Collaboration and conflict are part of work. But what are they? And are they what we think?
Unthinking Collaboration And Conflict
Work is endless problem solving. A breakdown in communication, a budget problem, a dissatisfied customer, burned out staff. Problems crop up in work that’s going well. We’re forever in some current state, aiming for some future state, and acting to close the gap.
Collaboration and conflict are part of this. They look like problems to be solved. That communication breakdown caused conflict. Collaboration slipped and caused that dissatisfied customer. Collaboration, conflict, and problem solving are so much a part of work that we fuse them. See them as one and all in a day’s work.
That’s reasonable, but it’s not the whole picture. We often encounter collaboration and conflict as problems to be solved. But what we encounter as a problem can be a bounded event, part of an ongoing system, or both. Events and systems have different characteristics, and you do different things with them.
Problems generally have distinct characteristics – a defined (or definable) unknown, discoverable solutions, one right answer (or a small set), stable relationships among elements. They’re generally bounded with edges you can identify. And they feel like they’re “out there,” apart from us, where we work on them to fix them – like a pipe you unclog, settings you correct, a policy you update, a project you bring back on schedule. Technical knowledge is generally sufficient to solve them and they’re like solving for X in algebra – apply the right method in the right way, and solve it.1Type I problems are simple, well-defined, clear solutions. Type II are complicated but still solvable with sufficient expertise. There are more moving parts but the problem is still bounded, and still determinative with the right technical knowledge. Type III, also called complex or wicked problems, have no definitive formulation and no stopping rule – no point at which you can say This is solved, we’re done, because solutions actually change the problem. To me, Type III problems are systems – but I’ll refer to them as a type of problem because that’s the convention.
Systems are different. They have interdependent parts in ongoing interaction. Patterns of interaction – often from different parts of an organization, or between an organization and its customers, partners, supply chains, regulators, lenders, and more. Properties of systems emerge over time, coming, going, and transforming in ways which are hard to predict. We often see some properties as problems – think of presenting problem or symptom – which can become a unit of analysis and action. But conditions easily change even as you engage them, even because you engage them, which can frustrate progress. Systems are also challenging because you can’t really stand outside them to work on them. You have to engage them from the inside, as a participant – hopefully with colleagues doing the same.
Both problem and systems approaches to collaboration and conflict are legitimate.2I sometimes refer to problems as events because of how they occur in a time-bound way, which is also contrasts them systems. Both inform handling. One’s not right or wrong, better or worse than the other. Seeing and knowing what to do about both is where better handling begins.
Let’s look at collaboration and conflict as both events and systems.
What does collaboration look like? You see people building on each other’s ideas, reconciling differences, reaching agreement. People working well together feels good and we call it collaboration. But what about quick agreement – is that collaboration, groupthink, or perhaps avoidance? Is open disagreement a sign of healthy collaboration or conflict? Are coordination and cooperation the same as collaboration, part of it, or different?
Based on your line of work, you might describe collaboration differently than a friend in a different line of work: Joint work toward a shared goal (general), interdependence and coordination (management), information sharing and integration (cognitive science), joint sense-making (organizational theory), cooperation under conditions of mixed motives (economics and game theory), as relationship and communication (heath care), identity (sociology, organizational culture), and more.
Even collaboration and conflict scholars and practitioners define collaboration as a practice, process, relationship, approach, feature, and outcome.
What the origin of the word help us? Collaboration comes from the Latin collaborare, meaning to work together. Col comes from the Latin com, meaning with or together. And labor comes from laborare, Latin for to work or to toil. For me, that’s working together – and we can do something with that.
Work is highly interdependent and requires working together. A product launch requires marketing, engineering, sales, and operations to work together. A hiring decision involves a recruiter, hiring manager, interviewers, and HR. Very little work is completed by a single person acting alone. What each person does changes what’s possible for everyone else. Working together is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, and this helps us define collaboration as coordinated interdependence, and conflict as contested interdependence.
Coordinated interdependence means people recognize that their actions depend on and affect the efforts and results of others, and act with that in mind. They may pursue shared purposes, accommodate different purposes, or work together to establish and adjust the terms of their interdependence. Differences, disagreement, expressions of strong emotion – none of it means coordinated interdependence has ended, so long as people work with their interdependence rather than contest it.
