Head: (4.5 of 5)
Heart: (4.5 of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (4.5 of 5)

In Divide or Conquer, author Diane Smith's premise is that teams rise or fall based on the success or failure of their relationships: "every team is only as strong as its weakest relationships," she says. Everyone realizes relationships are important, she says, but few understand why or how.  Starting with the well-publicized dysfunctional relationship between Steve Jobs and John Sculley, she alternates stories of their initial honeymoon period and subsequent breakdowns with a systematic analysis of what is happening behind the scenes to create the escalating conflict, including the hard-to-see informal structures that lead to hard-to-break patterns. In the end, Jobs and Sculley had to call it quits, and Smith shows us why.

Smith continues with entertaining, in-depth stories of other business relationships to illustrate how to transform them by disrupting embedded patterns of interaction, reframing your perspective, and revising what you think to be true. The first key to changing relationships is to be able to step outside of them, observe and then map the structural elements and habitual reactions for both parties. Also necessary: that people assume responsibility not just for themselves but for the relationships they create and for the impact the relationships have on their company. 

Smith's book is divided into three parts, one "coda" and several appendices.

Part I: Understanding Relationships

            2. The Life and Death of a Relationship

            3. The Anatomy of a Relationship

            4. The Key to Resilience

Part II.  Transforming Relationships

            5. Disrupt Patters of Interaction

            6. Reframe How You See Each Other

            7. Revise What you "Know" to be True

Part III.  Making Change Practical

            8. Focus the Change Effort

            9. Choose the Right Strategy

            10. Motivate Change

Key points from Part I include the fact that all relationships develop at both a formal and an informal level. At the formal level, people define and redefine their formal roles and responsibilities, who gets to make what decision, and what rewards go to whom. But there's also an informal level which defines the emotional responsibilities the people in the relationship will assume and assign, the interpersonal rights they'll claim or relinquish, and the psychological rewards they'll want to give and get.  As relationships develop over a series of fairly predictable stages, people will adapt to both these formal and informal roles, sometimes without even knowing what they are or that they even exist.  Without being aware of the processes at play, views can become entrenched and difficult to change.  

The informal structures underlying all relationships, Smith claims, include four interlocking elements: actions, frames, contexts, and repertoires.  Actions are what someone actually says or does, while frames are the interpretations embedded in our reactions, making some actions seem like the obvious ones to take, while making others seem impractical.  The social context, which includes formal roles, time constraints and historical events, are the background upon which some triggering event occurs, prompting the need to respond.  Behavioral repertoires are similar to patters of behavior-largely unconscious experiential knowledge and interpretive strategies-that both shape and are shaped by social contexts.

The way to change a typical interaction within a relationship, and from there go on to transform that relationship, according to Smith, is to continually break each interaction down into is basic elements.  She proscribes making maps of as simple things such as Peter's and Chris' actions and reactions to each other, listing each item as simply as possible.  From such maps, the two parties (with the help of a neutral third party such as Diane or a similar consultant), can see exactly why, where and how things break down.  By mapping the underlying "anatomy" of their relationship, executives like Chris and Peter can stand outside of their relationship and see their roles in creating a relationship they don't want or didn't intend to create.  It is their increased awareness of themselves that frees them to create a relationship that supports growth-for themselves, their teams, and companies.

For more troubled relationships, the best way to avoid sitting around and waiting for one or the other to cool down is for the two involved to actively try to help shift each others' perspectives.  To shift perspectives, you must first reflect and reframe your own thoughts, then try to do it with your conversational adversary.  This is called taking a relational perspective, as opposed to being stuck in an either/or, good guy/bad guy worldview.

To truly transform a relationship, the people involved must work through three stages, sometimes over and over again: (1) Disrupt patterns of interaction (2) Freeze frame and then reframe and (3) Revise-resetting the relationship's foundations including revisiting past events and restructuring outdated knowledge.  Here, as in every section of the book, Smith provides detailed stories and tools to help us make sense of her method of change.

Smith's book is full of maps, charts and tools to aid people in analyzing, reframing, and ultimately transforming their relationships. She even includes a matrix to analyze which relationships in an organization should get how much attention. The combination of highly readable case studies with precise activities and tools to use in each and every phase of relationship growth will leave the reader full to the brim with new, highly usable information. Buy It.