Thursday, April 23, 2009
Munchkins
This morning Joe stopped by Dunkin' Donuts to pick up some donuts to take to the office in honor of the last day of work for his friend Mark. Joe also surprised the boys and me by bringing us home a box of muchkins before heading off to work. After the boys had eaten their breakfast of eggs and strawberries, I gave them each a munchkin. Caleb proceeded to lick all of the powdered sugar off of his, only taking a bite here and there. Joshua nibbled at his donut, but became distressed by the powdered sugar that found its way onto his fingers and decided that it would be too much of a hassle to finish it. When Caleb realized that Joshua had abandoned his partially-eaten munchkin, he snatched it and licked off all the remaining sugar. Joshua, in turn, polished off Caleb's "naked" donut, now that it was less of a nuisance to consume, then proceeded to finish up his original munchkin after Caleb also licked it clean. Now don't you wish you had a twin with whom you could collaborate, too?
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Soul mates don't need Mom the Mediator!
ReplyDelete"The classic example many mediation and negotiation trainers use to illustrate the differences between distributive and integrative bargaining comes from Getting to Yes and involves two sisters quarreling over a single orange. Each sister's position is she needs 100% of the orange. Using a distributive approach, for one sister to gain some of the orange, the other must lose. The mediator or negotiator using a distributive approach may come up with a solution as mom did when she entered the kitchen and found the two sisters arguing over who should have the orange. Wanting to be fair to both of her daughters, mom the mediator proposed this solution. One daughter would cut the orange in half and the other daughter would choose which half she would receive. Over all, this seems like a fair and reasonable solution, and in fact, this is how many disputes are resolved and how many negotiations play out. Each sister gets 50% of what they wanted. The result achieves fairness and arguably a win-win solution. But can we do better?
Using Fisher and Ury's principled approach, the focus is shifted to the sisters' interests rather than their positions. This time, rather than just proposing a solution, mom the mediator seeks to understand and find out why each sister wants the orange. Mom discovers that one sister does not really even like oranges, but she wants to bake a Christmas cake which calls for the peels of one orange. The other girl wants to eat the fruit and plans to toss the peels into the garbage. Learning the interests of each person, rather than just knowing their positions, allows for creative and often much more satisfying results. By giving the peel to the first girl, and the fruit to her sister, each girl receives 100% of what she wanted for a truly win-win solution."
http://ezinearticles.com/?Getting-To-Yes&id=1135241
Is that a Jimmy Hendrix tee shirt Moses is wearing?
ReplyDeleteLenz-- Joe told me about this same orange story when he first read this entry. Your explanation was a bit more comprehensive, though. Very interesting!
ReplyDeleteBabo-- Yes, it is! The text says "Electric Baby". Megan got it for him when she was visiting Jimi's hometown a couple months ago.
besides white rice, i'm pretty sure DD's chocolate munchkins are my favorite food. glaze and all. i'll be interested to see if their tastes change to include the entire munchkin as they get older. i never eat the powdered kind unless i have to--going without a munchkin at all seems very wasteful. glad they're developing their teamwork skillz :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the boys would have each individually eaten an entire chocolate munchkin had I given them the opportunity, but unfortunately for them I was hoarding them all for myself! Di, I'm sure you'll be a much nicer mom and share the chocolate munchkins with Jack :)
ReplyDelete