Compromise implies loss. It implies mutually exclusive objectives among two or more parties, and loss is the cost of maintaining the relationship. One option always exists to avoid losses: decouple. In decoupling, each party can pursue its own objective independently. Often what forecloses this possibility is joint obligation and load-bearing responsibilities. Especially in nuclear family homes, “compromise” is sacrosanct. The joint obligation of children and mortgage forecloses easy decoupling. Compromise is the only way to balance needs with responsibilities, a form of triage where unmet needs and wants is the inevitable outcome; someone has to lose something in order to maintain the relationship.
Continued compromise warps into transactionality and resentment. Losses are tallied on a personal ledger, my loss this time means your loss next time. In a perverse way it feels like people forget that win-win scenarios exist, extracting win-loss outcomes is a loyalty pledge in service of “fairness”. I lost last time, it’s your turn to lose this time to show that you care about the relationship. The more ledger-fied the dynamic the more the space of options closes into a single spectrum of tradeoffs between mutually exclusive objectives. Fear of loss narrows into zero-sum thinking.
Well, win-win scenarios do exist. That’s alignment. If compromise collapses the space of options into a single line, alignment explodes the space of options into n-dimensions, and within that space there are options where everyone can get what they want, win-win.
Alignment requires an inverted attitude from that of compromise. An attitude of compromise is besieged, scarce and rigid. In compromise loss is inevitable, fear of loss is always justified, it’s continually re-validated through experience.
Alignment requires a spacious hope that a win-win always exists. It’s an active hope, one that requires work to revalidate. Hope and effort are not sufficient, however. The thinking around compromise is simple: draw a line between our mutually exclusive objectives, barter and fight along the line. The thinking around alignment is complex: the problem is a knot to be untied.
To untie the knot, slack must be identified. “Slack” is a factor with two properties: (1) adjustable and (2) “upstream” of the stated objectives. Untying a knot in the dark, seeing only with your hands, once slack is identified it’s important to adjust it in different directions while tracking the rest of the knot. What becomes tighter? Where does new slack open up? The key is slack begets slack. Keep loosening the system of constraints. Identifying a contingent chain of slack until the original “conflict” evaporates, the knot is untied. Alignment thinking is analogous.
Alignment thinking is much closer to play than a fight. It’s an exploration of the space of possibilities, a discovery process met with a series of unexpected “aha” moments when a seemingly irrelevant factor options up a new pocket of slack. Just keep following the slack. Sooner or later the knot unties. But in the meantime, you have to go on hope. Fear of loss must be inverted into curiosity of unexpected gain; fear and curiosity are opposite attitudes towards the same unknown. In every moment of fear, there is an equal and opposite opportunity for curiosity. Compromise is anchored in fear, alignment is guided by curiosity.
“Slack” isn’t the only form of optionality in alignment. “Fat” is a second. Where “slack” is some adjustable factor, “fat” is some substitutable factor. Substitution is its own kind of optionality. In a nuclear family dynamic often “fat” is paid for. A nanny, a tutor, a personal assistant, etc. The problem is that in paying for care, it’s not a true substitute; a nanny cannot replace a parents’ love and investment. Communal arrangements often have more “fat”, within communities built around trust and shared cares, truer substitutes exist. With the presence of fat, graceful decoupling becomes possible. What’s onerous within one relationship can be generative to another, and decoupling doesn’t mean the relationship itself is bad or broken, just locally misaligned.
One of the richest and most consistently unexpected rewards to curiosity is discovering complementary needs and offerings. Human relationships are complex, and in certain situations what one person perceives to be a burden another perceives to be a gift. To one person, holding space for emotions may be draining, to another it may be enlivening. What’s draining versus enlivening may change from person to person, relationship to relationship. Within every relationship new opportunities for alignment (and misalignment) arise unexpectedly, and require an open and exploratory inquiry process to discover. These discoveries are particularly exciting and inspiring because what superficially seemed onerous on its own becomes glorious in combination. An energy sink becomes a well. It’s magic. This magic arises out of the unique properties of a specific relationship, the latent potential for alignment. I loosely label this source of alignment as “polarities”; complements or opposites attract, and in attracting can form a whole that is stabler than its parts.
My thinking around alignment has been informed through coliving, within community “slack”, “fat”, and “polarities” exist and can be applied in tandem for the best results. Communal arrangements have other nice alignment-promoting properties; they provide a whole alchemy of alignment that doesn’t feel available outside of them.
In the nuclear family, often there’s role specialization, and specialization feels superficially justified by the law of comparative advantage. In community there’s an inverse strategy, which often feels better than specialization. Let’s imagine a home has a garden. For a nuclear family to sustain the garden, the law of comparative advantage encourages one parent to specialize. But in the process of specializing the responsibility may become onerous. It can become work, rather than fun. Let’s now put a group in that home. With more people two opportunities open up. When done together the work becomes a source of connection, the work becomes a vehicle for relational richness. For instance, perhaps a mentor teaches a mentee gardening techniques — the work has become a vehicle of teaching and care, which may be enlivening on its own terms. The second opportunity leverages saturation curves. Each person in the group may have different levels of innate interest in gardening. Until a certain saturation point, benefits outweigh costs, after it the reverse and it becomes work. If each person helps until saturation, the collective maximizes fun. With a large enough or interested enough group, fun may exceed what’s required to sustain the obligation. What’s “work” for too few becomes a joy to many.
There’s a rich vocabulary of alignment, and once one begins seeing all the possibilities, it feels impossible to go back to stifling, deadening, besieged compromise. While compromise may be a necessarily bridging solution, as a state of being it descends from zero-sum trades to net-negative resentments, the cure becomes worse than the disease, a last resort for bearing joint obligations.