conflict is useful

I had an interesting conversation about conflict on teams last week that made we want to collect and share some stuff about conflict & how it plays out on teams.

I’m a bit in love with this manifesto…

We invite diversity into our community not because it is politically correct but because diverse viewpoints are demanded by the manifold mysteries of great things.
We embrace ambiguity not because we are confused or indecisive but because we understand the inadequacy of our concepts to embrace the vastness of great things.
We welcome creative conflict not because we are angry or hostile but because conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the nature of great things.
We practice honesty not only because we owe it to one another but because to lie about what we have seen would be to betray the truth of great things.
We experience humility not because we have fought and lost but because humility is the only lens through which great things can be seen – and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.
The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer

Conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the nature of great things. Wow. That’s a really important thing to think about. I recall reading something Alistair Cockburn said about teams needing conflict – it was less beautiful than that quote above, but the same idea. Despite our need for it, conflict is scary and socially unacceptable (well, depending on your society). But. Agile teams are, like the old MTV Real World (back when the people were actually interesting without manufactured melodrama), a place where people start getting real. So conflict is more likely to get expressed.

Knowing you’re going to have conflict, the team needs a way to talk about it – sometimes, the team needs permission to talk about it. It helps to bring this up as the team forms, which is conveniently an awesome time to practice, since learning to work together tends to bring out clashes of people and perspective.

You need, as a team, to essentially come to agreement that conflict can be useful or not: “I disagree with that… here’s why” is a natural part of collaboration, while an angry “everything about you infuriates me” vibe – while true, and an allowable feeling – sucks. So find a way to talk about degree of feeling/passion, and what’s safe to express within the team.

I think it’s easier to talk about conflict with a vocabulary model for the team. A team might choose their own, or use what others have created.

Plenty of experts and amateurs have developed models or theories to talk about types of and approaches to conflict. Here are a handful:

• Relationship-Data-Interest-Structure-Value
• Dependence-Style-Background-Leadership-Personality (The semi-inclusion of “gender” in “background” annoys my inner feminist – I think there’s a fine argument for learned gender differences as a form of background, but why call it out separate from any other quality?)
• The popular Thomas-Kilmann Accommodating-Competing-Avoiding-Compromising-Collaborating model (which is more about ways of handling conflict than types of it)

Just getting comfortable labeling and talking about conflict seems to help teams work in it. I’ll write more later on some of the resources I’ve seen for deciding what to do with a conflict.

Some less-organized thoughts on conflict…
While I was looking for whatever Alistair Cockburn said about conflict, I wandered into this blog post on conflict-handling dysfunctions; it’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s a nice little survey of quotes.

If you’re near Richmond, my friend Lyssa is doing an evening introduction to a conflict model I like: 9/15/09, info via Agile Richmond. She also presented it at Agile 2009 – and is doing it again for Agile Development Practices. So many ways to acquire this information.