Anyone who works together will sooner or later run into conflict. That sounds heavier than it usually is: a conflict rarely means that the collaboration has failed, it mostly shows that interests, convictions, expectations and ways of looking at things touch upon each other, and in complex situations that is virtually unavoidable. The more interests are at play, the more incomplete the information is and the greater the mutual dependence, the smaller the chance that everyone naturally arrives at the same conclusion. People look at an issue from their own responsibility and weigh different things, which means that what feels logical and necessary to one person can feel thoughtless, too hasty or far too cautious to another.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, organisations need those differences. A team in which everyone sees the same thing, considers the same thing important and reasons in the same way misses part of the information needed to make good decisions under complex circumstances. Yet we still often treat conflict in organisations as if it were a malfunction: as soon as tension arises, the reflex is to remove it as quickly as possible, restore the atmosphere and get people back on the same page. It is precisely in that reflex that the information contained in the conflict often disappears, and we frequently fail to resolve the conflict at all.
Not every conflict is harmful
There is of course a difference between a conflict that yields something and a conflict that gets stuck. As soon as positions harden, people start judging each other personally and the conversation mainly becomes about who is right, the quality of the collaboration quickly deteriorates. But that is something different from saying that conflict itself is the problem. A well conducted conflict actually forces people to sharpen their reasoning: assumptions become visible, different perspectives come to the table and decisions are examined more thoroughly. Someone asks a question that another had not yet thought of, a risk that was previously underestimated finally gets attention, and an assumption that seemed obvious turns out, on closer inspection, not to be so obvious after all.
That can be uncomfortable, but discomfort and unsafety are not the same thing, and a professional team must be able to bear tension without the collaboration falling apart because of it. People need to be able to contradict each other while remaining curious about why the other person sees things differently, and that requires more than good intentions. Above all, it requires insight into what actually happens between people during such a conversation.
Behaviour is almost never purely personal
In conflicts, we tend, from our own perspective, to attribute behaviour to the person far too quickly: someone is dominant, reserved, controlling, unclear, slow or not very engaged. In doing so we unwittingly turn behaviour into a trait, while in practice it depends far more on the situation and on the reactions of others than such labels suggest. Someone who gives a lot of room in one team may take much stronger control in a different environment; an employee who normally shares their opinion easily may become noticeably quiet in a particular group, not because their personality changes, but because behaviour partly arises through interaction with the environment.
You see this clearly when tensions rise. Take someone with a strong need for clarity and progress: if a team keeps talking for a long time without reaching a decision, that person will often start putting their stamp on things more firmly, steering and influencing. A colleague who instead needs care or space quickly experiences that steering as pressure and withdraws further, after which that reticence is again interpreted as a lack of engagement, causing the first person to take charge even more emphatically. Both people act from their own "logic", but together they unintentionally build a pattern that makes the collaboration increasingly difficult. Anyone who only looks at the behaviour of both people sees two people who do not get along; anyone who looks at the interaction sees a self-reinforcing pattern, and that second perspective offers far more starting points for change.
Complexity exposes patterns
When circumstances are straightforward, many of these kinds of differences remain below the surface: tasks are clear, agreements are known and people know what is expected of them. Complexity and pressure change that. As soon as uncertainty arises, priorities shift and different interests demand attention at the same time, people have to interpret more and can no longer rely solely on existing agreements and routines, and it is precisely then that it makes sense to make mutual patterns visible, to name them and to discuss them. Who takes the initiative when the direction is unclear, who looks for extra information first, who mainly wants to keep up the pace and who tries instead to build support; who values certainty about roles and responsibilities and who mainly asks questions about the consequences for people. None of these reactions is automatically right or wrong, they stem from different motives, experiences and expectations.
The problem grows when people regard their own reaction as self-evident and start interpreting that of another person from their own frame of reference. Then carefulness quickly gets labelled as indecisiveness, decisiveness becomes dominance, critical questions become resistance and a need for connection is read as a lack of results orientation. At that point, valuable diversity is lost in mutual irritation. And before you know it, it becomes a cacophony of opinions, interests and frustrations.
Change intensifies this even further
In impactful change you often see the same mechanism in an amplified form, because change touches existing routines, responsibilities, certainties and mutual relationships. People have to redetermine what is expected of them and what position they occupy in the new situation, and it is hardly realistic to expect meaningful change without some form of resistance or conflict.
