A Job Done Well - Making Work Better

Is Conflict Our Greatest Natural Resource?

• Jimmy Barber, James Lawther • Season 3 • Episode 12

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This episode introduces special guest Charles Irvine, who proposes a provocative idea: Conflict is our greatest natural resource.

Key Discussion Points

The Problem with Denial: Jimmy, James and Charles discuss how much time, energy, and resource people dedicate to denying the existence of conflict or avoiding it, leading to a "long tail of conflict" through rumination and anxiety.

The Water Analogy: Charles uses the analogy of water—an essential resource that can nurture or destroy—to explain that, while conflict can be destructive, it must be channelled and worked with rather than demonised or avoided.

Conflict vs. Consensus: James raises the point that the opposite of conflict, consensus, can lead to groupthink, which is dangerous for organisations. Charles adds that people often withhold their genuine opinions to pursue consensus, resulting in decisions that lack genuine buy-in.

Benefits of Channelling Conflict: When channelled properly, the benefits include:

  • Tapping into the thinking, wisdom, and expertise of others.
  • Saving time by dealing with issues directly, leading to more effective meetings (citing statistics that at least 40% of management time is spent dealing with dysfunctional relationships and poorly made decisions).
  • Improving relationships by fostering honesty and robust conversation.

Shifting the Mindset: Charles recommends two key approaches for changing the negative perception of conflict:

  • Be Gentle: Be less critical of yourself and others, recognising that no one is perfectly skilled at managing conflict.
  • Talk About Conflict Before It Happens: Have a team discussion about what a healthy conflict culture means for you.

The Fifth Province: Charles draws on Irish mythology—the Fifth Province—as a strategy for managing past or present conflict. It is a metaphorical space where participants can temporarily leave their "weapons" (resentment, egos, fight) at the door to have an open conversation. The goal is to free the mind enough to talk, knowing that the dynamic will shift, and they will not leave the same way they entered.

The Elephant's Peg: Charles uses the analogy of a circus elephant tied to a tiny wooden peg to illustrate how people are held back by assumptions and limiting narratives built up over time about the risks of engaging in conflict.

Listen in and decide if conflict really is our greatest natural resource.

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Hello, I'm James. Hi, I'm Jimmy and welcome to a Job Done Well, the podcast that helps you improve your performance enjoyment at work.

James:

good afternoon. How you doing?

Jimmy:

I'm doing well, James, how are you?

James:

I'm doing fabulously. Thank you very much. What are we talking about today then?

Jimmy:

Well, today we have a special guest who's going to talk to us about how conflict is our greatest natural resource. I worked with Charles a number of years ago and this is one of those things where it's just like a bolt from the blue hit me. And, something really fascinating to share how we reframe and how we act differently around conflict.

James:

Mm, very good.

Jimmy:

But before we get into that, what, what have you been up to, James?

James:

have started Christmas shopping. I took

Jimmy:

Oh.

James:

Law out today, and I have been Black Friday shopping how Black Friday can happen on a Tuesday is beyond me, but I've been Black Friday shopping and I have bought her a dressing gown 20% off. She's

Jimmy:

You, you are absolute. I mean, what have we had? What was it? Hose pipe recipes cookery course, and now a dressing gown.

James:

actually go all in this year and buy her a shopping trolley as well.

Jimmy:

I.

James:

getting to that stage in life. You need to drag one along behind you.

Jimmy:

She's getting to that stage in life where she needs to push you down the hill, mate. It's like, come on, you can,

James:

very keen with the idea, but there you go. That's what I've been doing. How about you?

