FOUR
From Conflict to Collaboration
Emilia Melville and Hen Wilkinson
One of the most intriguing aspects of the experience of lockdown
is coming face to face with ourselves and those we live most closely
with. For many, navigating daily relationships at home and work
is an exercise in dodging difficult conversations. When there is no
way out –physically or psychologically –we are left confronting
our own internal contradictions as well as butting up against the
competing interests of others.
This chapter explores what impact a greater awareness and
understanding of those small, everyday conflicts –within
ourselves as much as with others –could have on our collective
future. It reframes conflict as inevitable, normal and not
necessarily destructive, an integral part of all human interaction
and one that serves a useful purpose, directing our attention to
issues that need addressing and reminding us that our interests
and worldviews are not necessarily those of others. This
understanding leads to a flexibility in thought and imagination,
which is a key skill for navigating our relationships at home
and at work, as well as for collaborative working in any arena.
Conflict skills are also essential for effective stewarding of
commons at any scale, the concept of commons here referring
to shared resources –from the quality of silence on your street
during lockdown to public health or climate change impacts.
What COVID-19 and lockdown has made more evident is
what we take for granted: when crisis happens, we recognize
the layers of hidden relationships and shared world that we all
inhabit. Recognizing these hidden relationships can help us
to better steward the commons.
31
Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis
In this context, we draw on a conversation between Paul
Kahawatte (P), Hen Wilkinson (H) and Emilia Melville
(E) exploring the potential for the lockdown to transform our
experiences of conflict in a positive way. We know that for
many people lockdown is hard and dangerous, and that conflict
in domestic violence situations may be deadly. However, crisis
calls for work of the imagination, and so this chapter aims
to leave you with some clues and excitement about how we
might transform our experiences of conflict and what this
might mean for the world after COVID-19.
What is conflict?
P: ‘Our culture doesn’t teach us much that’s useful about
how to relate internally, interpersonally, how to operate
in groups. Groups often find themselves in a mess.
Even when people have done lots of work looking at
themselves, they can still slip back into patterns around
conflict that don’t work so well.’
A widespread reluctance to engage with conflict in any
form is perhaps in part because it is often conflated in our
minds with the idea of violence, and we are given little or
no training around how to manage interpersonal conflict as
we grow up. When we are not in lockdown, we can dodge
facing these differences through avoidance strategies –putting
off the conversation, leaving the room or house, arranging
diversionary activities. But when we have no choice about
staying or going, we are forced into negotiations. How each
of us individually understands conflict and our particular ways
of engaging with it will affect those negotiations and how we
engage with the views of others.
H: ‘Conflict is an indicator of something within a
system that is clashing, not necessarily wrong, an
32
From Conflict to Collaboration
indicator of where to put some attention. Conflict is a
complex system, with multiple routes through. Where
systems bump up against each other there will always be
friction –this is where my sense of inevitability comes
from. It is how we manage, understand, engage with
conflict that takes us to a next place.’
P: ‘I feel 100% aligned around the inevitability and at
least neutrality of conflict, I think it can even be positive.
Something that emerges within systems, at the overlap
of systems, and it’s more about how we engage with it.
It’s a process, not a thing. Feedback that something is not
working very well, or there’s an opportunity to evolve.
And if we don’t give it attention it will raise its volume
much of the time.’
H: ‘I’m keen to avoid framing conflict as wrong or as a
problem because I think that’s the very thing that leads
to conflict avoidance and to a lack of skills.’
Although our experiences of conflict are often difficult, it is
in fact a useful form of feedback. Without an understanding
of conflict as normal, it becomes frightening, an exercise in
wielding power of multiple types.
H: ‘It’s power relations in action –how you position
yourself or are positioned (or maybe a bit of both),
the interface between our own internal worlds and
programmings and the external worlds and contexts that
we’re operating in. Conflict itself is neither good or bad
but an inevitable dynamic in human interaction.’
What form conflict takes depends on what form power takes.
One form of power derives from being a trusted person in
a community.
33
Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis
H: ‘Conflict is a localized dynamic, different in different
cultures and communities and closely related to trust.
When I did an exercise based on power and agency
around sorting out water shortages with development
workers in Yemen in 2014, the person with the least
relevance in that situation was the local policeman.
When I do the same exercise around local community
development in the UK, the police tend to be among
the most relevant.’
In many urban areas of the global north, community has been
eroded such that we don’t know who to trust. What if we knew
of people we could reach out to for help with conflict before
it got to the point where we needed to call the emergency
services?
How can we transform our approach to conflict?
P: ‘The management thinker Mary Parker Follett1
suggests that “there are three ways of dealing with
difference: domination, compromise and integration.
By domination, only one side gets what it wants;
by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by
integration we find a way by which both sides may get
what they wish.” ’
How can we transform our understanding of and approaches to
conflict so that we increasingly see options beyond domination
or compromise? We live in a complex world of interlocking
systems –as the pandemic has made clear –and so we need to
engage with conflict at multiple levels, including the systems
and processes we turn to when we face conflict, and the way
we understand our own internal world.
