An Expert on Conflict Says Your Relationships Are Doomed Without It

I don’t know about you, but from personal relationships to work to politics, it sure seems to me there’s more than enough conflict to go around. But in her new book, “The Art of Fighting,” the conflict resolution facilitator Priya Parker argues that we could use more of it, and need to be a lot better at it. The book is a natural companion piece to Parker’s previous work, “The Art of Gathering,” in which she provided tools and examples for how communal activities can create closer and more cohesive bonds within social groups. She’s doing much the same in “The Art of Fighting,” but this time looking at ways in which intentional, thoughtful conflict within and between groups can be a pathway to greater connection. She and I talked about that counterintuitive idea and how to deal with some common workplace and family conflicts.

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“The Art of Gathering” was all about healthy group activity. The new book is about conflict. It’s hard not to wonder if that suggests something grim about the trajectory of the world. So why did you feel compelled to write the new book? I am deeply interested in human connection, and as a conflict resolution facilitator, I saw that in so many of the organizations and families that I work with, and so many of the friend groups that I am a part of or see, they’re often falling apart because they’re afraid to fight. When conflict arises, organizations and friend groups basically oscillate between unhealthy peace — conflict aversion, avoidance, pretending everything’s fine — and unhealthy conflict, which is escalation or domination or abuse. I wrote “The Art of Fighting” to say: Look, this is a deeply, deeply important part of all group life, of all of our relationships, and we’re not taught how to do it well. It’s not immoral, it’s not toxic. Conflict is the way we figure out who we are and how we negotiate to be part of common life together.

You used the term “unhealthy peace,” which could feel like an oxymoron, because what’s unhealthy about peace? Can you explain what you mean? I’ll start with a personal story. I’m half Indian, half white American, and both of my parents are very conflict-averse. When my parents separated and then divorced, everyone was shocked because they never fought. So I learned from a young age that there’s great loss in avoidance. I’m actually a third-generation conflict-avoidant person. When heat rises, we just stick our head in the sand and hope it will p***. And unhealthy peace is the idea that if we just pretend this conflict is not there, if we just shove it under the rug, everything will be fine. But actually, when we don’t have meaningful conversations, the relationship can end. Often you hear in the culture, “It’s not my labor,” “It’s not my burden,” “There’s too much baggage” — as if friends are supposed to just be fun. But because we’re so conflict-averse, we exit before we’re actually willing to engage. Our communities and our families are fracturing, in part because we’re not taught the skills of how to have those fights.

What’s the most common workplace conflict that you’re asked to help resolve? One of the most common problems that people come to me for is: “Our team is too polite. We have this norm of almost toxic politeness, and it’s blocking us from having the really important conversations about what should go in our product or why do our customers hate our product.” So one of the most common sets of problems that companies come to me for is to help them become more conflict-competent. I think it’s a huge misunderstanding to think that we have too much conflict right now. We actually have too little.

Which sounds crazy. It sounds crazy, but there is something between war and peace, which is what I call “healthy heat.” Healthy heat is at the center of all meaningful relationships. Part of what I do is help teams get more comfortable with heat. I’ll give an example: One of the things that we do is we have companies or teams host a “hot takes” party, basically practicing prosocial conflict. They’re laughing, they’re arguing, they are finding they’re allowed to be disgusted with each other about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. They start normalizing fighting with each other, and low-stakes arguing is actually preparation for high-stakes arguing.

You write about conflict as having to do with healthy interrelationship within a group. People are having conflict with the other members of the group because they actually want to be in a better relationship with those same people. But I can’t help but wonder if that’s a little pie in the sky. Maybe the fight is about one part of the group wanting to dominate the others or get rid of them. So why is it the case that conflict is necessarily generative in a good way? What you’re talking about is a power battle, a fight for dominance. But the type of conflict I’m interested in is when we get into what I call existentialist territory, when the fight starts to touch on a group’s us-ness: Who are we, and what are we about? If you find yourself in a conflict that is worthy to sort through, that you think is touching on what makes us us, you’re going to need some skills to duke it out. One of the examples I give in the book is a 150-year-old swim club in San Francisco where they swim in the open sea in the San Francisco Bay. And they have an existential conflict because with the invention of the wet suit, all of a sudden there are those who think, Oh, great, now we have some protection to brave the elements.