Conflict generally feels worse than collaboration feels good. Disagreement, debate, difference, dissension, tension, friction – we don’t like them and we want them to stop. There’s a strong physiological and psychological impulse to reduce social tension – which is a problem solving move. Nearly everything I see in professional development content advises steps to reduce uncomfortableness and restore some pre-conflict condition.
But honest-to-goodness collaboration can contain uncomfortable moments – tension, disagreements, debates, arguments. Labeling those moments as conflict risks misclassifying them, and misclassifying them risks taking the wrong actions.
If the feeling of conflict isn’t a reliable guide to defining and handling conflict, what about behavior? It’s easy to spot – we engage, battle, withdraw, and escalate. But using behavior is as problematic as using feelings because it, too, can underdetermine motive, intention, meaning and strategy. They signal something’s going on, but don’t tell you what.
If you looked for a definition of conflict you could use – a working definition – you might be stumped. Definitions commonly use one or more related terms (difference, disagreement, etc.), which results in question-begging definitions. And depending on your education and line of work, certain definitions take the lead position. We have interference (social psychology), perceived incompatibility (organizational behavior), incompatible positions and interests (negotiation), strategic contest (political science), competing incentives (economics), a contest over rights and duties (law), intrapersonal phenomena (psychology), basic human needs (some conflict resolution theory) – and more.
Conflict scholars and practitioners add complexity with these generally accepted elements – two or more parties, constraints on parties, real or perceived incompatibilities, something of value at risk or at stake, and one or more parties resorting to unilateral action to preserve or advance their preferred outcome. Phew.
Here’s where it gets very interesting and a bit complicated – just like work.
There’s a deep strain of thinking among conflict scholars and practitioners that conflict as a phenomenon is neutral, value-free, and that what one does with conflict is where value judgments come in. Hmm…. that’s not unreasonable – but how reasonable is it? What happens is that scholars embed a value-laden act (acting to prevail over someone) inside value-free conditions (constraints, incompatibilities, stakes) – and that doesn’t compute. Not for me, anyway. It sends my mind in a definitional loop I can’t escape. Will etymology save me? (Bet you never wondered that before.)
Conflict comes from the Latin com- (together) and fligere (to strike), which produce confligere, to strike together. The irony is that striking something together can produce light and heat – both of which can help or hurt, depending. Can work conflict be good and bad? It can. Depending on what? Let’s see – and let’s pick up the idea of contested interdependence.
I like contested interdependence because it means one or more parties is contesting – challenging, fighting, rejecting – the interdependence which characterizes work and work relationships. It suggests that parties struggle within a relationship of mutual dependency. They need each other even as they struggle – or the contest would dissolve – which tells us conflicts can be about the terms of that dependency – who gets what, who decides, on whose terms work continues or stops. All good, until…
Contested interdependence can take different forms and have different degrees of intensity. Parties might openly fight over the terms of their interdependence, quietly resist them, or act independently while discounting how their actions affect others. Conflict can also be latent, emerging, manifest, or receding. Contestation’s form, intensity, and phase matter for how conflict is handled.
A simple but useful conflict resolution framework is that parties might settle a conflict by use of interest, rights, or power-based approaches.3William Ury, Jeanne M. Brett, Stephen B. Goldberg. Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict, 1988. Interest-based means parties appeal to joint and several interests. Rights-based means parties resort to rights such as policy, procedure, regulation, law, and sometimes moral or natural law. Power-based means parties resort to formal or informal sources of power to prevail. Each treats agency and authorship in different and important ways. Generally, interest-based approaches preserve one’s own and other parties agency, and attempt to co-author a solution. That’s one thing win-win means.
Rights and power-based approaches tend to see parties limit others’ agency and sole-author what happens next. Taking unilateral action is generally intended to preserve one’s own agency and authorship and constrain the agency and authorship of one or more others. That’s one of the things win-lose means.
Organizations and employees tend to prefer interest-based approaches to rights- or power-based approaches. Working with is a lot more pleasant and generally more effective than working against. But pleasantness and more effective aren’t always the right measures. Depending on the situation, light too bright and heat too hot might be appropriate. It depends on whether the means are warranted, and why.
Conflict can be sanctioned or unsanctioned, legitimate or illegitimate. Sanction concerns whether actions are permitted by an organization’s formal rules4The policies and procedures which codify employment, health, environment, safety and other law and regulation or informal practices[In organizational culture, for example.[/mfn]. Legitimacy concerns whether those actions are justified. The two aren’t necessarily the same, and formal and informal sanctions can contradict each other.5The distinction between formal and informal sanction is familiar in organizational studies. Legitimacy has several meanings including perceived acceptance and normative justification. We’ll examine that more closely in other content.