Jimmy:

well, I just, I an, an observation that I made this week. One of the things I do is subscribe like a lot of people to things like, vitamins and probiotics and God knows what else. And what I noticed that a lot of organizations are doing, you pay a cheaper price for subscribing than one, one off purchase. That makes sense, right? Then you get your stuff each month and then you realize that actually they do offers and new customers get it cheaper than even subscribers. So what you do is you cancel it. And you come back in as a new customer and get the cheaper price, right? So it's all sensible, but I've noticed they're making it more and more difficult for you to cancel. The subscriptions now. So now you think you want to cancel before you just click a button, gone start all over again. Now you can't find how you cancel anywhere. It's buried in like, 0.6 font, and then you've got to phone someone who never answers the phone, who then tries to persuade you to stay. I just think. I think the whole concept of subscriptions is really good, but when, as soon as you get that dual pricing between new and loyal customers, if you don't reward loyalty, expect some churn, and when you get churn, I just always, I always get a bit negative about companies that make it difficult for you to find your way out of the organization. So it's just, sorry, short rant, but that's my,

James:

difference between you and me, mate. When we have this, what we been up to, conversation, yours are always really deep, whereas I'm invariably shallow.

Jimmy:

Yes,

James:

what you will.

Jimmy:

Anyhow, I am, seriously delighted to have one of my definitely thought leaders and mentors over the years Charles Irvine to come along and talk to us about conflict. Charles, welcome.

Charles:

Thanks, Jimmy. Thanks James. Good to see you guys.

Jimmy:

I could wax lyrical about you, but do you wanna tell everyone a bit about you and what you get up to?

Charles:

Yeah, sure. And actually I think I'm gonna start with a little story And that's a story of when I was about 12. when I was growing up in South Africa, it was under the high height of the apartheid regime schools were segregated. So I went to a whites only school. And then in my local area, a new school. Set up and that was the, one of the first multiracial schools in South Africa. So I naturally, at 12, resigned from my school joined the new school and went home to the dinner table to tell my folks expecting praise and adoration for my move and all hell broke loose. Because they just exploded, my father in particular, and I couldn't really work out what was going on. And of course, eventually it worked. I worked it out. What was happening was the school that I had joined was run by the Catholic Church,

Jimmy:

Right.

Charles:

which was fair enough. The only problem was my father came from Northern Ireland, Belfast, and is a Protestant bishop. So he

Jimmy:

Yep.

Charles:

wasn't well pleased with the fact that I was now being educated by the Catholics. And so this was my first introduction to conflict because that was the first time that I understood a Compromise Agreement. And essentially the compromise agreement we came to was that I could go to my new school.'cause clearly being in a multiracial school with a family that was politically active was the right thing to do. There was just one condition we didn't tell Granny in Northern Ireland that the Catholics were educating me. I guess Jimmy and James, that's my kind of first foray into conflict and, and what it means. And at 29 I left South Africa and came to the uk, and thought maybe I could just work with this conflict stuff in the uk, And so I had a good 29 years of working around the world, and I think there was one consistent thing to me that I saw time and time again, and that was just how much time, resource, energy we dedicate to denying the existence of conflict.

Jimmy:

Yep.

Charles:

a conflict, it's a joke. It's simply something we say. It's something to be ignored. It's a disagree. And so I became fascinated with what happens when we turn that human energy. That we, invest in negative interactions with each other. Like it's, it's, it's something we should avoid and how do we pivot that world's energy from fighting to being a force for good? I think conflict is the world's greatest natural resource. I think people who sit in, in a kind of middle management role in organizations. Get it from ends, they, they have issues that are not dealt with at a senior level that compiling down on them. And they are expected to be the ones that deal with all the issues for everyone that sits beneath them. so you have this real movement happening and I really feel for so many people in those roles who do an amazing job. Navigating day to day dynamic.

Jimmy:

And I think it also does really nicely follow up to a couple of episodes that we did earlier in this season where we talked about how you work with difficult people and how you have difficult conversations. And actually this is a broader way of thinking about it as opposed to tactically dealing with those sort of pain points.

Charles:

I used to run a program called Managing Difficult People, and what I loved about it is everybody who arrived arrived with a very clear picture. That other person

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

the difficult person, and then they somehow found that in the group, all the people in the room were the difficult people. So I think it's really interesting how we name the, as the difficult person, but.

