Conflict Transformation Vs Management: two stairs that don’t lead to the same place.

When talking conflict people are most commonly referring to “managing” them. In a recent tour of presentation of my CASE© Method I was surprised to find that many people from the business world were positively impressed, and some time surprised, with my idea of “transforming” them, which indeed comes from the world of peace studies. Indeed, I feel that the originality of the Method lies in the fact that it is the outcome of the integration of my experience as a business person and as a passionate scholar of Gandhi’s methodologies of nonviolence. Whatever the case, transformation works and I’ll try to explain my point so that more people can think about this approach and, hopefully, embrace it for their benefit. Of course more on this you can find on my book “Sustainable Leadership. The CASE© Method”.

The idea of managing, despite various meanings that can be attached to the word, is not entirely satisfactory to me when talking conflict. It implies, in my vision, the idea of holding on to something, in this case the conflict, which is envisioned to go on. Like it was something precious to which the person, or the organization, is attached and won’t let go easily. There are indeed theories supporting the view of the conflict as a positive thing, something that helps people grow up and organizations to get stronger. I disagree with this view, unless we consider the positive contribution of the conflict something very much transient that expires once we decide to do something about the conflict. If it stays, i.e. is managed, it sucks: sorry! Likewise when people identify themselves with “their illness”, sticking to it s if it was their guarantee to be treated as “persons in need”, the fact of managing conflict situations is a often a way to justify poor performance or unsolved problems. If you think for a while to the long-standing territorial conflicts that are ongoing in our World you will understand what I mean. How many resources are poured into ongoing conflicts that would be shut down if the conflict was transformed and disappeared from the maps?

Let me explain my point with a graph from the book. The situation should be clear: there are two parties, one is demanding for itself the 100{f62d5d00145dc1761a46bb3b9876f4fb2b6782fa0e48784c716da9a8908fe5e5} of something, the other the same. It could be a territory, but also in a company a department asking for the whole budget for investment of the current year. You’ve seen this many times. In my view, managing the conflict is acknowledging it as inevitable, like it was a part of the normal life of the organization and walking back and forth on the red dots line of compromise. Compromise cannot take you to a better solution than 50{f62d5d00145dc1761a46bb3b9876f4fb2b6782fa0e48784c716da9a8908fe5e5} of resources for each part. Unfortunately, to satisfy the parties 50{f62d5d00145dc1761a46bb3b9876f4fb2b6782fa0e48784c716da9a8908fe5e5} each means also that they will be both 50{f62d5d00145dc1761a46bb3b9876f4fb2b6782fa0e48784c716da9a8908fe5e5} unsatisfied, which is a lot!

Walking along the line of compromise implies a belief that the parties cannot be moved from their initial requests, which is admitting defeat as leaders. What is, indeed, the role of a leader in such a situation? Think of the CEO when the managers of R&D and Sales would be competing for the bigger share of the investment budget. I think that the leader should enhance the value of the common objectives of the company as a whole, and bring the two to a point where they sit down and see what best the company can do with the available sum in the best interest of all. Maybe that they will finally agree that for the current year the best thing is that the budget is allotted to the marketing department, to research which best use make of the resources in the future: whether to invest in sales campaigns or in more R&D of new products. Beware: it is just a trivial example, but it gives an idea of what is a transformation: We have this situation, what can we do – where can we move – to transform it into an opportunity?

The CASE© Method believes that the parties can move away from their initial requests and sometimes completely let go of them, like in the trivial example above. More in the Case Histories on my website. This moves from Johan Galtung’s definition of conflict as an apparent incompatibility of objectives. Since it is apparent, the job of the facilitator – i.e. the leader – of the transformation is to make the illusion disappear and people get back to the clear vision that they have common objectives. In the case of managers from the same company it can be obvious. In other situations you can go down to the baseline of being human beings, members of a social species where individuals thrive only when the group thrives. But that is a long discourse that we’ll do somewhere else. Maybe in one of the CASE© Workshops that are organized around the world for your convenience.

Feel free to email me directly if you are interested in knowing more about the CASE© approach to conflict and leadership, want to organize a training in your organization or have comments and feedback on the book: they are always welcome.