Yet resistance is still often treated as something that mainly needs to be overcome: we want to bring people along, build support and make sure everyone understands why the change is necessary. That is understandable and sensible! But be aware that it can too easily become one-way traffic, while resistance actually contains information. Perhaps someone sees a risk that has not been sufficiently taken into account in the plans, perhaps the chosen approach does not fit daily practice, perhaps the change requires behaviour that was actively discouraged for years, or perhaps the content is not even the biggest problem, but there is simply a lack of clarity about what the change concretely means for someone. If you only try to reduce resistance, that information never surfaces by itself, you have to enter into the conversation for that.
Motives, approach and expectations
In many of the conflicts I encounter in organisations, three elements continually intertwine: personal motives, the chosen approach and the expectations people have of each other. Personal motives partly determine what people find important and what they are sensitive to. One person needs autonomy and room to act independently, another wants clarity, structure or certainty first; one person gets excited by speed and results, while a colleague draws energy from exploring together and coordinating carefully. This is not about labels or the idea that people fit predictably into a box. Motives mainly help explain why the same situation is experienced differently by different people.
In addition, the chosen approach has at least as much influence as the content itself. A change can be sensible in substance and still trigger unnecessary resistance because of the way it is carried out; a decision can be correct and still lead to frustration because people do not understand how it came about. A manager may want to offer clarity, while employees mainly experience that their influence is being limited. Content and approach are simply not the same thing, and in practice that difference is too often overlooked.
And then there are expectations, where surprisingly much goes wrong. People often think their expectations are clear to others, while they have never been explicitly stated: we assume that someone understands what we find important, how we want to work together or what responsibility we place with the other person. If that other person then acts differently, irritation arises, not because someone consciously breaks an agreement, but because both parties act from a different picture of that same agreement. Anyone who does not examine this starts judging behaviour; anyone who does examine it often discovers that part of the conflict is based on expectations that were never jointly established.
The conversation does not have to resolve the difference
This is where I see an important value of CIRCYOULAR®: not as a model that explains every problem, and not as a tool that makes conflicts disappear, but as a way to better understand what is happening in the mutual dynamic. Why does someone react the way they react, what is important to them in this situation, what expectation lies beneath the irritation, what influence does the chosen approach have on the behaviour we see, and what behaviour do people subsequently evoke in each other? Exploring these questions changes the nature of the conversation: people do not have to immediately resolve their difference in order to understand each other better, and that last part is often underestimated.
After all, understanding does not mean that you agree with each other, it means that you can better see the logic from which the other person acts. This creates room to distinguish between a genuine substantive difference and a conflict that is mainly caused by assumptions, interpretations or mutual patterns, and that nuance matters greatly in complex situations. Without that nuance, people increasingly reduce each other to their positions.
Progress does not require harmony
Organisations that handle complexity well are not by definition organisations in which little conflict occurs; what matters far more is whether people are able to work with differences. That requires that dissent is possible, that people dare to examine their own assumptions and that leaders do not experience every tension as an immediate loss of control. Psychological safety plays an important role in this, not as a pleasant atmosphere in which everyone must feel comfortable, but as the space to bring in relevant information, even when that information is uncomfortable.
A team that only functions well as long as everyone agrees is vulnerable. It is precisely when interests clash, pressure rises or the future becomes uncertain that it becomes clear whether a team can truly work together: that is when it becomes visible whether people keep asking questions or withdraw, whether differences are examined or made personal, whether resistance is seen as difficult behaviour or as possible information. That is exactly where the quality of collaboration is determined.
And then, that cure-all after all
Perhaps that explains why CIRCYOULAR® proves valuable across so many different issues. After all, it is not always about the same problem, but very often about the same human reality: people differ in what moves them, respond to the circumstances they find themselves in and continually influence each other, in leadership, change, collaboration, culture and conflict. CIRCYOULAR® does not remove those differences, nor should that be the intention; it mainly helps to recognise them earlier, understand them better and make them discussable before patterns get stuck.
That means it is usable in many different places, and I like to use the comparison with a cure-all. But there is one important difference I would like to point out. A cure-all suggests that you apply something and the problem then disappears, and that is not how human collaboration works. The real work only begins when people are willing to explore together what is happening, what they expect from each other and what their own share is in that dynamic. Conflict does not need to be avoided in the process. What we mainly need to learn is how to use it better.