Jimmy:

Wow. Well, you'll be pleased to know that Charles, one of the bits of advice that we gave was to consider are you the difficult person and how do you come across to others? And maybe, maybe you want to change some of your behaviors rather than look at others all the time. So, yeah. But, but I, I guess just to sort of a step back though. I think it's quite a bold, it's a bold statement, isn't it? Conflict is our greatest natural resource. And it's quite provocative, deliberately so, and, So, so first off, I guess, why do you say conflict is the greatest natural resource, and then how do you go about shifting that mindset that we've been added drummed into us our whole lives?

Charles:

And I think you're right, Jeremy. so for me, the best way to kind of think about it is to use the analogy of, of water,

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

right? So we all know that water is an amazing natural resource. But unless you've had a few, I haven't really come across anyone who tries to deny water.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

It kind of just is. a natural resource, what we also know about water is that it has the capacity to feed, nurture, grow things, but water also destroys floods and kills. And what we know about water is we've gotta channel it. So there's absolutely no good in just saying, okay, great water's a natural resource, but we don't try and channel it and we don't try and work with it. I think what doesn't help us is us demonizing this thing called conflict or seeing conflict as somehow. or anti-human or not, right? And the wonderful thing about humans is we're all different. So guess what? We are going to be differences and conflicts. And I'm trying to get us to all say when that moment happens, whether it's a small difference.'cause we don't like to call it conflict, I would call it conflict. But when that small thing happens, of us going, oh my God, let me get away from this, or That didn't happen, or that was just a joke, or Let me just ignore this. Because let me tell you, there's nothing like the long tail of conflict if we don't deal with it If you just think of any conflict you've had to manage or deal with, how much thinking time post that event do you dedicate to it? Hours.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

with your sleep.

Jimmy:

if you've got conflict ahead, I think you spend a lot of time. Dreading it, not, not thinking about how you can deal with it, just not looking forward to it.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

Then you do whatever happens, happens. And I, I, I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm bad. I, I, I hold a grudge, I'm not gonna lie. And so there, there are people that I would guess I had conflict with decades ago, and I can still remember what was said

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

how it felt and, hold some. Obviously shrinking, but some level of animosity about them and that experience.

Charles:

Yeah. actually what you make me think about now is listening to WhatsApp Docs which is one of those great podcasts. They, they, they, in dealing with all kinds of stuff, and one of the people they had on was a woman, a professor who specializes in memory.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

And she lived, used a lovely analogy that that memory is like Wikipedia. You start the entry yourself, but other people all add to it. And what you're saying here, Jimmy, is you will hold your memory of that conflict.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

odds, chances are their memory is never the same.

Jimmy:

Yeah,

Charles:

And so what we do is we land up fighting about our memories.

Jimmy:

yeah. Yeah.

Charles:

And so what you've said here is that we build this thing called conflict into something that we either prepare for and we prepare for the fight. Or we get anxious and what's what's better is we start imagining fantasizing about the other person to such a degree that we attribute to them probably more intellect and capability and thoughts than they ever brought. We come to this thing and then we never let it go. So all I'm trying to do by suggesting that conflict is our greatest natural resource. First of all, to just allow us to see it's human, it's natural,

James:

Sorry, just a thought that goes through my head In a way, the opposite of conflict is consensus. You could argue,

Charles:

Yeah.

James:

a long way from consensus to group think, which is really very, very bad. So when you start to look at that, I mean, when

Charles:

Yeah.

James:

a diversity of opinion and trying to subvert it. It's really very dangerous for organizations.

Charles:

Absolutely, and, and next I would go further and argue that I don't think people give their proper opinion in order to achieve this alleged compromise or consensus and, and what, you know, like when you're in a cartoon got that little thought bubble. For me, what happens in that, in that consensus time? Is that what's coming out? My mouth is, yes. Great. I completely agree. My thought bubble is what part of idiot that. I'll come back to this later. So actually we still get nowhere, but for me, the starting point has gotta be dealing with our feelings of anxiety, anger, dread. Fight all of those very natural feelings, which I think we can help by just getting our thinking into a space that says, okay, it's normal. And for me, sometimes to me, I've found that replacing the word conflict almost with choice.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

So if I don't wanna use the con the word conflict, or it's so ingrained in me to think that it's a negative thing, you see it happening, why don't you think choice. I've got a choice. I got lots of choices here. I can either fight this, I can ignore it, or guess what? I can use it.

