From Agile to Radical: conflict

Within the Nordics, Sweden is known to be one of the least conflict-oriented countries and cultures. I love living there and believe it’s the best one of the five that I’ve lived in. However, there are times when the avoidance of the elephant in the room becomes a bit much.

Being Dutch and coming from a culture that’s a bit more ‘in your face,’ I love to name the elephant, point at it and invite people to address the issue at hand and stop pretending it doesn’t exist. The challenge, obviously, is that this requires people to engage with each other in an area where they disagree. And you don’t have to be Swedish to feel uncomfortable with doing so.

The reason I feel it’s so important to address and resolve conflict is because avoiding to do so leads to all kinds of unhealthy behaviors that are detrimental to the company as well as the individuals involved in it. There are at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.

First, it’s a natural human tendency to avoid topics that might lead to conflict or in general feel uncomfortable. In companies, this may result in situations where important actions simply aren’t taken by the people responsible. In one company I worked with, it was obvious that they needed new business models for monetizing their offering. As it was unclear what the right approach to this was, I encouraged them to conduct experiments with different customer segments to understand what the impact of different models would be. This led to me uncovering a pretty deep and long-lasting conflict between the folks in sales and product management that had resulted in a complete deadlock.

Second, in quite a few companies that I’ve worked with, I can see patterns in workshops that clearly are repeated, ingrained behaviors. These behaviors often contain beliefs about the other party in the conflict that are shared in the meeting. This results in both parties stating their opinion of the situation and each other. Then somebody steps in, claiming that we’re not going to resolve it here and now and that we need to park the issue for a later time. Which of course never comes.

In several companies, there were clear examples of this between the systems engineering folks and the software people. Both had developed strong opinions about each other and were openly sharing those opinions, and the issue was parked. The result was that systems engineering kept looking to minimize the bill of materials while the software staff kept developing solutions for DevOps that would never work in the highly constrained resources that the resulting product would have.

Third, the most explicit form of unresolved conflict is when teams work actively to undo each other’s progress. One glaring case was when one team was responsible for improving the performance of the system as customers were complaining about a lack of responsiveness. Another team was responsible for improving the system’s cybersecurity. When looking in-depth into what the results of each team were, it rapidly became clear that both teams were undoing each other’s changes. The result was a system that was not getting more performant or more secure despite the best efforts of the two teams.

I’m sure that there are more effects of unresolved conflicts, but all of them amount to the same thing: negative outcomes for the company and a culture where people often don’t feel safe and experience significant negative energy. This can easily lead to significantly higher levels of unwanted attrition as people feel they can’t have any impact as well as people simply checking out, ie they come to work, do the least possible to get by and aren’t invested in the company.

It’s the task of leaders to identify and address these conflict situations. The preferred outcome of addressing conflicts is where everyone agrees on a course of action and commits to executing it. In fact, this is the very core of what leadership is all about.

The second possible outcome is where a group of people in the conflict are simply not willing or able to change their views. In that case, leaders need to ensure that the disagreeing parties understand the reasons and underlying principles for the decided course of action and get people to ‘disagree and commit.’ You don’t have to agree with the decision taken, but I do expect you to behave in support of the decision. Allowing people to go passive-aggressive or even continue to actively oppose the chosen direction is unacceptable.

The third outcome is when some people simply need to be taken out of the equation. This is often difficult in especially European companies, but letting conflicts sit unresolved is much worse over time than taking the cost and energy of going through the process of removing people who don’t work and are detrimental.

In many situations, I’m met with a lot of resistance when I state this, but in my experience, the people under fire are often not in a good place themselves. As they’ve not managed to reach the momentum to get themselves from a current suboptimal situation to a new, better one, it often is quite helpful to give them a little push to improve their situation. In other words, rather than hurting them, you’re actually helping them! In my experience, everyone wants to contribute and have an impact, and helping people shine elsewhere is a great gift.

Whenever two or more people come together around a common goal, there will be conflict. If not addressed, unresolved conflicts result in negative outcomes for the company and the individuals involved. Consequently, it’s the task of leaders to identify and address conflicts. Preferably resulting in everyone agreeing to a common course of action, but if necessary by getting people to a point of ‘disagree and commit.’ Finally, if nothing else works, leaders need to take people out of the equation and help them go and shine elsewhere. To end with Peter Senge: “In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no individual would have come to on their own.”