The Assumptions We Don’t Know We’re Making

The other afternoon a serious fog descended on the Jeddore Harbour as I was heading to the beach for a walk with my dog. As often happens on such relaxation drives, my mind drifted. This time the Attack at Jeddore of many centuries ago came to mind. I wondered how it would have gone had it been as foggy as this.

My mind drifted some more, to reflect on the friendships I’d established with several Mi’kmaq clients over the years. During the time I worked with them on governance, leadership and culture issues, the word ‘decolonising’ came up repeatedly. It was initially a foreign concept to me, so I listened carefully. Yet I’ve never been entirely sure I understood everything people meant by it.

I can’t leave the question alone. As an Afrikaner, I inherit a history shaped by both British imperialism and Afrikaner colonial power. Those two realities have lived together in me for as long as I can remember, along with the anger and guilt they evoke.

When I got home, I started reading. One question that kept popping up during my walk was the concept of “Peace and Friendship Treaties”. What I learned about treaties in my history classes was that they were pacts nations made with one another to defend against a common enemy, and then the subsequent documentation of the terms of settling the war when someone’s lost and the other had won. I started exploring what might have been the British ideas and values that were in the minds of their negotiators and whether they had any understanding of how the Mi’kmaq viewed sovereignty and property. My mind was wandering - down a rabbit hole or towards a new insight? I was simply following the questions as they popped up.

Looking back afterwards, what interested me most wasn’t where the reading had taken me. It was how I had been reading.

I realised I hadn’t been approaching the material as a historian.

I had been approaching it as a mediator.

What held my attention wasn’t simply what had happened, but the questions my mediator brain asked about the assumptions the different parties brought into those conversations.

The British negotiators came from a constitutional tradition in which sovereignty rested with the Crown, land could be owned, rights could be transferred and treaties formalised those arrangements. Ownership could be won through victory in battle, or through negotiated agreements. That was how Britons understood the world. Wherever they went; whomever they colonized, that was their frame of reference.

As I’ve come to understand it, the Mi’kmaq came from a profoundly different perspective. Land was not a commodity to be owned. There were no documented title deeds. Relationships mattered more than possession. Those treaties were understood as agreements about living together peacefully and sharing the land and its resources, not about surrendering sovereignty or transferring ownership. Whether that summary of mine captures every nuance isn’t really the point. What interested me was that each side appears to have been negotiating from assumptions so deeply embedded that they may never have thought to articulate them; they experienced them as a self-evident truth, as unquestioned as the path of the sun across the sky. Nor did it occur to anyone to check the other side’s assumptions or value system.

It is possible for people to leave the same negotiation believing they have reached an agreement while understanding that agreement in profoundly different ways.

But those misunderstandings do not unfold on level ground. When one party holds greater military, political and institutional power, its interpretation is far more likely to become the official one, and to shape the lives of everyone involved. That brings to mind the old saying, “History is written by the victors.” It is often attributed to Winston Churchill, although its origin is uncertain. The victor’s account is shaped by the victor’s assumptions, culture, interests and sense of what matters.

I began to wonder how much human conflict grows from people acting boldly on assumptions they have never thought to examine.

In my years of conflict coaching and mediation being curious about assumptions has become second nature. In fact, I do not convene a mediation session until I am quite comfortable that I have discovered the hidden assumptions on both sides of the table. That’s often a fascinating rabbit hole to descend into for a while, as is the gratification both the client and I experience when the tunnel returns to the light, with new insights and new questions about what the truth really is.

I found myself asking exactly the same questions about the people around those treaty negotiations. Not who was right or wrong, but what each side believed to be so self-evident that it never occurred to them to say it out loud. And right in there I realise that part of the ongoing decolonising discussion is to reclaim what was lost in that maze of misunderstood assumptions.

This may be why I don’t work as an international treaty mediator - I prefer to work in worlds I know - workplaces, families and communities, where we can test and correct our assumptions without the guns and flags coming out. And, when I write up a mediation agreement, it is not finalized until everybody concerned has confirmed with me that we all understand the terms and the reasons behind them in the same way. Then I’m confident the agreement will hold. (But even then, I have a contingency plan – I commit to being available, at no extra cost, for 3 months after the signing, in the event that there is some disagreement in interpreting something I wrote on their behalf, knowing that we humans often take mental shortcuts and forget recent shifts in our thinking.)

The longer I ponder all of this, the less interested I am in the treaties themselves. They were simply where my thinking had begun. What stayed with me was something far more ordinary; far more unsettling.

Every one of us lives inside assumptions that are so familiar we experience them simply as reality. We seldom think to test them until they collide with someone else’s equally self-evident reality.

I suspect that is why I find mediation endlessly fascinating. The task is not to persuade people to abandon their values or to ‘compromise’. It is to help them recognise that what has always seemed obvious to them may not be obvious at all. Sometimes that recognition changes nothing. Sometimes it changes everything.