Anxiety is a key component of conflict, both impeding
clear communication and an outcome of an unsuccessful
34
From Conflict to Collaboration
interaction. Having in place prior understandings and skills in
relation to managing conflict has been shown to greatly reduce
anxiety, both at a personal and at a shared level of experience.2
Suddenly being locked down in a house with people you may
or may not have chosen to be with or know well, you may feel
anxiety about whether negotiations will lead to collaboration
or competition –something that will only emerge over time.
But if you are confident of a common vocabulary and approach
to the situation, the chances of a constructive outcome are
greatly increased.
P: ‘In his work on restorative systems, Dominic Barter3
talks about the need for prior agreement about how we’ll
handle conflict. He uses the metaphor of human dwellings,
where you’ll always find some version of a kitchen and some
version of a bedroom. That’s because humans have noticed
that with a certain rhythm they get tired, they get hungry,
and rather than wondering what to do every day they get
ready for it –a bed, a kitchen. What’s the equivalent of that
for conflict? If we stand back we see that conflict also arises
with a rhythm –it’s part of life. So how do we prepare for
that in the same way that we build a kitchen? It’s a terrible
idea to build your kitchen when you’re really hungry, or
your bed when you’re really tired. It’s even worse to set
up your agreements about how you handle conflict when
you’re in conflict because you may not even be talking to
each other.’
P: ‘There’s a framework developed by Miki Kashtan4 [see
Chapter Seventeen in this book] that I find quite helpful,
both in terms of smaller units like an organization or a
family and at a much larger social scale. Kashtan identifies
five systems: decision making; resource flow –how we
share resources; how we engage with conflict; how we
gather feedback –or not; and information flow –how
information flows within whatever unit you’re talking
35
Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis
about. I think it’s useful to think of a sixth also, support
and care. Part of this perspective, from Dominic Barter’s
work, is that we have a pattern or system for handling
these parts of life, whether or not we have noticed it or
chosen it. We can’t avoid having a way of organizing
these aspects of life.’
We don’t currently know when the lockdown is going to
lift, or how. But we can share information about how we are
all doing with our families, people we share a house with,
our neighbours. There could be feedback if someone lights
a barbeque in their garden and a neighbour says the smoke is
coming in through their windows, or if noise from builders is
bothering them. There is information when we walk in the
park and see how many people are wearing masks and staying
two metres away from each other.
We also need to develop our understanding of our internal
worlds. We often fail to recognize how easily good projects and
initiatives are brought down by individual lack of self-awareness,
by adversarial and confrontational ways of communicating that
bring about the collapse of collective endeavour.
H: ‘Experience of training development workers
across multiple environments has led to an interesting
observation: that while people can be taught processes,
actual agreements are often stymied by the entrenched
positions held by individuals. The importance of each
individual developing a deeper, personal understanding
of the nature of conflict and how they engage with it
is essential but often bypassed in conflict training. This
level of internal, visceral understanding is as key to
unlocking lasting agreements with others as setting up
conflict processes in advance [as discussed earlier]. In
over 20 years of using experiential exercises to bring
alive people’s own individual responses to conflict, I’ve
36
From Conflict to Collaboration
seen how this enables them to reflect on themselves.
This regularly leads to lightbulb moments and ongoing
lasting change in their relationship with conflict and
others. One piece of feedback from work in Yemen,
for example, was that while development workers are
often taught what to do in relation to conflict, they
had never previously been shown how to get people to
do it. Now that they understood how they themselves
operated in and around conflict, they had a far better
understanding of others’ responses and how to engage
with them.’
One approach to facilitating such ‘lightbulb moments’ is
walking people through Argyris’ Ladder of Inference (see
Figure 4.1). This enables them to understand how they form
their worldviews (from the moment of birth onwards) and
how this then affects their actions and decision making in all
spheres of their lives (note the feedback loop, which causes
us all to self-select information that fits our internal framing
of some event or idea). It also brings home how others form
their worldviews and leads to the unforgettable realization that
there is therefore no right or wrong in anyone’s worldview,
simply difference.
