Conflict is a signal.
Don't tune it out.
Earlier this week I was asked to talk to a group of 20 practitioners who work with leaders across civil society, who are all seeing a rise in the frequency and intensity of conflict.
My brief was to provide some guidance for these people who find themselves in a context where conflict is showing up in this way but they wouldn’t typically be expected to have the skills and experience to deal with it.
Given that conflict is both my job and one of my ‘intense interests’, I had to try and be as concise as possible.
When I sat down to prepare for the meeting, the thing I wrote in big, bold, black letters, in the middle of the page was this:
Conflict is not a problem to be solved. Conflict is a signal and a symptom.
I’ll tell you what I went on to share with them later that morning.
When conflict shows up, we focus on its content - the words, behaviour and interactions of the people who seem to be having it.
As a result, our focus is on those externalities - and typically, what we can do to make them go away. Even if that is dressed up as ‘conflict resolution’ or ‘conflict transformation’.
This is because all of us are conditioned to see conflict as a negative. That idea creates (and is created by) the difficult feelings we experience when conflict arises.
So we try and get people to communicate differently, to see each others’ point of view and change their behaviour.
There is a place for this, but because it stems from an idea that conflict is bad and it needs to go away, we actually miss this simple fact - that conflict is a signal.
Every moment you move to resolve or manage it, you're tuning that signal out.
What’s more confronting, and important to recognise, is that any attempt to make it go away stems from your own inability to sit with it.
As someone who finds themselves on the edges of other people’s conflict, the first job is to learn how to sit with all the feelings and notice all the urges that being witness to it brings up.
Treat them with kindness and compassion. Hold them. Let them be there.
You have to do it to the point where you are listening to everything that's happening in the room, without judgement or bias - especially the behaviours and opinions you find most difficult.
Up until this point, you’re intervening in a way that is not only unhelpful but is only in service of your own needs for ease and comfort.
But when you can sit with it, holding your own ‘stuff’ in the background and being present to the clean reality of what’s happening, then you create the possibility for others to do the same.
Paradoxically, it’s their inability to do it which creates the disconnection that everyone wants to resolve in the first place.
While we might focus on the things we can see or hear when it comes to conflict - it is not really created by the words or the behaviour. All external presentations of conflict are just symptoms.
The conflict itself is created by conditions and context - and this is the reason why many of us are seeing more of it, everywhere.
The pressures on individuals, organisations and communities - from dwindling funding, cost of living crises, geo-political horrors - these tensions and stressors create the inner instability that many of us are feeling.
When we're unstable on the inside, we react more readily on the outside. We’re primed to react, because we hold an unconscious sense that there is danger and threat around us, which we need to be vigilant to.
So while you might be seeing unkind words or reactive behaviours, these are all stemming from the dysregulated inner state of the people involved in the conflicts
When you - as a practitioner - learn to sit, notice and listen, you begin to regulate your own nervous system, which creates the internal conditions to be fully present.
From that place you create the possibility to get 'under' the conflict. To create the calm, quiet space that allows those involved to work through it, surface what’s not being seen, and to do so with less drama and sense of ‘survive or die’.
By taking a wider - or deeper - perspective, you depersonalise the conflict and instead shine a light on the systemic pressures which affect all of us, rather than reinforcing the idea that someone is right and good, and someone is bad and wrong.
Even if you struggle with the behaviour that someone is exhibiting, just forcing yourself to take that step back and see that person as an actor in a play that’s being directed by forces greater than each of us can help ease the judgement and regulate your own nervous system.
And as I said, in this is the paradox - only by allowing the conflict to be as it needs to be, not judging it or those participating, that you'll create the possibility for anything to change in a way that brings people closer together, or for change to turn into something genuinely creative and sustainable.
If you want to start learning how to work with conflict, the How to Fight Well online course is a self-paced, six week programme that you can get started on now in an affordable and accessible way - watch the trailer here
Alongside this, I’ve created a library of articles on some of the fundamental principles of working with health conflict, over on the How to Fight Well Medium publication