Generative conflict — collaborative debate as one of my mentors calls it — is critical to effective groups. It helps move a group from Tuckman’s forming stage to the storming stage. Although storming sounds bad, it is a critical period in the development of an effective team. Storming is when team members start to gain each others’ trust, align, and learn how to work together.
Why is generative conflict important for this transition? To build trust, you need to be able to share your perspectives. But if conflict doesn’t feel safe, then you will only share the perspectives that are unlikely to generate debate. That means that the team will not have access to the full range of each other’s perspectives. In addition, healthy conflict helps to build trust because it shows that even when we disagree, we can maintain our relationships with each other.
Making space for generative conflict is harder when teams are not colocated, whether this is because of hybrid work or just because teams are distributed between multiple offices. There isn’t anything inherently magical about being in person. However, there is something magical about open ended conversations. When a conversation has a convergent goal, then a choice has to be made. This automatically means that the options that are not chosen will be implicitly labeled as wrong — or at least less right. This raises the stakes. When a conversation is divergent, the stakes are lowered. Even if disagreeing feels a bit stressful, it is okay if we don’t come to a conclusion, which means that it’s less personally risky to bring up alternatives.
However, divergent conversations often feel like they’re a distraction from “real” work. We need to intentionally make time to have open ended conversations where people can bring up options and respond to each other without the risk of having their opinion implicitly declared wrong when something else is chosen.