Another approach is to ask a group to respond to three
conflict scenarios – in the street, at home and then at
work –by standing on pre-prepared written words on the
ground that are closest to their first reaction: walk away,
laugh, intervene, silence and so forth. As you ask people to
explain where they are standing and why, multiple reasons
for any one person’s response in any one moment emerge,
immediately highlighting how differently we all act in
different situations. The nuances of conflict jump out, from
the significance of immediate contexts (hunger, tiredness)
to previous experiences (how conflict was dealt with in
our childhood) or a sudden awareness of our simultaneous
37
Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis
Figure 4.1: Recognizing our own worldviews
I take action based on my beliefs
I adopt beliefs about the world
I draw conclusions
You can improve communication (and challenge your own
assumptions) by: I make assumptions
based on the meanings I added
• Reflection – be more aware of your own thinking and
reasoning I add meanings
• Advocacy – make your thinking and reasoning clear to others (cultural and personal)
• Enquiry – ask about the thinking and reasoning of others
I select data from what I observe
Observable ‘data’ and experiences
(as a videotape recorder might
capture it)
Source: Author’s own, based on the Ladder of Inference model developed
by Chris Argyris and reproduced in Senge (1994).5
reactions to conflict at physical, emotional and intellectual
levels. The inaccurate idea that we are restricted to binary
‘fight or flight’ reactions to conflict is immediately dispelled
as everyone in the room identifies the subtlety and flexibility
of their own and others’ conflict responses.
These are simple but highly significant learnings and come
into their own when trying to shape group agreements.
Suddenly, there is less certainty about the ‘rightness’ of any
one individual’s approach, and less need to defend a stance
at all costs once it is understood how fluid our experiences
truly are. Following on from that, there is more openness to
the views of others and to understanding conflict as a moment
when different views meet rather than a tussle between right
and wrong/your way or my way. The binary concept of
conflict is diluted further, and more space arrives in the room
to accommodate the thinking of others.
Changing our understanding of conflict
At this moment of being confronted with scarcity and
challenge –as will be the case more often in future as
38
From Conflict to Collaboration
climate and ecological collapses unfold –it is fundamental
that we develop experiences, systems, processes and skills
for communities to navigate collaboratively rather than
competitively. Competitive response to collapse would be
disastrous. The more we can collaborate, the more likely we
are to be able to take care of commons at all scales, from the
peacefulness of our streets to the prosperity of our towns
to the climate of our planet.
Community and commons emerge where there is shared risk
and shared prosperity, and in such situations there is increased
potential for conflict. Just as learning to see our own inner conflicts
helps us to navigate conflict with others successfully, the successful
management of commons at a global scale, such as a peaceful and
just response to climate change, begins with having experiences
of positive navigation of conflict in our daily lives.
E: ‘The clear conclusion that Elinor Ostrom6 came to
when she was looking at how people manage commons
round the world was that where people were successful
there were accessible and quick means of addressing
conflict. An example of commons working well were
irrigation systems where a really important person in
the community was the water arbitrator. People knew
who that person was and they were always very easy to
access when needed.’
Sustainable collaboration demands the active acknowledgement
and working through of conflicts, an ongoing process of
developing a shared collaborative ethos that underpins
management of commons and encourages increased levels
of reflexivity among all those working together. The more
that skills and structures for managing inevitable conflicts are
embedded in everyday life (from political systems and societal
structures to institutions, agencies and individuals), the more
easily and creatively differences of interest and worldview
are accommodated.
39
Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis
P: ‘People love to collaborate, almost more than anything
else, if you create the conditions for collaboration rather
than for competition.’
The possibility of transformation
As so many of the chapters in this book argue, COVID-
19 and lockdown have taken us to a moment of viscerally
experiencing our interdependence: in shared risk, shared care,
shared experience. This interdependence is revealed at the
personal, local, national and global and international scale as
the commons of public health comes into sharp focus. In our
homes there is no escape from the emotions in the household,
the noise on our street, relationship tensions and our own inner
demons. We are cracked open by shared risk.
P: ‘The illusion of everything being fine, everything good
to carry on, business as usual –that’s not an illusion for a
lot of people because their faces are right in it inevitably,
every day, they know that things aren’t working –the
illusion has been shattered.’
During lockdown, some people are stuck in abusive situations
and cannot escape, or are alone or struggling with mental
ill health. There may be no way out without external help.
For others, dealing with working at home plus childcare, or
overloaded as a key worker, there is no space to do anything
differently. However, the cracks are where the light comes
in, and there is an opportunity here to get to know ourselves
better. Our own anxieties, thought patterns and how we are
affected by each moment are there to see. We are seeing the
same small number of humans every day –whoever we are
living with, our neighbours, or our own selves. So we can’t get
away from negotiations. We may be more willing to articulate
our experience to other people, where otherwise we would
have stayed silent, because there is nowhere to go to get away
40
From Conflict to Collaboration
from it. We talk to our housemates about how strictly they or
we follow lockdown rules, as this affects the value of our own
efforts. And if communication goes badly, lockdown affords
us another chance and another and another.
Being confronted with the unknown of how the world will
be after the virus is deeply unsettling, but within it there is
the possibility of learning and of change. In lockdown, there
is an opportunity to nurture the seeds of self-knowledge
and to open up collaborative conversations with others that
allow our experiences of conflict to be transformed. After
COVID-19, we need the imagination to bring this learning
to multiple arenas of our lives, from personal relationships to
group endeavours and the stewarding of our commons.
41
