Business as usual?

Business as usual?

Ever happened to you? You get round to talking about a problem after times and times again skirting around it. It’s been building up steam in the background until everyone hates it or hates each other. The meeting arrives…and everyone contorts themself through it to clear the air, get things off their chest and be nice. And then…nothing happens. No feedback, no follow-up. Like surgeons at the operating table passing the scalpel around, hailing a successful operation without having actually made an incision. Dealing with conflicts thus results in niceness…of questionable sincerity—which survives until the next regurgitation of the problem, because it hasn’t really been dealt with and because we are creatures of habit, especially bad ones. Plastering nice words like “empowerment” or “transformation” over the problem doesn’t help either. Nice is bad—worse than you think.

The surgeon metaphor is not random. Solving conflicts in teams requires a cutting away—via negativa. Moving things around or adding things will be necessary at a later point in time but when the structure/system/paradigm is wonky, then a brave soul has to step up and show the elephant the door. What is the elephant? A poor quality process; a lack of skills; a bottleneck; bad decision-making; external interference; boredom; status; form over substance; micromanagement; arrogance; bullying. A toxic cocktail of them all?! Dicking around at the margins is a waste of time. Smash it up and start over.

(The most effective use of via negativa I have experienced in such conflicts is the removal of a useless leader).