These types of conflicts are as old as the hills, and they pop up regularly. There are a few things to get straight before you decide how to deal with this problem.
Who is your boss?
Not all bosses are alike. Some use conflict as part of their management strategy. Some fall into conflict because they are not great at managing their emotions. And some, are in the conflict game to push institutional strategy forward. You deal with each type differently.
If your boss uses conflict as part of a management strategy, you need to figure out the underlying game. Usually it is to motivate staff to perform. If so, you need to start focusing on the metrics that he or she is using and become a star performer.
If your boss is an emotional mess, becoming a star performer may not help much. Most of the problems here relate to insecurity and fear of failure. Your job is to help your boss deal with those emotions.
If your boss is trying to push a new agenda, you have to decide if you are for or against that agenda. If you8 are for it, advertise that to your boss. Become part of the new wave team. Fight with him or her to get the change implemented.
Who are you?
The problem is not just about who your boss is. You also need to take a close look at yourself. Before you start feeling defensive, this is not just about identifying where you screwed up. It is about honestly asking whether you are motivated to exceed expectations, whether you are focused on what needs to get done, and whether you are able to work in teams to do that. If you are ace in all three areas, there is something wrong with your boss. If you are not, there is something you can change in yourself.
Here is the thing. You have the option of leaving your job. But you only want to do that if you have good alternatives, and your current situation is suboptimal. If you don’t want to pull the exit cord, you need to work with your boss to figure out how to transcend the conflict.
Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, but that does not mean that his brand of populist political agitation is dead. Sad to say, there is a core or rump level of support for the absurd conspiracy theories that he and his cohorts put out there (most in the news – the strange idea that the 2020 election was stolen from him).
And we have other strands of populist conviction that cause trouble. The anti-vaxer movement comes to mind. The common reaction to anti-vaxers is to use “mandates” – to force vaccinations. And this works, to a certain extent. Coercion is like that.
But coercion does not remove the underlying cause for the weird populist conviction. Where does that come from and what can be done about it? The answer is simpler than many would think. We start with a basic principle – populist thinking is not based on reason. It is based on emotion. So using reason to counter populism is like using a fart to counter a wind storm. Forget it.
Any counter populist movement has to play in the same arena that the populists play in – the emotional arena. And it has to use the language of the people with whom we want to have a dialog. So forget using those Ivy League policy wonk dudes for this task. And what kind of messaging works? It is a language that calls people to action. That calls for people to do things (not just have opinions). And it is language that builds trust in the leadership. The goal is to rebuild a bridge of trust between rank and file citizens and leadership.
That type of counter populist movement goes to work in regions and locales where populism has its roots. Not in national capitals. Not among the rich and powerful. And not among the academics.
As I propose this, I immediately bump into a problem. Who does this sort of thing? Where are the places where people who want to take counter-populist leadership roles to get into the fray?
The answer may be found in Texas. The anti-abortion law passed by the GOP led state government plays on an old populist theme. It has been put on hold by a federal judge, but the issues are joined. Will we see a counter-populist leadership arise in Texas that empowers women to fight for their rights?
Going back to 9/11, the US faced a new kind of strategic peril. Seemingly out of the blue, it had been attacked by terrorist groups. Of course, this was “out of the blue” only to those who had not been following the news. Terrorism as a tactic goes way back, perhaps as far back as the Munich Olympics in 1972. And it would appear that the US has learned little about how to cope with this strategic peril.
What did we do? We invaded Afghanistan, thought to be the haven for al qaeda. We easily occupied the country, and proclaimed that we would transform it into a more modern nation state that is wedded to the rule of law and respecting human rights. Twenty years later, the US pulled out of Afghanistan having achieved little. We invaded Iraq as well, and we deposed its dictator. When we pulled out, the power vacuum spilled into Syria, and sparked a regional conflict that has killed thousands but resolved little.
Using hindsight, it is more clear now that using military tactics to exterminate terrorists in their locales has limited effectiveness. A defensive strategy might have been wiser.
