Agree to Disagree: Conflict Resilience Authors Reveal the Power of Productive Tension

Do you shudder at the thought of conflict? Many people do — and go out of their way to dodge it. But that’s a problem, according to Harvard Law School senior fellow Bob Bordone and neurologist Dr. Joel Salinas. The pair are the co-authors of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. 

The duo spoke with b. about getting more comfortable with conflict in an effective, productive manner.

b.: What inspired you to write Conflict Resilience? 

Bordone: The book was really born of a series of conversations, just informally, that Joel and I had. … My longtime professional interest is broadly in conflict, negotiation and mediation. But unbeknownst to me, Joel had similar kinds of interests and observations. And he really is the one who said, “Hey, what about taking some of these ideas and marrying them into a book where he could make it highly additive by bringing in so much of the brain science and neuroscience that explains how we process conflict when we’re in it?”

Salinas: From my perspective, it was really seeing … increasing levels of social isolation and loneliness within the youth population — that’s some of the research that I do — but also observing that there’s a decreasing tolerance … with being in the discomfort of disagreement. … To be able to sit and actually have hard conversations, to really stick with each other, to be in places of difference … and hopefully connect even further.

Conflict isn’t bad. Conflict can be a source of vibrancy and creativity, a source of connection. If you think about your own relationships, it’s those where you do openly work through conflict that actually are some of the closest relationships that you’ll have.

b.: Can you dive deeper into the science?

Salinas: In the brain, there are these areas called the anterior cingulate and the insula, and both of these areas are involved in pain perception. Usually, if you were to get physically injured, you would also have … sensory areas that correspond to that in your brain [activate].

But in [conflict] situations, when we notice that there’s something salient, something that should have our attention, there’s this valence of something negative tied to it that we’ve learned to avoid. The anterior cingulate and insula start to be much more active and start to override a lot of our brain’s typical frontal lobe, self-regulating networks. 

So we start to get into what we call default reactions. You might be familiar with … the typical fight or flight reaction, but it can go beyond fight or flight. In [our] book, we talk about the five Fs: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. It could be potentially expanded even further than that, in that we all learn behaviors in response to situations that we’re in. If that response to that behavior leads to feeling better, then our brain starts to create networks, connections, to tell us, “Do this the next time this comes up. And if you get a reward from it, do it more, and then do it more.”

But what ends up happening, if, for example, avoidance (“flee”) is the way that you typically respond to certain conflict situations — or “fawn” is you fold over and do whatever the other person says and placate them. These are things that your brain is now turning into reflexes. So the next time you’re in a similar situation, you’ll turn to it.

There are different situations based on the relationship, the power dynamics, the environment that you’re in, how you’re physically feeling that day. That all influences how we perceive that conflict, our ability to actually hold it, and how we end up responding to it.

What we really want is for people to start to have at least a basic awareness of their brain’s role in these situations. Awareness is really more than half the battle here. … In that awareness, you’re able to start intervening or making some changes and observing what situations are harder for you to engage in conflict and what situations are easier, and why that might be. 

b.: What factors have led to the decline of conflict resilience?

Bordone: One of the things we try really hard in the book to do is to distinguish conflict resilience from conflict resolution. It really is a prerequisite insofar as developing and doing the internal work to sit with pain, to sit with discomfort, to sit with things that are less than pleasing to us. Because if we can’t do that, then it doesn’t really matter if we happen to have taken a class and have some good skills on how to deal with conflict because we’re never going to put ourselves in the situation because we can’t handle the fire.

We both have seen this in our lived experience. But I think even if you just zoom out and look at the research: the rise of social media, the ability to create our own cocoons of comfort so that we are not necessarily exposed to people with whom we disagree has been a big contributor here. The algorithms don’t help because the more we click on people we like and agree with, the more we see those [types of] people.

It’s not just social media; it’s also patterns of the way people have moved geographically. There are fewer and fewer places that are purple. Even in states that are purple … the cities are blue and the rural areas are red.

