Handling better, together, means at least handling effectively. But does it also mean handling ethically? Can you separate them?
Characteristics Of Collaboration And Conflict – Revisited
Work is made interdependent by the relationships between so many things running in so many directions – not just in the content of things related.
Strategy depends on operations and operations on strategy. Initiatives depend on projects, projects on tasks, tasks on activities – while what happens downstream can change what is possible upstream. People depend on processes and processes on people. An organization depends on markets, suppliers, customers, regulators – and they depend on organizations.
Interdependence can be coordinated or contested, and collaboration and conflict are coordinated and contested interdependence respectively. Both have the nature of interdependence, which takes two forms or modes – events and systems.
Interdependence can show up as events, systems, or both. The difference has to do with your relationship to them. You can act on an event as a thing separate from you, and for which your action doesn’t necessarily loop back into it. You act in a system because you’re in it, and because your action does become part of it and what is possible next. We can depict these relationships this way:1The matrix isn’t intended to be ontological so that collaboration and conflict are four discrete types of things out there in the world, waiting to be sorted this way. It’s intended to be analytic so that thinking through a moment or situation along these two axes helps you see and handle yourself in them.
| Act On | Act In | |
| Coordinated | Collaboration as a bounded event — a definable situation with identifiable conditions | Collaboration as an ongoing system — conditions neither party fully controls, changing as participants engage |
| Contested | Conflict as a bounded event — a definable situation with identifiable conditions | Conflict as an ongoing system — conditions neither party fully controls, changing as participants engage |
Agency, Authorship, And Acts Of Judgment
The matrix depicts the conditions in which you act. Agency is your capacity to act within those conditions – including the capacity to be aware of why you’re acting one way and not some other. Authorship is your ability to shape what happens next through the exercise of agency, and accountability for your contribution to what follows. It concerns whether and how you exercise that capacity and the consequences or effects which follow – whether you’re willing to own them or not.
Agency and authorship change as you move through the matrix’s quadrants. We can reframe the obvious question about what handling looks like in each quadrant, to a better functional question – what does exercising agency and authorship look like here?
In a contested or conflict event, for example, agency might be constrained and enabled by formal organizational policy and procedure. The grievance you filed affords certain actions (enablement) within the rules of the grievance procedure (constraint), conducted fairly or unfairly due to organizational culture (the system). If the system is known to be fair or unfair, you judge what that does to your capacity to act (agency) which informs whether and how you participate (authorship).
Let’s say your team operates with coordinated interdependence, but you’re not sure that’s leadership’s mode (two systems – one within the other). An after-action review (event) surfaces a clear, important change to make (enablement) received skeptically by leadership (constraint) because of its resource requirements (system). You feel strongly about the change and are welcome to continue the conversation about it (agency), but you can do little beyond recommend (authorship).
Purpose affects judgment and action. You might file a grievance as a payback, to right a wrong, or to prove a point about the system. You might conduct an after-action review to fix a problem, assign blame, credit your team, or risk taking heat to make a point. Same action – file a grievance, conduct an after-action review – different aims. Whether and how you exercise agency and authorship depend, in part, on what your acts of judgment tell you to do within and about conditions, toward your purpose.
Purpose also affects how you measure effectiveness. Did filing that grievance pay anyone back, right a wrong, or prove your point? Did your after-action review fix a problem, get blame properly assigned, your team properly credited, and did you take heat make a point? Effectiveness is measured in technical ways depending on the means-ends relationships you chose.2While there is no single, agreed upon set of collaboration and conflict measures, scholars and practitioners discuss useful ways to measure practices, depending on purpose. Satisfaction with outcomes, effects on relationships, reduced recurrence, and lower transaction costs is one set. (William Ury, Jeanne M. Brett, Stephen B. Goldberg. Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict.) Fairness, efficiency, stability, and wisdom is another (Lawrence Susskind and Jeffrey Cruikshank. Breaking The Impasse: Consensual Approaches To Resolving Disputes).
But is effectiveness the only way to judge a purpose?
Does Purpose Entail Ethics?
Purpose doesn’t just establish a relationship between your actions and intended outcomes. Pursuing it affects what becomes possible for others’ actions and outcomes – whether you intend those effects or not – and that has ethical implications.
Filing a grievance to protect your rights has a different effect on someone’s agency and authorship than filing as an act of vengeance. Performing that after-action review to fix a problem has a different effect on others’ agency and authorship than performing it to shift blame.
The difference in intent is obvious, and you can easily judge one course of action as more or less ethical than the other. What’s less obvious is that the ethics of what you do isn’t necessarily limited to the people, moment, or situation immediately in front of you. Ethics “happen” and matter at a systems level, too.
At a systems level, patterns of grievances – of filing, not filing, and how they’re conducted – become part of how the grievance system works. Not just the literal working of the procedures, but what the system means to people in the organization. Is it trustworthy or weaponized? Legitimate or performative?
Purpose entails ethics at a systems level because individual uses of a system, accumulated over time, become part of the conditions in which others exercise agency and authorship – and can expand or constrain what’s available to them. This is how acting well and acting rightly come together. Where effectiveness asks whether your actions serve a purpose, ethics asks what that purpose – and the means used to pursue it – does to other people and to the conditions in which they can act.
Purpose is ethically assessable because it necessarily has ethical implications – but those implications don’t, by themselves, establish whether the purpose is legitimate.
Handling better, together, asks more than whether what you do works. It asks that, but it also asks what your actions make possible for others. You judge what will work, what your actions make possible for others in the moment, and what those actions do within the systems you’re acting in.
Test Drive Handling Better, Together
Here are some things to try, to test drive ideas in this blog:
- Think of a collaboration or conflict situation you’re in. What happens if you look at it as an event you’re acting on, or as a system you’re acting in? Does either perspective change what you think you can accomplish, or how you might go about it? What if both perspectives apply?
- Think about what you’re trying to accomplish in that situation. What if you were pursuing a different purpose? Would that change what you consider important, how you judge your options, or what counts as effective handling? What does that suggest about the relationship between purpose and effectiveness?
- Consider how pursuing your purpose affects others’ agency and authorship. What does it make more or less possible for others, both in the immediate situation and in the systems you’re participating in? What if you pursued the same purpose differently? Would that change what becomes possible for others – and does that change how you judge whether you’re handling the situation better?
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.