At the same time, that does not mean that the US would pull back behind its defensive barriers, as the Athenians did when Sparta attacked. The US has other ways to play offense against terrorism. And we do that by promoting our values.
Of course, we did the opposite, embracing torture and incarceration without due process for suspected terrorists.
What does this tell us about ourselves? Perhaps our strategists were less clever than we would have wished. And perhaps our values are not quite as clear as we would think.
Start here iwith the beautiful day story to open minds to the way we connect or disconnect.
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats,” and truer words were scarcely ever spoken. We tend to think that if an idea has merit, everybody will immediately recognize its value, but that’s almost never true.
Ignaz Semmelweis, quite famously, advocated for hand washing at hospitals, but was ostracized, not celebrated, for it and would himself die of an infection contracted under care before his idea caught on. William Coley discovered cancer immunotherapy over a century ago, but was thought by many to be some sort of a quack.
Good ideas fail all the time. Part of the problem is that people who believe passionately in an idea feel compelled to win over the skeptics. That’s almost always a mistake. The truth is that the difference between success or failure often has nothing to do with the inherent value of an idea, but where you choose to start and the best place to start, is with a majority.
The Fundamental Fallacy Of Change Management
Pundits tell us that change is inevitable, so we need to create a sense of urgency about it. They say we must “innovate or die,” because those who don’t “get it” are dinosaurs and, much like their reptilian brethren, they are bound to die an awful, painful death once the asteroid hits (and, the implication is, they will deserve it too).
History, however, shows us exactly the opposite. People like Ignaz Semmelweis and William Colely had truly groundbreaking ideas that could have saved millions of lives if they were adopted earlier. Nevertheless, those in the medical establishment that thwarted their efforts thrived while the innovators themselves suffered greatly professionally and personally.
It’s not just the medical profession either. Take a short tour throughout history and it becomes clear that unjust and incompetent regimes can have remarkable staking power. The status quo always has inertia on its side and rarely yields its power gracefully. A bad idea can last for decades, or centuries even.
The fundamental fallacy of change management is that it is essentially a communication exercise, that change fails because people don’t understand it well enough and if you explain it to them in sufficiently powerful terms, they will embrace it. The truth is that change fails because others oppose it in ways that are devious, underhanded and deceptive.
That needs to be your primary design constraint.
The Power Of Local Majorities
Merely telling someone about change, no matter how artfully, is unlikely to be effective, but that doesn’t mean that people are immune to persuasion. In fact, there are decades of studies that show that people naturally conform to ideas that are widely held by others around them.
Consider this famous series of conformity experiments conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design of the study was simple, but ingenious. Asch merely showed a group of people pairs of cards like these:
Each person in the group was asked to match the line on the left with the line of the same length on the right. However, there was a catch: almost everyone in the room was a confederate who gave the wrong answer. When it came to the real subjects’ turn to answer, most conformed to the majority opinion, even when it was obviously wrong.
Clealy, most ideas are not nearly that unambiguous, which is why, despite having made breakthrough discoveries, Semmelweis and Coley had so much trouble getting traction for them. The majority of the medical establishment was resistant and Semmelweis and Coley found themselves in the minority. Majorities routinely push back against minorities.
The Threshold Model Of Collective Action
One important aspect of Asch’s conformity studies was that the results were far from uniform. A quarter of the subjects never conformed, some always did, and others were somewhere in the middle. We all have different thresholds to adopt an idea or to partake in an action, based on factors like confidence in our ability to make judgments and expected punishments or rewards for getting it right or wrong.
The sociologist Mark Granovetter addressed this issue with his threshold model of collective behavior. As a thought experiment, he asks us to imagine a diverse group of people milling around in a square. Some are natural deviants, always ready to start trouble, most are susceptible to provocation in varying degrees and the remainder is made up of unusually solid citizens, almost never engaging in antisocial behavior.
You can see a graphic representation of how the model plays out above. In the example on the left, a miscreant throws a rock and breaks a window. That’s all it takes for his friend next to him to start and then others with slightly higher thresholds join in as well. Before you know it, a full scale riot ensues.