There are a whole bunch of technological and demographic changes that have contributed to the decline of conflict resilience. I think there’s the ease with which we can cancel and shut out those with whom we disagree. And then I think the increasing loudness or polarization of our politics have caused us to, instead of looking to how we can join, [we] look to how we can gather our own people and fight. And then add to that everything Joel has explained in terms of our brain defaults that serve us in some ways but in this domain, when we’re not mindful about them, actually hold us back.

b.: Why is conflict at work necessary, and what happens in its absence? 

Bordone: I don’t know a world where there’s an absence of conflict. But what I do know is a world where folks don’t feel comfortable bringing conflict up into the open. The value of conflict brought into the open is that when handled well, it’s the source of dynamism and vibrance.

So much talk, so much energy, is spent in corporate settings talking about creating diverse and inclusive environments. And there are lots of reasons for that — diverse views, diverse perspectives, diverse experiences help bring about creativity, help bring about new ideas. But all the effort falls apart if people aren’t actually able to bring their differences into the open. And that is, in some sense, what conflict is.

When that isn’t happening … it usually means something has gone awry. We are either not bringing things forward, which is exhausting internally — we’re losing the creativity, we’re losing the kind of generativity that differences bring — or even worse, we actually haven’t created much of a diverse environment, and we have a bunch of people who think all the same. And we know in today’s pluralistic world, that doesn’t work for organizations.

Salinas: There is this cycle that could be perpetuated if we avoid conflict. The less we encounter [conflict], the more our brain becomes sensitized to it. So the physiological response to these kinds of perceived potential threats — heart rate, respiratory rate increase, blood pressure, flushing of the face, muscle tightening — all these things become that much more exaggerated and much more intense and happen much more frequently, even at the mere thought or the mere potential of conflict.

You can end up in a spiral, or this vicious cycle, where the more you avoid, the more you supplant, the more sensitive you are to conflict, and the less likely you are to engage with it. 

b.: You have a framework on how to better handle conflict: 1) Name and dig deep, 2) Explore and be brave, and 3) Commit and own the conflict. How specifically can business leaders apply them?

Salinas: For “Name and Dig Deep,” first you want to pause and breathe and then name the situation. It’s about really labeling or figuring out what’s going on; that includes labeling the emotional experience you’re having [and] the type of conflict. Just this process of actively thinking about the situation is meta-cognition, thinking about thinking. That process really starts to get more of these frontal parietal executive functioning networks much more online. [That] will help offset a bit of these ingrained, much more reflexive emotional parts of the brain that are focused on protecting you from threats and helping you survive.

The “Explore” component is the next step after that, which is about really understanding what lies behind that label and what feeds into it. … Thought distortions can include catastrophizing [and] black-and-white thinking. There are many different ways that our brain can fool us into thinking that reality is one way based on … what we’ve experienced in the past. That can oftentimes shut us down and sabotage our way of sitting with the disagreement that’s in front of us.

With the “Commit” component, it’s having an opportunity to understand your own interests and be able to think about the interests of the other person and what to do based on that. A little bit of the neuroscience there: one part is the planning that goes into it, with the brain envisioning what’s possible. But a critical thing is the theory of mind that comes into that element, which is to … understand what the other person’s perspective is. But you’re not necessarily going to endorse that other side. It’s a much more objective or impartial way of thinking through what action to take next.

From our perspective, in these three steps, the key thing is just making sure that you have a sense of what you want to do next. [Then] you can actually move forward with it as opposed to falling back into those default reactions.

Bordone: If we look across a range of catastrophic business calamities, so much of it is due to avoidance. … [Business leaders] use their power in a way to do something that feels like it’s creating resolution, but … actually is preventing them from getting the needed information to make the best decisions they can.

There are a lot of examples I could think of. One that we talk about in the book is what has happened to Boeing over the past decade — it was completely preventable because … engineers were raising concerns. There were people in the process saying, “Hey, take a look here.” The failure to be resilient to hearing that bad news, the failure then to engage with it in a constructive way … has really put this iconic American brand in serious jeopardy. And even worse, human lives. The consequences around this are quite serious. It’s not just a matter of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we handle conflict better?”

Conflict Resilience will be available on March 18. 

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