Sneak Peek at Good Conflict’s New Digital Course

We’re now taking all our best tricks, tips, insights, and research and putting them into this digital masterclass, which is the most in-depth class we have ever done. It’s little mini videos that add up to over four hours and six modules, and it walks people through all four steps of our methodology to help people stay sane in a crazy time.

Hélène: One thing I often heard when doing interviews and reporting on different stories was, “Okay, this all sounds great, but how?”

“How does this work? We want to know. Can you show us? Can you give us a taste of it?” This course is about the “how.” In working with leaders and different organizations and reflecting on their feedback and pain points, it was evident that we needed to make the course bite-sized and digestible — something that people could easily process because conflict, as we know, is not an easy thing to navigate.

We bring in storytelling, graphics, insights from people whom we have learned from to help make sense of why a normal conversation can turn into high conflict within a matter of 60 seconds and why maybe I should have gone on a Good Conflict date with somebody instead of just deciding to send a nasty email and CC everyone in the entire company.

Chi: Can you explain what good conflict is and what high conflict is? Why are we in this moment of high conflict?

Amanda: This is all something that I think it’s fair to say Hélène and I came to later than we would have liked as journalists. We thought we understood conflict pretty well. We cover conflict constantly. If you’re a painter, you work with paint. As journalists, conflict was like our paint. Or so we thought.

Eventually, as the country became more politically polarized, we realized that the usual journalism methods weren’t helping. They weren’t making the conflict better or leading to more understanding. They were sometimes making things worse and, more often, having no impact on the conflict.

We started to investigate conflict in different ways and how to cover it differently. I followed people who had been stuck in messy, political, gang, and all kinds of conflict. I asked them, “How did you get out?” and quickly realized that was the wrong question. And they told me that was the wrong question. It’s not about getting out of conflict because we need conflict. Not just for great storytelling, but to get better, to get stronger as an individual, a family, and a country.

There is no better path to transformation than healthy conflict. The kind that leaves us — even though it’s uncomfortable and challenging, and it can be frustrating and sad — understanding ourselves, the other person, or the problem a little better. The more questions asked create more flashes of curiosity instead of just the same negative, hostile emotions over and over. So that’s a good conflict.

High conflict, in the research, is sometimes referred to as intractable conflict or malignant conflict. It’s the kind that becomes a conflict for conflict’s sake. You’re really stuck, and it feels that way where you are having the same recurring patterns of blame and hostility. Anger is fine in conflict, but contempt is much harder to work with. Contempt, disgust, a sense of superiority, a sense of predictability – those are all signs of high conflict.

Chi: Can you show me or share an example of how you have worked with someone or an organization to go from high conflict to more healthy conflict?

Hélène: We recently trained a group of organizations that is taking a really innovative approach to changing how our society thinks about the foster care system, government interventions, and child protective services—areas that are naturally filled with conflict. These different leaders came together to train in good conflict. The leader of one organization acknowledged right from the start: “We will have conflict.” She didn’t shy away from it; instead, she put it out in the open so she could address the elephant in the room. “We are going to learn tools, skills, and vocabulary so that we can help one another. And in the course of doing that, we will create a trusted community. We have to have trust for us to have healthy conflict.”

A few weeks after our training, the news media reported a story about their work and slightly got it wrong. People were going to Facebook and social media to share their disagreements and confusion, and things were taken out of turn. There was misinformation at play. And two of these leaders who had been trained in good conflict said, “I’m hurt, and I’m disappointed by what you said on social media. I can tell that this is a problem for you. Why don’t we meet?”

So, they met for coffee. “Let’s start with coffee, and hopefully, if things get better, we’ll be able to have wine,” they said. “We just had this workshop, let’s loop. Let’s find out why you shared what you shared on social media. What do you think the media got wrong in general?” “This is what I was dealing with, and these were the limitations that I had to face. This is why the story was put out the way it was.” They talked through their differences.

What I appreciated about the leaders was that they acknowledged that they disagreed. At no point in this entire conversation did they agree with one another. However, for them, the relationship was so valuable that it was really important and essential just to listen, get a sense of where both sides were and what was happening, and then figure out what the plan was moving forward.

The leaders understood that conflicts like this will continue to come up, and they had to lead from a place where their teams and the communities that they serve can see the skills they are modeling, so that the staff and community members will, in turn, do that for themselves.

Chi: Who are the people that you had in mind when you created this course? Who should take it?

Amanda: The people we have foremost in our minds are the people who have reached out to us and we don’t always have the bandwidth to help, or they are in a dire situation and need help right now, or they need it at their own pace.

People like school superintendents who feel attacked by activist school board members, parents, the media, or teacher unions. We also hear from CEOs of nonprofits and other organizations. We hear from politicians, elected officials, and their staff. University leaders, student leaders, and anyone working in an industry that has been politicized or a casualty of our broader high conflicts like police, healthcare, and education. Unfortunately, it’s a long list.

Their usual tools and strategies like explaining, defending, and ignoring aren’t working, and it’s unnerving and disorienting. It can lead to a lot of lost sleep and suffering. They need to do very counterintuitive things to get out of high conflict, which requires some practice.