Learn how to have more productive conflict, with Liane Davey

Let's start with the definition.

So if I just take a Merriam-Webster definition, conflict is the struggle between incompatible and opposing needs, wishes, and demands.

And the reason I think conflict is so essential to organizations is that we face incompatible and opposing needs, wishes, and demands 10 times before 10 a.m.

So the problem is if we are comfortable with conflict, if we avoid conflict, those really difficult trade-offs, those things we have to wrestle with to optimize a situation, we just lose those opportunities.

And either we are conflict avoidant, so we back away and come up with a meh suboptimal decision, or we are sort of aggressive and we force our will on others, both of those get us over the mid and long term a much worse outcome.

So we need to learn to be good at conflict so we can get through that struggle, not avoid it, and optimize incompatible needs, wishes, and demands.

Okay.

And in your book, you share some brilliant data about the cost of avoiding conflict, that you talk about conflict debt, which I was really interested in.

And it's not something I'd heard before until I read your book.

So for listeners, what is conflict debt and why do they need to understand it?

Yeah, so if you think about what I just said, our organizations require us to move through and make these hard trade-offs and confront these difficult conflicts.

If we add the second half of the research, which is that as humans, we've evolved for 15,000 years to cooperate and go along with our in-group.

And as we learn more and more, actually, the neuroscience has evolved even since I published The Good Fight to understanding concepts like social pain So as we start to understand our wiring and even how we're socialized, you realize we tend to run away from conflict.

So if you put those two things together, our organizations are piling up more and more conflicts we need to have, put that together with, we're running the other direction.

I had to coin a term for it so it could be more visceral, conflict debt.

And just imagining that balance like you have on a credit card that's piling up and you're paying interest and penalties and you're getting trapped under it.

That's what happens if we don't have the conflict.

So when I look at the impact of getting into conflict debt, we can look at it at multiple levels.

For an organization that avoids conflict and gets into conflict debt, we see real erosion of return on investment.

You try and dilute your resources across too many things, and so nothing actually pays off.

We don't get forward momentum.

So there's sort of organizational costs of conflict debt.

There's team costs, because if we don't deal with the frictions building up in our teams and between people, we erode trust.

Engagement suffers.

So there's sort of team costs.