The example on the right is slightly different. After the first few troublemakers start, there is no one around with a low enough threshold to join in. Rather than the contagion spreading, it fizzles out, the three miscreants are isolated and little note is made of the incident. Although the groups are outwardly similar, a slight change in conformity thresholds can make a big difference.
It’s a relatively simplistic example, but through another concept Granovetter developed called the strength of weak ties, we can see how it can lead to large scale change in the final graphic below as an idea moves from group to group.
The top cluster is identical to the one in the first example and a local majority forms. However, no cluster is an island because people tend to belong to multiple groups. For example, we form relationships with people in our neighborhood, from work, religious communities and so on. So an idea that saturates one group soon spreads to others.
Notice how the exposure to multiple groups can help overcome higher thresholds of resistance, because of the influence emanating from other groups through weak links. When you start with a majority, even if it is a small, local majority, an idea can gain traction, move from cluster to cluster and almost infinitely scale.
As I explain in my book, Cascades, there is significant evidence that this is how ideas actually do spread in the real world. The crucial point here is that it makes a really big difference where you choose to start. If you start with people who are enthusiastic about your idea, you are much more likely to succeed than if you choose people who are resistant.
So rather than trying to convince everybody at once, you are much better of identifying people who are likeminded and working on a Keystone Change that can for them basis of a larger transformation.
Working To Attract, Rather Than Overpower
When we look at the stories of Semmelweis and Coley through the prism of local majorities and resistance thresholds, we can see the mistake that they made. Having made truly breakthrough discoveries, they naturally assumed that others would see value in them. Instead, they ran headlong into a highly resistant majority and got squashed.
In my work helping leaders drive organizational transformations, I see this happen all the time. People who believe passionately in an idea naturally assume that others will “see the light.” Not surprisingly, they want to move quickly and overpower any resistance. This is especially true if they feel that they have institutional power behind them.
Yet that is almost always a mistake. There is a reason why the vast majority of organizational transformations fail, even though they typically have big budgets and C-Suite support behind them. To drive meaningful, lasting change you can’t rely on overpowering resistance, but must work to attract and empower genuine support.
That means you need to start with a majority. In the beginning, that may mean starting with a small, local majority— say, three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you find yourself in the minority, you will immediately feel pushback. The secret to overcoming resistance to an idea and driving it forward is understanding that you get to choose where to start.
Revolutionary change always starts with the art of choosing wisely.
Why do some people fight and others flee when confronting violence?
“This question has been bothering me for quite some time,” says Aidan Milliff, a fifth-year doctoral student who entered political science to explore the strategic choices people make in perilous times.
“We’ve learned a great deal how economic status, identity, and pressure from community shape decisions people make while under threat,” says Milliff. Early in his studies, he took particular interest in scholarship linking economic deprivation to engagement in conflict.
“But I became frustrated by this idea, because even among the poorest of the poor, way more people sit out conflict instead of engaging,” he says. “I thought there must be something else going on to explain why people decide to take enormous risks.”
A window on this problem suddenly opened for Milliff with class 17.S950 (Emotions and Politics), taught by Roger Petersen, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. “The course revealed the cognitive processes and emotional experiences that influence how individuals make decisions in the midst of violent conflict,” he says. “It was extremely formative in the kinds of research I started to do.”
With this lens, Milliff began investigating questions anew, leveraging unusual data sources and novel qualitative and quantitative methods. His doctoral research is yielding fresh perspectives on how civilians experience threats of violence, and, Milliff believes, “providing policy-relevant insights, explaining how individual action contributes to phenomena like conflict escalation and refugee flows.”
First-person accounts
At the heart of Milliff’s dissertation project, “Seeking Safety: The Cognitive and Social Foundations of Behavior During Violence,” are connected episodes of violence in India: an urban pogrom in Delhi in which nearly 3,000 Sikhs died at the hands of Hindus, sparked by the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards; and the bloody, decade-long separatist civil war by Sikh extremists in Punjab that began in the 1980s.
