CONFLICT ANTICIPATION
We met Chris Honeyman a few weeks ago, and I talked with him extensively about his new ideas about developing a form of consulting that would anticipate corlrubens.com/frontier.pdf">www.RLRubens.com/frontier.pdf )
The
Next Frontier Is Anticipation: Thinking Ahead About Conflict to Help Clients
Find Constructive Ways to Engage Issues in Advance
BY CHRISTOPHER
HONEYMAN, JULIE MACFARLANE, BERNARD MAYER, ANDREA SCHNEIDER AND JEFF SEUL
Do major, sophisticated, well-funded companies, institutions and organizations often find themselves blindsided by conflicts they might have anticipated? We think so.
The Brent Spar fiasco is a high-profile example. By
1995, Shell
There are significant forces in play that often prevent a more thoughtful and pragmatic approach to anticipating and preparing for conflict. These forces often lead otherwise smart people to let a problem fester, or impose a superficially adequate outcome which at first seems to avoid the problem, but really only delays it. This pattern occurs even when the results are counter to the real interests of almost everyone involved, and even when the fairly predictable result is that parts of the organization become dysfunctional.
ORGANIZATIONS
IN STRESS
At root, the common failure to apply thorough analysis, integrated systems management, and the coordination of specialist skills to enable holistic conflict anticipation is due to stresses common in corporations and other organizations.
All of these circumstances, and their likely results, are predictable to an experienced conflict manager. An example of such predictability is the pattern of problems in corporate mergers. Combinations of companies large and small, as well as partnership mergers, often fail. The failures almost never appear to result from poor due diligence on the numbers. The expensive advisers surrounding the parties generally get that part of the equation right.
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mso-layout-grid-align:none'>There are examples of this false optimism and lack
of anticipation in every industry, every kind of government function, and in
every age, back through the origins of both World Wars,
There is no evidence that the growing knowledge and skill set of the conflict management field has yet had much impact on the ability of managers to anticipate and forestall problems of this nature. In a nutshell, the integrative function of conflict anticipation remains to be developed out of the component parts that the field of conflict management field has developed over the past 30 years.
The occasional ray of light in this picture includes the small subset of strategic planners who have a strong conflict management background, and a willingness to use it. There are also some management consultants with the appropriate background and interests to assist with conflict anticipation, as well as certain diplomats and NGO experts who sometimes perform these functions in high-profile international problemslikelihood of default, and similar concerns.
Lawyers are not often asked to zero in on human relationships problems, overlapping or even contradictory functions within an organization, the impact of particular leaders or managers on corporate culture, or any of the myriad reasons aside from the legal and financial issues that may cause a proposal, deal, or change effort to go wrong.
Existing conflict anticipation work, meanwhile, tends to be focused on more specific, routinized and less systemic issues, such as personnel issues, consumer complaints, or franchise disputes. Big business and other large organizations now often prefer to see such routine cases resolved in a private and consensual way, and may engage in a system design or planning process to achieve this. But these are not generally viewed as part of the business core; meanwhile, the more complex and systemic issues organizations face do not respond to routinized approaches.
It also is possible that conflict anticipation will need to be undertaken or at least endorsed from a high vantage point within an organization, such that costs should be structured as a central, shared cost for the entire organization.
NEW
DEVELOPMENTS,
A work specification from a forward-thinking client is likely to frame the task partly in terms of preparing the corporation or other organization for the inevitable conflicts, as l another level, the work is close to both management consulting and training, for it requires helping clients to learn to handle conflicts in a cooperative and constructive spirit. Yet the work we are describing here is neither encompassed by nor the same as any of these existing roles, all of which will still be needed. The missing element, instead, involves coordinating these skills, and making sure their holders actually get to use them.
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This approach places significant demands on
clients. It may require clients to acknowledge that a technically brilliant
plan is still deficient if it does not anticipate conflicts that commonly aririd-align:none'>
Unless, of course, the organization already has adopted something quite like it. The partnering model for anticipating conflict between contractors and suppliers (and owners, architects, engineers, officials . . .) on large construction projects has been used successfully by a number of corporations and government agencies. Another established model comes from collective bargaining; the labor-management cooperation consulting practice has been well known for decades.