Conflict Collaboration

The two of them were screaming at each other on the far side of the lab, the Quality Assurance manager and the production manager.  They were alternately picking up a sample of the product and shaking it in the other's face.

"Oh no," I thought.  "I'm going to have to break this up."  As plant manager, this was my least favorite job.

It turned out to be a lucky break for all of us, though, because we stumbled on to a universal way to resolve conflicts.  We learned the difference between COMPROMISE and COLLABORATE in order to actually delight both sides of the argument.

Let me define those two terms, so we’re clear on the distinction.  COMPROMISE implies that both sides give up something in order to reach an agreement somewhere in the middle.  Neither side gets what they really want, but, hopefully, each gets what they need.  But the bottom line is that it’s a lose/lose solution.

COLLABORATE means that the two sides work together to achieve a result that, not only satisfies both sides, but may exceed what they want.

You can find five ways to resolve conflict in this HBR article, but as far as I’m concerned, you can skip the first three.

How did we make this discovery?  Let’s go back to the beginning.

The problem was brown specks that showed up randomly in our powdery product.  They were a purely cosmetic defect, but customers would reject it if they could see these specks.  We didn’t have a good way to measure the number of brown specks in the product, other than to have the QA tech count the number of specks on the side of a four oz. sample bottle. 

Needless to say, this pitiful analytical technique contributed to the volcanic eruptions between Production and Quality Assurance.  A more sophisticated, optical counter was out of the question for a number of reasons.

So there I was, staring across the sea of instruments in our lab.  Technicians were head-down amongst their beakers, trying to avoid becoming collateral damage.  Something had to be done, and there was nobody else to do it, so I waded in.

Production (Jerry) and QA (Mary) both showed me – at 120 decibels – that if you shook the sample bottle, you could get any number of brown specks to become visible that you want.  They were looking to me to declare a winner between the two of them.  But I wasn’t going to take that bait.

I said to them, "Look, clearly our analytical method is a barrier.  Let's solve that first, then we can figure out what's causing the brown specks."

Amazingly, the two antagonists stopped their yelling and began to COLLABORATE on the problem.  Long story short, they succeeded and everyone benefited.

I’ve since used this discovery to resolve any number of disputes.  The trick is to configure the conflict in terms of a problem to be solved.  In this case, it was easy because the two antagonists were a chemist and an engineer.  These technical people LOVE to solve problems.

Your task should you find yourself in this situation is to find the commonality between the two antagonists.  It's not so easy sometimes:  Artist and Accountant?  Do artists need to make money?  Is there any art in accounting?

How about you?  Do you have a similar story?  What has worked best for you?  Comment below.