This article is by Peter T. Coleman, associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution and author of The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts.
Hostile takeovers and union walk-outs. Legal battles and shareholder revolts. Demanding regulators, impossible environmentalists, petulant executives and disillusioned workers.
Leaders today must navigate a convoluted and treacherous landscape of conflicting interests.
I recently worked with an organization that had been trapped by an intractable conflict. It had started as a problem between two co-workers.That dispute between two people spread and created factions beyond their department, culminating in accusations of harassment and racial discrimination. The result: disciplinary actions and the termination of one of the employees, which triggered a lawsuit against the organization that lasted for years. These events drove the company to expand its in-house office for legal counsel and transformed the company culture from open and collegial to cautious, paranoid and litigious.
Scholars estimate that about 5% of conflicts are like this. They become highly destructive and resistant to multiple good-faith efforts at resolution. This is why my colleagues and I set out to write our book, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts. We are a motley crew, an unlikely mix of social psychologists, an anthropologist, an astrophysicist, complexity scientists, conflict specialists, and peacemakers, brought together by a shared commitment to addressing the misery and mystery of impossible conflicts.
The insights in our book were born out of our own confusion, conflict, and nonlinearity. None of us could have accomplished this feat alone. Consequently, our ideas and methods often go against conventional wisdom in the field of conflict resolution, In fact, they tend to challenge it directly. This is part of our mad method: to create enough tension in our field to break through the current frames of understanding, in order to begin a new conversation where we must all think differently about the possibility of resolving impossible conflicts.
Here are a few guidelines from our book, which defy conventional wisdom on addressing difficult conflicts:
Envision complex networks of causation. Although these conflicts may start small, over time they gather new problems and grievances and disputants which combine in complicated ways to increase their intractability. It helps to understand this, even to map out the different parts of the conflict, in order to get a better sense of what’s operating. This is particularly important when the polarizing tide of Us vs. Them becomes strong at work and leads to the oversimplification of the sources of the conflict (Them!).
Circumvent the conflict. Research on difficult, enduring conflicts shows that direct intervention, such as attempts at negotiation or mediation of the problem, is not only ineffective but may in fact make matters worse. In these situations it may be best to avoid directly addressing the conflict for a while and instead work to increase positivity and decrease negativity between the disputants through channels that are completely unrelated to the presenting conflict.
Welcome weak power. Case studies of intractable conflicts where sustainable resolutions eventually emerged have taught us that forceful interventions by powerful authorities or third parties rarely help for long. Paradoxically, they have shown that it is often weaker third parties who often are most effective as catalysts for change. These people employ softer forms of power; they are trust-worthy, unthreatening, reliable, and they don’t have a strong agenda.
Support islands of agreement. Harvard Law Professor Gabriella Blum has found that during many protracted conflicts, the disputing parties often maintain areas in their relationship where they continue to communicate and cooperate, despite the severity of the conflict. In international affairs this can occur with some forms of trade, civilian exchanges or medical care. In organizations these islands may emerge around personal or professional crises (e.g., a sick child), outside interests (mutual work on common causes), or by way of chains of communications through trusted third parties.Bolstering such islands can mitigate tensions and help to contain the conflict.
Identify the invisible 5%. Because our perception is so strongly affected by tense conflicts (we tend to process negative information about the other side and ignore positive information), simply identifying the 5% of actions by the other side that are benign or even benevolent in intention can help to constrain the spread of negativity in conflict.
Capitalize on instability. Research has shown that enduring conflicts often become more amenable to resolution after some type of major shock has destabilized the system. When conflicts have dragged on for months or even years and have established a status quo of contentiousness, leaders should watch for moments of instability – ruptures in the day-to-day dynamics of the conflict-focused organization, which present opportunities for change. These can come from many sources, including scandals, economic crises, health crises, and other such jarring events. However, it is critical to realize that instability is only a necessary but insufficient condition for resolution.
Rethink time. Research has also shown that the changes brought on by destabilizing shocks to systems often don’t manifest right away. In fact with international conflicts, changes can take up to ten years after a major political shock before their effects take hold. (Note that the Arab Spring was triggered roughly ten years after 9/11 and the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.) Thus, conflicts of this nature require us to re-examine our tendency to think in terms of immediate cause and effect, and to understand that changes in some complex systems operate in radically different time frames.