And the others think it’s antithetical to the spirit of the club? Exactly. In my line of work, I know it’s that wet suit divide that’s touching on the group’s us-ness and is threatening to a group over time.

What is the role of compromise in conflict? Because when I think back through my career, there have been moments when, rather than engage in conflict, I’ve compromised — even in situations where I didn’t think the compromise was ever going to lead to a better outcome. I just thought, I don’t want to deal with it. But do you want to be in relationship with that person?

Well, at the risk of losing my job, probably. [Laughs] Great!

But how can we manage situations so that we reduce conflict, but also not feel like we’re just settling for compromises? I mean, compromise is part of life. So much of human engagement is deciding what your intent is and what you want that relationship to be. My father is a white man from Waterloo, Iowa. He’s conservative, he’s Republican, he’s an evangelical Christian. He is deeply important to me, and a huge part of our relationship over the years is finding out which conversations are not helpful, and where and how do we have meaningful, rich conversation and interaction and joy despite our differences? Any meaningful relationship over time has difference in it, and part of the ability to have compromise is to say, “I’m not going to win every battle, but I can live with this.” Compromise is a really important part of any type of relationship or team.

I made a flippant joke about not wanting to get fired, but there’s a truth in there, which is that there are power imbalances in conflicts. This is something that shows up in work conflict all the time. So what limits do power imbalances put on conflict resolution? And how can the person with less power try to manage that imbalance? Power exists in every relationship, and in organizations hierarchy exists. And hierarchy is super helpful, right?

Sometimes. [Laughs] My most challenging situations are when a person doesn’t recognize their power. Often when I work with managers, one of the sets of coaching that we do is helping them understand that they have disproportionate power and it’s not the same relationship as if they’re arguing with their brother or their wife. That they have institutional power over the person and it’s a different interaction because you can fire the person. So a lot of our work is with the people with more power, to use their power well. Organizations get in a lot of trouble when people with power don’t think they have power.

Have you seen any cultural changes in the corporate world, in terms of appetite to engage in conflict resolution? Because it feels cold out there. I think one of the biggest changes in corporate culture in the last decade is the introduction of Slack. My mentor in conflict resolution was a guy named Hal Saunders. We used to think of negotiation as a chess match, and he said conflict resolution now is more like a squash court, except with 15 balls at the same time and mirrors on all of the walls. Slack hyper-turbocharged conflict. It turbocharged who can create a group or community in any workplace. It was deeply confusing to leadership. And it allows anyone to say anything without realizing the impact that it has on a thousand other eyeballs.

My experience with Slack is that it’s an annoying thing that I feel an obligation to be on and it’s crazy-making and not particularly productive. So what do we do about it? In most companies, Slack didn’t begin as a deeply considered software enterprise decision. It started because you could download it and create a channel. Communication channels are disproportionately the engines of what people think of as “what it means to work here.” Slack and social media are not designed for healthy heat. They’re not designed to have context or nuance. In some cases, Slack can help smaller communities find one another. But Amanda Ripley wrote a book called “High Conflict,” and she has this great term, “conflict entrepreneurs,” where in any group and every family and every company there are people who are just in it to stir up [expletive]. Slack can be really conducive to that. I often see Slack as smoke. Why is this all rising? And part of what I do is help people look for the fire. If people are saying all sorts of stuff on Slack or starting the side channels, that’s usually a symptom of a malaise elsewhere.

Do you have a sense that your ideas about conflict resolution work when extended to conflict between political groups? We have examples of conflict in our politics that are deeply unhealthy, and I also have examples that are starting to look more healthy. There’s a huge conflict right now happening within the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democrats, right? The D.S.A. are like the jilted lovers of the Democrats. They’re saying, “I wish you could see the world we think can exist.” Part of that fighting is tapping into what the conflict resolution facilitator Sethu Nair calls “relational longing.” In all types of political conflict, tapping into that relational longing is a way to actually widen the tent. But even across political divides, when you bring people into the same room or when they have a shared community that often isn’t even about politics — it might be their neighborhood ***ociation, their kickball club, their trivia night — having a second identity that they’re able to come together around expands their ability to be in community with each other across political differences.