If I work against a colleague using means sanctioned by governing variables, that conflict is permitted under those rules. Whether it’s legitimate is a separate question. Imagine a false claim made knowingly, and run through proper channels. If doing so violated my employment rights and I contest it, this is a generally accepted place for rights-based approaches.
The picture is murkier when it comes to power-based approaches. If I work against a colleague using organizational politics, is that sanctioned by governing variables? Probably not officially – but unofficially? And if it’s not sanctioned, does the conflict become illegitimate?
Power-based approaches to conflict paint a large gray area to move around in – an area we’ll examine more closely in other content. But thinking about whose agency and authorship is enabled or constrained, and why, in any collaboration or conflict is a deeper and possibly more informed way to size up the situation.
Rethinking Collaboration And Conflict
Working together has personal and lexical meaning. Agency and authorship are what intentional participation and deliberate engagement are made of. Agency is the capacity to act intentionally, to choose your response rather than have one and allow it to carry you into action. Authorship is the ability to shape what happens next through the exercise of agency. It concerns whether and how you exercise that capacity and the consequences which follow – whether intended or not. This makes collaboration, conflict prevention, and interest-based conflict resolution forms of co-authorship – joint acts of choosing what to respond to and how, to author what happens next.
Rights and power-based approaches are less characterized by co-authorship, but aren’t necessarily without it. Bill Ury’s loop backs from higher cost to lower cost approaches requires some degree of co-authorship, or they wouldn’t work. And parties to any conflict terminated through rights or power approaches – say an organizational political fight, or an HR ruling – can be said to contribute to what follows, even involuntarily, because they create conditions they and others must live with, some of which might become precedent.
If you rethink collaboration and conflict as having characteristics of events and systems, and if you see agency and authorship at work in both, a few things become clear.
First, collaboration and conflict aren’t opposites. They’re not two states we see at work, one desirable and the other undesirable. They’re two ways of handling interdependence – a foundational condition of most work. What each of us does changes what’s possible for others.
Second, a common view is that agreement = collaboration and disagreement = conflict. But disagreement isn’t the boundary between collaboration and conflict, nor are differences. What distinguishes collaboration from conflict isn’t difference or disagreement – it’s whether people work with their interdependence or contest it. A useful question is, are we trying to author what happens next, together? Has one or more of us begun authoring what happens next for themselves? If so, is that justified?6There are criteria for measuring the technical effectiveness of collaboration and conflict resolution. Ury, Brett, and Goldberg propose satisfaction with outcomes, effects on relationships, reduced recurrence, and lower transaction costs in Breaking The Impasse: Consensual Approaches To Resolving Disputes, 1987, Lawrence Susskind and Jeffrey Cruikshank propose fairness, efficiency, stability, wisdom. There are others, and you might have your own. We’ll return to the questions of measures in What Does It Mean To Handle Collaboration And Conflict Better, Together?
Finally, the event-system distinction tells us handling is important because how you handle either becomes part of something which happens next. Events as problems are bounded – but not necessarily contained. (One solution to a budget overrun is to reallocate funds – and that relocates the effect somewhere else.) A technical solution might be appropriate – but could be insufficient. (Ever try to ensure the most basic IT security practices across an organization?) And we know that by engaging a system you become part of the conditions under which interdependence continues – or doesn’t. So handling might not end with the thing handled. There are downstream consequences to anticipate.
Seeing collaboration and conflict as events and systems, and understanding your agency and authorship in them, make them more readable. That’s where handling them better begins.
Test Drive Definitions
- Think of a collaboration or conflict situation you’re in. What happens if you look at it as an event, as a problem to solve? What happens if you look at it as a system you’re participating in? Does either view help you see something the other doesn’t?
- Think about a disagreement you’ve experienced with colleagues. If disagreement doesn’t necessarily mean conflict, what would distinguish collaboration from conflict in that situation? Does thinking about coordinated and contested interdependence change how you understand what happened?
- Think about agency and authorship in that situation. Whose ability to act and shape what happens next is being enabled or constrained? Does looking at the situation this way change how you judge what’s happening—or what you might do next?
The idea here is to test my ideas, not to test yourself. Reflection might answer questions – or raise more questions than you can answer. Both can help you understand how you orient yourself to work collaboration and conflict, and how you navigate them.