you.

I'd love to hear what your comments are about this.

Leave them in the comments below.

All the best and I'll see you next time.