Jimmy:

I get, I get the, it's a natural resource and I get the weird, there's a lifetime of gravitational pull towards, it's a negative, but when you capture the, the conflict and you use it to its advantage and you have the right mindset, what's the, what's the benefits it gives you?

Charles:

I think there's a huge amount to benefits, one of which is very much what James's point was, which is that you then start to be able to actually and tap into the thoughts, the thinking, the wisdom, the expertise of the people you're in conflict with. Because inevitably you think differently to them and they've got different agendas.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

I mean, don't let me start on agendas. Why on earth do we think that an agenda is somehow a negative thing that we've got? Oh, you've got a hidden agenda like you are the devil incarnate. Guess what? Jimmy's human. I mean, James deals with him all the time, so he knows that. But it's the most human thing in the world to have an agenda. So what the hell are we doing? Hiding it. Why don't I come to you, James, and say, do you know what my agenda is this? This is what I want to achieve. Then I've just taken all the assumptions and hyperbole around from this and saying, I put it on the table. This is what I wanna achieve. I think, Jimmy, what I'm saying here is you, the first thing that you benefit from is that you actually tap into a resource you don't have access to before, and

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

other person's thinking.

James:

So I think that's a really powerful point. I mean, uh, these things are never black and white. So if I take somebody, they will not surprise our listeners to think, realize that I, I do not have a very high opinion of Donald Trump. Yeah, I think the man's a complete fruit loop. However, if you start to say to yourself, well, what has he done that I agree with? Well, actually there were quite a few things that he is done that I agree with, which I think ly sensible. So it's never black and white.

Jimmy:

And, and you do close yourself off. If you, if you have a view that so and so's an idiot, you are closed off to every idea they have, including the good ones, which, even in that extreme example of Donald Trump, you will find that he's done some good, you know what I mean? But we're close to that.

Charles:

I think

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Jimmy:

So back to back to the benefits then. So you've got the tap into people's thinking expertise. You're just about to say save yourself

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

the.

Charles:

save yourself from creating a past that becomes a shackle. Because I think what we are doing when we don't deal with conflict well, it becomes the long tail, so we ruminate over it. It actually then informs the kinds of people that we think we can deal with the next time. It informs the situations that we are having.

Jimmy:

I pre, I presume as well it, it must you, your relationships must improve.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

It's gonna be very indifferent to interact with somebody who has this belief and this mindset towards conflict than it does, the traditional way of thinking around conflict. So it's got to improve. Improve relationships, isn't it?

Charles:

And I think it makes meetings more effective. Let's just look at that, for example. I mean, how many of us have tolerated when we sit in meetings and people are not saying what they think, but they step out into the corridor and then they say what they think

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

what? We have to have three other meetings about it.'cause no one is actually saying what they think. And then guess what? We're coming to a conclusion that there's not buy-in to. And then, oh my God, we suddenly decide that it takes us years to implement something. Why? Because we are not having robust conversation when we should. So

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

of the things that we've looked at statistically is manager's time. how much time are you spending trying to navigate conflict or disputes that haven't been worked with properly? And the statistics are showing us that it's at least 40%, at a minimum, 40% of management time. He spent trying to deal with dysfunctional relationships, poorly made decisions conflict in the workplace.

James:

a friend of ours says he enjoyed work. said he spent a third of his time doing really interesting stuff, but he spent another third of his time politicking and he spent the third, third of his time being politics. Now, sorry. It's a very throwaway comment, but it does kind of reinforce your point about the amount of time we spend on this.

Jimmy:

And

Charles:

we call it Politicking James, but that it's the conflict, but.

Jimmy:

yeah. Just, and, and just on that, don't wanna deal with it. How many meetings have both you been in where there is clearly a difference of opinion? And you, you hear that classic line, we'll take that offline.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

You know what I mean? Always happens. Take that offline.

