A healthy relationship with conflict is at the heart of all high-performing teams (and organisations). It’s pivotal to setting principles, making decisions, and delivering value. But when conflict so easily intermingles with a plethora of social dynamics, it’s often squandered.
Circular, high-level, and unactionable conversations are typically red flags that conflict isn’t being utilised in a way that aids your team. They’re not always easy to spot, though. Conflict can trigger a wide range of cognitive patterns and emotions, making it very difficult to see the wood for the trees.
Good conflict means you can frequently explore multiple options, assess the consequences and align on what best drives you toward your goals. It’s something that all teams should aim for but requires a huge amount of trust to do without negative side effects.
Here are a few tools that I believe aid in structuring conflict as an exercise of good faith interactions between colleagues.
1. Clarify Commitment
How much do you really care about this?
The law of triviality states that people within an organization typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Often this is done without explicitly stating so.
Behavioural science has attributed this to the fact that trivial problems tend to be smaller, and so people cognitively fall into the path of least resistance. In most cases, this is an incredibly subconscious dynamic. We can highlight its triviality by clarifying how committed someone is to a position.
When in situations of conflict, it’s always worth asking those involved how much they care about their position and the issue at hand.
You’d be surprised how often the answer comes back as “not very much.” You’d be even more surprised how long conflicts can endure under this level of commitment to a position.
As mentioned, this doesn’t mean that most people are arguing about things they consciously don’t care about. It normally just means they haven’t actively thought about the amount of weight they are prescribing to their feelings on a position.
It is true that sometimes people will say they care a lot about a position. At that point, you must clarify why and drive towards first principles.
2. Establish First Principles
What is your position assuming?
“Why are we in disagreement?” is by far the most important question you can ask in any conflict situation. This is because there are really two main types of conflict for teams:
- Priority conflict: Is this the highest value thing we should be working towards?
- Implementation conflict: Is this the best way to work towards that thing?
From my experience, people naturally gravitate towards perceiving disagreement as implementation conflict. This is often done due to the underlying priority being implicitly assumed. Naturally, the danger in this is that you can spend significant time engaging in conflict that, even if seemingly fruitful, leads you in the wrong direction.
Establishing first principles means breaking down the topic of disagreement into its most basic assumptions. Assumptions that cannot be deduced further than what they are.
There are a few ways we can do this, such as asking 5 whys, but what matters most is the surfacing of assumptions. Then you must ensure that you’re moving down the assumption ladder. A good litmus test for this is when your assumptions start to become circular, e.g., “Happiness is good because it makes us feel amazing.” Much deeper than this, and you start to hit the philosopher zone, which, in most instances, has limited returns for teams!
Driving towards first principles always ensures that conflict takes heed of the priorities it exists within. It is worth noting that establishing first principles can be a relatively exhausting exercise and should be reserved for larger disagreements. However, you should always look to check the assumptions of those you disagree with.
3. Set the Terms
What would it take to change your mind?
A good faith argument requires that all involved parties agree on the terms they are engaged in. This means that our positions are clear to one another, but more importantly, it requires that we’re explicit about what’s needed for our positions to no longer be valid.
We can easily establish if an argument has the conditions to exist in good faith by asking simply what it would take to change a person’s mind on their position.
Now, just because they can’t answer doesn’t mean they are maliciously engaged in the conflict. It just means the conflict doesn’t have the right terms to be constructive. I would argue that most conflict exists in this region in an ethereal space that weighs more toward sentiment than empiricism.
The main benefit of conflict with terms is that it, more often than not, drives us to be action-oriented and experiment-driven. Everyone knows that theory only gets us so far and combining it with experimentation will get the full scope of organisational learning.
To Conclude
Whilst there are many tools for conflict, these are the ones that have been most helpful for me. They ensure that we’re talking about things we care about in a way that surfaces core beliefs and drives iterative learning.
The only point I’d add is that whilst conflict relies on trust, trust also grows out of conflict (providing it’s handled responsibly). Strive towards consistently nurturing conflict in your teams. The tools above provide a sense of safety when doing so, but they’re not the only ones.
If there is no conflict in your teams, it may be brewing underneath. The hallmark of high-performing teams is being able to bring it to the surface in a consumable way safely.
Why Are We Arguing? 3 Tools for Structuring Conflict in Teams was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.