Practice #5
Increase Conflict Resilience
Create conditions that enable people to practice disagreement and generative conflict. Design channels for regular feedback, debate, accountability, and recommitment.
People are coming to social movements with experiences of conflict that have led to further rupture and violence. Conflict resolution, in a punitive society, has often meant silencing and punishing, without any real transformation.
Organizations must set the tone for a new way forward. We must boldly show that generative conflict moves us closer to purpose. Leaders need to model principled struggle, and organizations should have processes that support people to get more and more comfortable with conflict and disagreement over time. Accountability7 should be collectively defined, practiced, and normalized.
Organizing itself is inherently conflictual–the power struggles we engage in are the things that bring our people together, strengthening our internal solidarity. Our work towards belonging will always be a conflicting process of negotiation.
Risk
When conflict is not addressed, it festers, manifesting as fear and resentment. When organizations don’t skillfully, meaningfully, and directly address conflict, it becomes a thing to fear or a thing that brings our work to a halt. Without addressing the conditioned tendencies of people in our groups, their conflict patterns can become the norm. Historically, underinvesting in generative conflict has led to overwhelming ruptures in movements, pulling focus and energy from our purpose.
Opportunity
When our members, leaders, and staff experience the process of rupture and repair, they understand that their belonging isn’t contingent on “being nice” or always agreeing. Our belonging deepens when people understand that disagreement and struggle don’t mean something fatal. Instead, conflict can lead to our sharpest strategy.
If our groups can effectively build the skills of generative conflict, we’ll build more spaces for people to debate, take accountability, and land on decisions that expand a sense of collective responsibility.
Challenge
Social movements have existing cultures of conflict that are not generative. Our organizations may pander to peoples’ whims instead of struggling with them. They may maintain silence to protect themselves or some notion of peace. Beyond any one organization, call-outs are used to escalate conflict into the public domain.
Addressing these tendencies, and moving to a style of conflict that is more rigorous, grounded, and emotionally skillful, will take deep unlearning and intention setting for everyone involved.
Assessment Questions
Can members and staff openly disagree in meetings and discussion spaces? If they disagree, will they still work together towards a common goal?
Do staff and leaders feel equipped to create containers for feedback, disagreement, and principled struggle?
Over the course of their involvement, do members generally have more skillfulness and comfort with conflict?
Implementation
Reflect on organizational tendencies when it comes to conflict. What stories are at the root of those tendencies? Are organizational practices in line with your values? Identify how you may want to change your processes.
Identify what “safety” means for people across the organization. Create a felt sense of safety by fostering ways to move through processes of rupture and repair, reinforcing the normalcy of such processes. Ensure your understanding of safety is informed by an analysis of who wields power in the organization and how.
Titrate conflict by creating progressively deeper ways for people to engage in debate and disagreement. Get people more comfortable with conflict over time by creating spaces for collective decision making and dissent.
Promote and define collective accountability across teams and working groups. Explore peoples’ past experiences with punitive accountability or avoidant tendencies to land on a grounded accountability. Generate processes that are rooted in your values, shared agreements, and fair consequences.
Acknowledge and celebrate when conflict has been resolved. Uplift the ways people practiced skillfulness and vulnerability, and put words to lessons learned through the process.
Build critical conflict skills, such as:
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- approaching conflict from your values – asking “how do we want to be” rather than “what do we want to do?”
- discernment – picking and choosing which battles to wage
- communication – directly and compassionately sharing analysis, needs, observations, thoughts, and feelings (as needed)
- embodiment – identifying emotions and returning to center when activated
- principled struggle – debating different ideas or tactics, backed by studied analysis, with the goal of building our strongest possible collective action and unity
- regular feedback – giving and receiving critique and appreciation for the sake of growth
- grounded accountability – being able to be responsible for one’s own actions or inactions, taking steps to repair, ask for help, and make amends where needed
7 Within organizations, accountability begins with transparency about what has happened and why. Groups should work together to determine what accountability looks like when it is practiced for the sake of purpose and belonging. In one definition from this series hosted by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, accountability is “self-reflecting, apologizing, making amends, and changing your behavior so the harm you caused doesn’t happen again.”
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