Charles:

just to be the devil's advocate. And then they throw in this kind of verbal dagger that hits the room. And then as soon as, I mean I had a group of people I was working with a a few years ago now, and we were just doing one of those normal exercises where everyone was logging down the issues that they had. Right. All on that great old post-it note strategy. The group was standing there and looking at it and, and one person was standing right at the back and said to the person in the front, just move that. Post-it from here to there. And before we knew where we were, the person in the front exploded. that's so typical of you. You never do anything yourself. You stand in the back lines. They went off, right? The whole group froze. And in those few seconds afterwards, we got almost every standard response to conflict. Okay. people looked at the floor. One guy tried to make a joke, somebody else suggested we had a tea break. Somebody else suggested that maybe there was a different time. We'll take this offline. There's a different time to deal with this. soon as that happened, I relaxed. Thinking conflict is a great natural resource. the issues are on the table

Jimmy:

Yeah,

Charles:

and I invited everyone to take a seat and we actually had a real conversation the first one they had in five years.

Jimmy:

how do you shift, how do you shift your thinking from, I've always. Thought that conflict was a negative thing and to be avoided and, and, and that to being able to see,'cause I, I, I like the benefits. I want more productive meetings. I want better relationships. I want better thinking. I want to unlock people's expertise. I get all that. How, how's, how would you recommend people start thinking about it so they can really unlock that?

Charles:

I think the first thing we have to do is to be gentle with ourselves and with other people. And there's a great expression. Do you look at people with sharp or curious eyes? And I think some of us are very good at looking at ourselves with sharp eyes and are very critical. So the starting point for me is take a chill pill. No one is particularly good at it. You are in good company.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

I think the second thing is. Before any conflict happens, have a conversation about conflict.

Jimmy:

Right.

Charles:

And let's give an example. You're sitting down in your team and you are saying to them, I was dialing into this, this podcast on the way to work, and I heard this bonkers notion that conflict was a great natural resource. I wanna give this one a go. So in our team, I would like us to talk about what does a healthy conflict culture for us mean? And my point is. If you have a conversation about how you all think about conflict, the relationship you have with conflict what you wanna do, when there is conflict, before there's a conflict, it makes it a lot easier. Then when an issue emerges for you to say, here we go. I mean, if I was to say to you, what's your relationship with conflict like, how were you brought up in terms of conflict or how to have

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

or what would you guys say?

Jimmy:

Well, I, the, the thing that brought it home for me was when, when we did some work together many years ago and we had just done this thing on, on conflict and I, I was in an exec meeting and we had a, I can't remember, it was about budgets or something and we had a, a, a decent, robust debate about something came out the meeting and one of the team came up to me afterwards and said, Jimmy, are we all right? I was like. What do you mean? Are we all right? Yeah, yeah, of course we're right. No, no, really. I mean, that was, that was brutal. That was savage. Are we, are we okay? I was like. No, I, I think we just had a small disagreement there and what struck me was that to this person, they ha they, because we had disagreed to them, it was brutal and it was, it was a big deal, fair play to them. They came and talked to me about it, so, fair play. But I re, what I realized is that my relationship with co conflict growing up the way I did was that if somebody wasn't trying to physically attack me, that's conflict to me. It's physical violence, it's conflict, throwing stuff, name calling, you know, abuse. So physical or verbal abuse is conflict. Anything else ain't conflict. And so one of the things I had to rethink was actually I have to think about my relationship and my view of conflict, but I have to think about everyone else's as well. So, because I think it's nothing.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

it's brutal to someone else, I need to think about my part in that interaction and what did I do to make it feel like a brutal experience? I don't want people to have a brutal experience when they disagree with me.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

so that's that, that helped me kind of reset my levels and views on conflict and how I interact with others and how they view it. I dunno. James, what about you? You, you, you create conflicts, you do.

