“They make a desert and called it peace” Tacitus
I’ve just read “The Five Dysfunctions of Teams” by Patrick Lencioni (1 star Amazon reviews here – it is definitely a “borrow don’t buy”), which is a “business fable” (growing sub-genre, I’m told).
One of the five dysfunctions is an absence of trust. This leads to the next, the fear of conflict…
“It’s the lack of conflict that’s a problem. Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it only comes as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing. I’d trade that false kind of harmony any day for a team’s willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with no collateral damage.” page 92
and so one of the characters says of a controversial decision
“half of us are for it and half are against it, and so it just sits there because no one wants to piss anyone off.”
page 93
We all know about Groupthink (I hope), but perhaps the more apt link here would be to dissensus…
“I’ve argued here that the best approach to an unpredictable future is dissensus: that is, the deliberate avoidance of consensus and the encouragement of divergent approaches to the problems we face.”
dwighttowers.wordpress.com 
I just left the following comment on Leaving Babylon. My intention was to ask the same question here, so I thought I’d just repeat it verbatim.
I wanted to do this earlier, before I was lured into lecturing on Bohm!
We seem to be hitting up – not between us, but in general – against the question of conflict and how it can possibly be dealt with. I keep looking inside as the way to get to where conflict ceases to be destructive and I’m running into the edges of my own predispositions and anxieties around conflict. In Bohm’s – I know, I know! – discursion of thought in his “On Dialogue” he talks about suspending the reactions thoughts provoke in us as opposed to suppressing them which leads to all sorts of Jungian badness! This seems connected to the question of conflict, since it would lead to a way to protect ones self from the emotional shocks of an encounter, but it still leaves open the enormous question of how we come to an effective way of dealing with conflict. – I do make a distinction between effective and efficient, the latter being the toxic form of something we cannot live without!
I know how silly this is to put such an enormous question into the form of a “shout-out!” But there it is!
P. S. Someone I know has gotten me in this new habit of double-posting responses…. Anyway, here goes!
The last comment went here on this particular post because you brought this question to me in this series to do with group interactions.
How we deal with conflict has a direct impact in how we make sense of dissensus, and how we carve out whatever justifiable realm there is for will.
These are to y mind the open questions right now.
Me brain is fecked right now. But I wanted to mention, Dwight, that drinking a glass of milk and eating a couple of slices of turkey at bedtime will go a long way toward calming insomnia…
Hey Vera, I will try milk and the vegetarian equivalent of turkey, whatever that is. I realised that the cup of coffee so strong you could almost literally stand a spoon in it that my father made me at 11pm may have had something to do with that bout last week. What I have done is lined up a whole bunch of posts to go up at roughly 24 hour intervals – they are in a queue on my wordpress. I will ALSO be adding extra posts in between times. Went to something tonight that was “ego-fodder”ing, but I realised I needed a less confrontational judgmental term (that’s the problem with hanging out on the Tinterwebs with people like you and Antonio – sooner or later you realise the position of judgmentalism is a cul-de-sac, albeit a comfortable and comforting one! Curses on both of you!!) The new phrase is going to be “Bizzzzzzzzzzzness as Usual “, about static meetings and Q and A where everyone is doing things from a good heart, but an unreflective brain…
And other posts too. But it’s late. Bedtime. My father is about 600 miles away, so too-strong coffee won’t be an issue.
Best to both of you, and any other poor soul reading this 🙂
Tee-hee. I am ready and willing to be blamed!
Veg turkey won’t do it. You need the tryptophan. Get it in a pill then, either from the health food store, or by prescription.
Been thinking about wearing colored hats, green for good, yellow for “yer losing me”, red for “stop”! They are amazingly cheap, 6 bucks for a dozen, could pass them around before the meeting.
Tee-hee.
Hey, I like the hats idea…could’a used the trio at dinner in a Thai restaurant a couple weekends back with a very old friend i was reuniting with. He was on caffeine due to insomnia the night before, i was feeling my wine-while-waiting-for-dinner; he’s more of a talker, i’m more of a listener… But over the course, i felt the need to interrupt him twice, once to ask him to slow down, and once to tell him the people at the next table were not only hearing him, but looking over at us funny. The hats would’ve been painless!
Antonio, good for you for puzzling over dealing with conflict. That realm and how poor our conditioned social skills are at it is pretty much the uncrackable nut if there is one, eh?
Dwightowers, for some reasons it’s good to hear you’re a fellow veggie…well, i’m 99% no lactos or ovos either, but not fanatical about it. Yeah, i don’t think “Tofurky” has tryptophan. Melatonin has been getting better sleep-aid reviews lately; medicinal cannabis (higher in CBD) is effective for certain sorts of insomnia, but caffeine counteraction is one of the biggest of sleep challenges…
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