Can Conflict Be Good?

At the turn of the 20th Century there was a race to be the first to develop powered flight.

People all over the world, from backyard tinkerers to government funded teams were attacking the problem.

The surprising winners were two brothers who ran a bicycle shop in Ohio.

In December 1903, Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright successfully flew their plane four miles along the coast of North Carolina.

They succeeded where others failed because they loved a good argument.

Their father had taught them how to debate when they were children.

“The greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.” - Orville Wright

He would give them a topic, assign each one to a different standpoint and let them debate, then after twenty minutes, they would swap sides and make the other argument.

The brothers learned that arguing was the fastest and most efficient way to uncover truths and develop new ideas.

Ian Leslie, author of books on behaviour, quotes Charles Taylor, who worked for the Wright Cycle Company, saying: “The boys were working out a lot of theory in those days, and occasionally they would get into terrific arguments. They’d shout at each other something terrible. I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.”

After one heated argument about the propeller design, they both managed to convince the other to switch their views, leaving them with different opposing views.

Wilbur described powered flight as a problem that, “could not be solved by stumbling upon a secret, but by the patient accumulation of information upon a hundred different points some of which an investigator would naturally think it unnecessary to go into deeply.”

But through this heated process they were able to work through the complexity of the problem.

And through argument they were able to get to that truth much faster than anyone else.

As Wilbur said, “No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth…Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly.”

“In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.” - Peter Senge

Task & Relationship Conflict

The key thing about the Wright brothers was that although there were passionate arguments they were never personal.

The arguments were always task based, with the focus on improving their combined knowledge and ideas.

The average person spends more than two hours every week dealing with workplace conflicts.*

And that conflict falls into two types: task conflict, or relationship conflict.

Task conflicts are clashes about ideas, opinions, procedures, or decisions, all focused on how the problems are being addressed.

Task conflict is people against a problem.

Relationship conflicts are personal, emotional clashes filled with friction and animosity, with little respect to the task at hand.

Relationship conflict is people against people.

Hundreds of studies across over eight thousand teams have collectively shown that task conflict can stimulate a team’s creativity, critical thinking and facilitate superior group performance.**

But there is an ideal zone.

Too little task conflict can lead to inactivity and complacency.

“The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy. If you’re in a group where people never disagree, the only way that could really happen is if people don’t care enough to speak their minds." - Adam Grant

Too much task conflict can build into relationship conflict and if debates persist it prevents projects from progressing.***

And while task conflict, for non-routine issues is positive, it can cause negativity in routine situations.

Relationship conflict is always negative.

“A lot of problems in the world would be solved if we talked to each other instead of about each other.” - Nicky Gumbel

As the psychologist Adam Grant puts it:

Task Conflict: “We’re going to solve this problem”

Relationship Conflict: “You’re the problem.”

Proactive Conflict

“Proactive disagreement is a critical life skill.” - Adam Grant

In his book ‘Think Again’ Adam Grant discussed his research of teams working in Silicon Valley:

“The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on and were so busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel comfortable challenging one another.”

“Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don’t come from our side.”

“What happened in the high-performing groups? … They started with low relationship conflict and kept it low throughout their work together. That didn’t stop them from having task conflict at the outset: they didn’t hesitate to surface competing perspectives. As they resolved some of their differences of opinion, they were able to align on a direction and carry out their work until they ran into new issues to debate.”

“Task conflict can be constructive when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships.”

So conflict can be a good thing, if you use it in the right way, at the right times, like the Wright brothers.

“I see that you are back to your old trick of giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel pretty certain of my own ground, but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways of looking at things.” - Wilbur Wright in a letter to Orville

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* CPP Inc., “Workplace conflict and how businesses can harness it to thrive: CPP Global Human Capital Report,” Consulting Psychologists Press (2008)

** Frank R C de Wit, Karen A. Jehn, “The Paradox of Intragroup Conflict: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology (2012)

*** Karen A. Jehn, “A Multimethod Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1995)