James:

do. So I am really bad. My kids will tell you I'm dreadful, I'm Mr. Calm, and even I don't get excited. I'm. And then all of a sudden I just flipping Snap. I'm bang. I'm a bit like the bloke who was screaming about the Post in there, you know? I went down, there's a museum in South Wales called the Big Pit Fascinating Museum. And I urge anybody listening, go to the big pick. It's fascinating. It's an old British coal British coal mine. And you go down there and they explain to you about how they used to mine coal. And then of course, the first bloke goes in and his job, the first shift, they go in and they drill into the sea. And then the second shift come in and their, their job is they take the coal out and as they take the coal out, they put the pit props in to hold the seeding up. The third job is the third shift come in and their job is called crashes. They get paid extra, but what the crashes do is they pull the pit pop props out behind where they've just been in the course and the whole world comes down and they get paid more for that. Can you imagine? But one of the things he said was that they've moved from wooden pit props to steel pit props. Now the miners hated. Steel pit props. the steel pit props were stronger, the thing with wooden prick props is when the wooden pit prop was about to go,

Charles:

You could see.

James:

whining. Whining first you could hear it. Whereas when the steel pit prop went, it just bloody went and people died. And I think this is my interpretation of what you are telling me about conflict is you don't want it to be an all or nothing sort of thing. You want people to. Wine, like a wooden pit prop. They want, you want people to be explicit about what their issues are.'cause if you get the issues out on the table, you can do something about it. Whereas if you hide it and then just snap, it's a bit chuffing late is I understood properly

Charles:

I,

James:

you're saying.

Charles:

I, I love that because I think also what you're saying, James, is that one has to look at the range of different contexts within which one is calling something conflict. Because as you're describing here, Jimmy, there's, there's, when you're in a moment and you're having a discussion. How are different people experiencing that discussion? And the biggest thing you are looking for is, are we creating an environment where people can be honest? Now, one of the expressions I hate the most is this whole notion of I'm just brutally honest. Well, frankly, that means you're just brutal because why on earth do we think that you should have the right to express your opinion with no thought about how you might be heard? I have a responsibility when I want to work well with conflict for thinking about any situation, how am I expressing the things that I want to express in a way that maximizes the ability of other people to hear me? And I think what you're talking about here, James, is that when we are talking about conflict, we can be talking about historic conflicts. I worked in an organization where this group of people wanted me to manage the conflict that existed between them and another organization. The conflict had been going 20 years. None of the people in either organization had started the conflict, but man, they were loyal to it. And this one had been going 20 years, we've got to think about conflict in the moment. We've got to think about what's gone on in the past that we need to clear deal with. And think about the future conflicts that are coming down the line and how we prepare well for them. And there's a lovely Irish mythology story that can help us when we are in particular thinking about conflict in the moment or conflict of the past. And in Ireland, there are four provinces and there's a wonderful Irish pathology that talks about the fifth province. And when I'm working with some situations of conflict, what I will do is invite people to come into the fifth province. And the rules are very simple. guys, Demi James, you very welcome to your weapons. Those are lovely weapons. They look delight. In fact, they're so shiny. You should be really proud of them. Here's the thing. You leave them in the province, you come from just outside the door. But when you come into the fifth province, you can't bring them with you. But don't worry, there's any time you can leave. So don't get separation and anxiety. It's completely fine. You can go back to your weapons. what we find is when we give people the assurance that they don't have to let go of their resentment, they don't have to let go of the fight. They don't have to let go of their egos. They just have to free their brains enough start to have a conversation. And what you find is when you are in the fifth province, things start to shift. the great secret is, you've got into the fifth province, you never come out the same because something in the dynamic and something in the relationship will have shifted. So I guess one of the tips here would be to think about where am I at? Is it a past conflict

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

a particular strategy? Is it something that I'm going into right now that I could manage differently? Or is it something in the future? And the the golden rule is deal with it.

Jimmy:

Well, can you imagine the amount of time that's spent not dealing with conflict, how much of your mental and emotional capability? actually there's a whole kind of liberation of my thinking where I'm not just tied to, I remember all those times we fell out, Charles, I remember all those things that you, to me, I know we've got to have another conversation next week and I'm not looking forward to it. And, and I mean, I don't have to worry about that.

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Charles:

because our assumptions play havoc with how we work with conflict.'cause my assumption is,'cause you and I had a bad conversation before, that the next conversation we are gonna have is going to be even worse. The next assumption I have is that basically Jimmy, you're out to get me. I know this for a fact'cause of course what I think is a fact, what you think is assumptions, but minor or factual.

