There is an article in the Volunteer Leadership issue of Associations Now titled, “Balanced Conflict, Better Decisions.”

The conclusions in the article concern me. I’m paraphrasing here, but the article says:

• “Cognitive” conflict is about contradictory perspectives, where “affective” conflict is personalized, emotional, and political.
• Association boards make better decisions by delegating cognitive conflict to task forces, but dealing with affective conflict at Board meetings.
• For-profit boards do this the other way around.
• In a “fair and transparent” process for strategic decisions, “conflict managed or preempted” is step NINE in an eleven step process.

I am a conflict resolution professional, and I spend a LOT of my time helping people to understand what conflict is and how to resolve it. Most of us grow up, go through school, and advance in our careers without getting any formal instruction in conflict or conflict resolution. So I spend  a lot of time educating. My twenty years in the conflict resolution field runs counter to the above conclusions in some pretty important ways.

First, I’ve had it with the good/bad conflict thing, particularly when all things rational are good and all things emotional or political are bad. Stop this. Brain science tells us otherwise. The emotional center of your brain literally sends its signals faster than the rational center. You have your emotions BEFORE you have a chance to rationalize them away. As such, all conflict has an emotional component to it simply because all conflict involves human beings. We need to accept this fact and start dealing with it. Politics are woven into our cognitive conflict all the time. Conflict is about differing interests and needs, which sometimes connect to rational ideas, and sometimes to things like meaning, values, emotions, and the political needs of interest groups. It’s all in there, and we need to build the capacity to deal with all that complexity.

Second, you don’t delegate conflict. If you can delegate it to another group, then wasn’t really your conflict to begin with. I’m all for pushing conflict down in the organization–get the people who have the conflict to actually resolve it, instead of letting them push it up the chain.  Often, they are just being weak/lazy when they ask the higher ups to resolve it. Of course if the Board is supposed to be making strategic decisions, and those strategy choices have conflict embedded in them (which they usually do), then that Board needs to suck it up and deal with the conflict. If the Board doesn’t have time to do this, then we should be more honest and say that our Board’s role is in high-level oversight of strategic decisions, rather than in making strategic decisions themselves.

Third, I’m going to go out on a limb here (since I have ZERO experience with corporate boards) and boldly declare that corporate boards have absolutely nothing to do with associations and should never be used as a basis for comparison. Period. It’s useless to compare because the context and rules are so different. Let’s not waste our time.

Fourth, you don’t manage conflict at the end. You manage it all the time. You manage it when the issues are defined at the very beginning, you manage it when you decide how to collect data. You manage it when you analyze the data, and you obviously manage it when you work through to agreement on what to do next. And when you resolve a particular conflict, it often simply sets you up for the next conflict you are going to deal with. Conflict is a natural part of every system. It flows all the time. It emerges on a timeline that you can’t particularly control. Forcing these organic dynamics into our mechanical processes is a recipe for failure.

I know conflict is not easy. And I know that when emotions and politics get involved, it can get harder. And yes, we’ve all been part of groups where decisions fail (or are not made) because conflict got in the way. But the question is not should conflict be a part, or what kind of conflict should be there. Conflict is there. The systems that are most effective in shaping their own future will have very strong and refined skills in dealing with conflict (of all types). The people who operate in positions of authority in these systems will be able to behave more effectively in conflict situations. Start building that capacity, and you’ll start to see better decisions.