In search of first-person testimony to illuminate people’s fight-or-flight choices, Milliff lucked out: He located taped oral histories for a large population of Sikhs who had experienced violence in the 1980s. “In these 500 taped histories, people described at a granular level whether they organized to defend their neighborhoods, hid in houses, left the city temporarily or permanently, or tried to pass as Hindu.” He also pursued field interviews in California and India, but didn’t get as far as he’d hoped: “I arrived in India last March, and was there for two weeks of an intended three-month stay when I had to return due to the pandemic.”
This setback did not deter Milliff, who managed to convert the oral histories into text and video data that he’s already begun to plumb, with the help of natural language processing to code people’s decision-making processes. Among his preliminary findings: “People typically appraise their situations in terms of their sense of control and of predictability,” he says.
“When people feel they have a high degree of control but feel that violence is unpredictable, they are more likely to fight back, and when they sense they have neither control nor predictability, and more easily imagine being victims, they flee.”
A Chicago launchpad
Milliff drew inspiration for his doctoral research directly from an earlier graduate project in Chicago with the families of homicide victims.
“I wanted to learn whether people who become angry in response to violence are more likely to seek retribution,” he says. After taping 90 hours of interviews with 31 people, primarily mothers, Milliff shifted his focus. “My initial assumption that everyone would get angry was wrong,” he says. “I found that when people suffer these losses, they might get sad instead, or become fearful.” In unsolved homicides, family members have no perpetrator to target, but instead turn their anger at government that’s let them down, or worry for the safety of surviving family members.
From this project, Milliff took away a crucial insight: “People respond differently to their tragedies, even when their experiences look similar on paper.”
Political violence and its consequences seized Milliff’s interest early on. For his University of Chicago master’s thesis, he sought to understand how many long-running, brutal independence movements fizzle out. “I came away from this program believing that I’d enjoy the day-to-day work of being a professional political scientist,” he says.
Two research experiences propelled him toward that goal. While in college, Milliff assisted in the National Science Foundation-sponsored General Social Survey, a national social survey headquartered in Chicago, where he learned “how a big quantitative data collection exercise works,” he says. Following graduation, a fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace immersed him in South Asian military conflict and Indian domestic politics. “I really enjoyed working on these issues and became greatly interested in focusing on the political situation there,” he says.
Attracted by MIT’s security studies community, especially its commitment to research with real-world impact, Milliff came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, primed to delve deeper into the subject of political violence. He first had to navigate the graduate program’s thorough quantitative sequence. “I came to MIT without having taken math after calculus, and I honestly feel fortunate I ended up somewhere that takes the classroom portion of training seriously,” he says. “It has given me new tools I didn’t even know existed.”
These tools are integral to Milliff’s analysis of his singular datasets, and provide the quantitative foundation for informing his policy ideas. If, as his work suggests, people in crisis make decisions based on their sense of control and predictability, perhaps community institutions could bolster citizens’ abilities to imagine concrete options. “Lack of predictability and a sense of control encourage people to make choices that are destabilizing, such as fleeing their homes, or joining a fight.”
Milliff continues to analyze data, test hypotheses, and write up his research, taking time out for biking and nature photography. “When I was headed to graduate school, I decided to take up a hobby that I could do for 15 minutes at a time, something I could do between problem sets,” he says.
While he acknowledges research can be taxing, he takes delight in the moments of discovery and validation: “You spend a lot of time coming up with ideas of how the world works, diving into a pit to see if an idea is right,” he says. “Sometimes when you surface, you see that you might have come up with a possible new way to describe the world.”
Most of us try to avoid conflict. It is threatening and perhaps even dangerous. This is a very old instinct.
And it is an instinct that bullies take advantage of. The prototypical bully will test to see if you are afraid. If so, he or she knows that they have you where they want you.
But should we fear conflict? Should we seek to eliminate it from our lives? Or is there something in conflict that we actually need?
Managing Conflict 