Jimmy:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charles:

have this wonderful conversation with ourselves where we, we build those assumptions. I guess the other thing that we can think about is how we identify the assumptions that are holding us back. And, and there's great story for me about when I was a a, a young chaplain when I was in South Africa. We used to go to the circus a lot and there's this huge big African elephants in the circus. So we go into the circus and the thing that fascinated me as a kid was when we came out of the circus, these huge animals. Were tied to tiny wooden pegs in the ground and they didn't run away. I was like, dad, what's going on? Why are they not running away? and what he explained with us, he said, my boy, what happens is we bring the elephants into the circus when they're babies. And we tie them to the wooden pegs and those babies pull and pull and pull get free, and then they stop trying and they grow up they never try again. What I'm suggesting is If you were to start to think about what are the pegs I carry around conflict, either how I thought about it or the assumptions I make about what it means to give my opinion. How often do we hear, oh, it's very career limiting to give your opinion. Is that really the case or is that the narrative we all contribute to that stop us from doing it? So I guess there's something that we have to really think about is how do our own upbringing and our mindsets about other people, about the situation. of those things collude. If you like to make us fearful of conflict, try and avoid it or deny it,

Jimmy:

the, the peg story is a fantastic one. it's a really vivid analogy a good way to sort of bring it to a, a, a summary really, which I guess, we talked about the. Why, why would, why would you want to, to have conflict You know, there's, there's the benefits of it and they are everything from relationships to unlocking better thinking, to the liberation of not falling out with people. How do you go about kind of shifting your thinking from conflict is about having fights and it's a negative to actually, it helps me do these things. Well, like, like you said at the outset, water can help you grow and it, and it can, can kill you.

Charles:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

It depends on how you think about it, how you use it, and, and that's, like you say, conflict's the same thing. James, any final thoughts from you or questions Charles?

James:

Sitting listening to this and I'm, I'm not totally sold, Charles, I'll be honest with you, but I sort of get it, but not entirely.'cause my take on what you're saying is not so much conflict is the greatest resource. facing into conflict can be the greatest resource. So it's not so much you want the conflict, but you want to understand the reasons behind the conflict. And it's almost like having a pot on the simmer as opposed to having a pot boiling over. You want to understand it and harness it. You don't want it to go back. But it's just, I suppose, to semantics about the word conflict.

Charles:

I think James, that's, that's interesting because when you use that analogy of the pot and something in the pot, what's in the pot? And the pot is the conflict. If it boils over, it's not much good to you and it can burn you. And if you allow it to simmer, it can produce the most amazing food to eat. So my argument would be, if we accept that conflict simply is, neither good nor bad, simply is, what we do with it

James:

So

Charles:

results in.

James:

than, yeah. Okay.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

Charles:

and and that's why also it's a great source of innovation because actually if you see it in that way, you can welcome the conflictual views'cause you're not scared of it.'cause you can produce something that is so wonderful because it's percolated by the collective. But if it boils over, it'll damage. this is a difficult thing for us to get our heads around, the most simple starting point is to start having conversations about conflict with those around you. How do you find it? What do you experience of it? Because that act alone takes some of the fear of it away. there's gonna be some days for all of us, me included, when I'm not up for dealing with any conflict, where I don't want to take it on and where actually I'm deciding today to hell with it. not dealing with it, but I'm doing that consciously. It's a choice.

Jimmy:

Yeah. All right. Well thank you Charles for coming and sharing your perspectives on conflict. Fascinating as ever. James,

James:

Thank you

Jimmy:

any anything?

James:

enjoyed it.

Jimmy:

Alright, thanks everyone.

James:

Cheers. Now

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast from purpose to corporate jargon, but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well, easier said than done. So if you've got. Unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck. If your backlogs are outta control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised, just keeps failing to deliver, we can help. If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organizations, get in touch at Jimmy at@jobdonewell.com orJames@jobdonewell.com.

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James Lawther

Co-host
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Jimmy Barber

Co-host
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Charles Irvine

Guest