A mathematician’s 1947 breakthrough gives us a useful mental model for moving through conflict.
It was 1947, and American mathematician George Dantzig was facing an enormous challenge. He needed to allocate resources across hundreds of worldwide U.S. Army projects and deployments.
The obvious approach — evaluate every possible combination of variables until you find the right one — was computationally impossible even with the best computers of the era. There were just too many variables.
So Dantzig stopped trying to engineer the optimal answer by considering all of the variables at once. Instead, he built his approach around a single question:
What’s the best available move right now?
Dantzig’s method was to identify the best available move from wherever he started, make that move, reassess based on the outcome of the move, and repeat. He kept repeating the process (“stepping”) until no better move existed. That gave him the optimal outcome.
This kind of iterative approach has been used in everything from agile software development to lean management to behavioral therapy. Jim Collins, in his latest book, What to Make of a Life, recommends Dantzig’s Simplex Stepping for navigating life’s big uncertainties.
Conflict is one more place where Simplex Stepping pays off.
I used to tell my graduate students that conflict resolution is a grand experiment made up of hundreds of tiny experiments. We see something unfold in front of us, search our mental toolbox, and pick something we believe to be useful in that moment. We try it, see what happens, and repeat.
That’s the iterative instinct behind Simplex Stepping.
Why prescriptions fail
Sometimes clients ask for a prescription. They want to know what they should say or do, even the order in which they should say or do it.
I understand the desire to feel like you know the “right” next move. Conflict is confusing and can move fast. But it doesn’t lend itself to prescriptions. It doesn’t go in a straight line, it doesn’t follow a script.
Conflict is like the ocean and weather. A sailor can’t pre-program a fixed sequence of moves before leaving the dock and stick to those moves regardless of the conditions. She responds to the currents and the wind, repeatedly adjusting her sail. Each move grows from the results the previous one produced, combined with the present moment’s conditions.
The same is true in conflict. Like Dantzig’s post-war resource allocation problem, conflict has too many variables interacting simultaneously for any upfront plan to account for all of them. We don’t know our next best available move until we’ve taken the current one.
Simplex Stepping doesn’t tell us which next move to make. It tells us to pause, look at what’s in front of us, and consider what’s possible from here. What is the best next question to ask? What should you do when they do x, y, or z? The answer is born from what came before.
Simplex Stepping as a mental model
Simplex Stepping’s power in conflict resolution is as a mental model, a way to think about navigating toward a viable destination.
Mental models operate upstream of tactics. They shape how we read a situation — what we notice, what we miss, what we consider important, what we ignore.
When we use Simplex Stepping as a mental model, we free ourselves from the tyranny of needing a perfect plan. It helps us stay in the present moment, ready to notice the gems.
When I used to teach basic mediation, I would see students struggling to figure out what to say or do next. I recall that struggle when I was learning, too. We’re afraid that if we don’t say or do the perfect thing, terrible things will happen. Simplex Stepping relieves us of this perfection trap because it doesn’t demand the perfect next step. It demands a next step, a tiny experiment from which we learn and iterate.
And there’s this: it’s simple enough to access under pressure. Conflict is stressful. The question at the heart of Simplex Stepping — what’s the best available move right now? — doesn’t require a grand plan.
Caminante, no hay camino (Traveler, there is no path)
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
Disclosure: One or more links in this post are Amazon affiliate links, which means I receive a few dimes from Amazon if you buy the book through them (at no extra cost to you). And, of course, I just turn around and spend those dimes on more books, which then help inform my work and writing for you. It’s a beautiful cycle.