Situational Psychology -- 1) Dissipating Situations

What to do when stronger competitors invade our territories

Our ability to respond quickly and appropriately to challenging situations creates confidence in our supporters and uncertainty in those opposing us. In each of the nine common competitive situations, we must understand the psychology that creates supporters instead of opponents.

In this series of articles, I will illustrate these nine situations with my own experiences in business. This article looks at the first of those common situations. In this situation, external pressures confused our mission. They are called '"dissipating” because they dissipate the strength arising from our mission that unites and focuses us on our goals. What sets this situation apart from all others is that it is not triggered by our own attempts to advance. They are triggered by the actions of our “enemies.”

We should start with the general lesson that identifying others as our enemies makes finding any proper response more difficult. Sun Tzu’s Chinese character that we translate as “enemy” originally means “fellow nobleman.” His view was that those we see as enemies should be first seen as people who are more like us than different.

Modern society, especially media, likes to emphasize the differences between people. More and more, we cast every situation as a battle of “good guys” against “bad guys.” In our lives, however, our differences with our “enemies” are seldom, if ever, as important as our similarities. We can only predict the behavior of others to the degree we share their perspective.