But one of the big questions at the moment is how much do some of those groups that are in conflict want to be in relationship? I agree, and I think one of the deepest dangers in our country is that we’ve fallen out of love with each other. When you no longer have relational longing, you just leave. When I work with organizations, with churches, one of the things that I tell leaders is to find and cultivate that relational longing, that residual desire to still want to be in community with each other. Families, particularly across political divides — which are many families in this country — still have a residual desire for one another. When we fall out of love with one another, that’s a dangerous place to be.

You know, I was intrigued by the way you described yourself as a conflict-averse person earlier. How does your own conflict aversion show up in your life? When I am in a tense situation with somebody that I love — my husband, my children, my friends — my palms get super sweaty, my heart starts palpitating. Sometimes, in a really good fight, I’ll feel slightly faint. And I have come to realize that all fighting is physical. The physicality of what actually happens in our bodies deeply affects our ability to fight or stay. So I’m still physically conflict-averse. As a facilitator, but also in my own life, I have very simple practices to just notice this is happening, to breathe, to not exit.

But what advice do you have for people about how to mentally and cognitively deal with conflict aversion? Because it’s one thing to not flee. It’s another to be able to have a productive conflict. It’s to reframe conflict as an investment in the person. I do this in my own household. When my husband and I start arguing, if my children happen to be in the room, I will look at them and say: “It’s OK that we’re fighting. We’re arguing because we love each other. This is an important conversation.” I’m kind of saying it as much to them as I am to myself. We tend to think of conflict as antagonistic, but conflict can actually be incredibly prosocial. So, very simply, it’s checking in and saying, Do I care about this relationship? And counterintuitively, if I do, let me get in there.

When you’re in a fight with your husband, does he ever say, “Stop doing techniques on me”? Of course! [Laughs] “Don’t facilitate me!” My husband is very comfortable with conflict. I’ve learned a lot from him. It can be very frustrating because I know what the tools are, but we’re not always using them. When I am in a fight with my husband, I’m the wife. I can’t be a facilitator.

The way you just described your husband as someone who’s good at fighting conjures up a certain personality type, which is individuals who are always poised for conflict. What’s your guidance for how best to engage in a conflict with those people? Because my reaction often is I’m just not going to engage. This dynamic exists everywhere, and you’re often married to the person. There’s the person who wants to fight and the person who doesn’t. There’s a great piece by Rhaina Cohen in The Atlantic, and she looks at couples who schedule their fights.

Schedule their fights? When you actually schedule a time for the fight, the conflict-averse person can be like, “Save it for Tuesday,” and the conflict-seeking person, who feels like their conflict-averse partner is never willing to have a fight, knows, OK, fine, we have that for Tuesday. It might sound bizarre, but I studied traditional and Indigenous communities and how they dealt with internal conflict, and almost all of them had specific times and places to regularly sort through conflict. Part of what we are lacking in modern life are rituals to hold things that are hard. It allows us as humans, as friends, to have a place where we know we can take this stuff. In part because we ***ume that conflict is dysfunctional, we don’t even know that there are ways that we can actually embed this into daily life.

Can you share a conflict in your life that you’re working on right now? Oh my god, so many. When you’re a parent, there are conflicts all over the place. I have an 8- and 11-year-old. When my children are with their peer set and something happens between two kids, as is totally normal, when and how to pick up the phone and call the other parent, or when to just let it wash out — that’s a really deep conflict within and across parent communities. How much do you let kids sort it out, and how much is it our job to get in there and give them some skills? I do this with my own children in normalizing apology. When they do something to hurt or annoy one another, I help them practice a full apology, to articulate what it is that they did and not say, “I’m sorry you were offended.” Then, on the receiving side, instead of saying, “It’s OK,” I invite them to say, “Thank you,” because it’s actually quite vulnerable to admit that someone affected you. We are so averse to apologizing, we’re not taught how to, and we’re averse to even knowing how to accept someone’s apology. It’s a huge problem with daily group life.

It really is amazing how some people just will not apologize or admit wrongdoing. Entire families and teams get incredibly stuck when we don’t have the tools and skills to apologize. If you are unwilling or unable to admit that you were ever wrong, it creates this huge distortion within the entire group. One of the simplest ways to get a group unstuck is people articulating the elements that have hurt them or annoyed them and the other person practicing listening and accepting.

Earlier I brought up the idea of how we might reduce conflict in ways that don’t feel like we’re just compromising. And you gave this example of your relationship with your dad and how you decided that it was best for you to not talk about your political differences. How is that different than just avoiding the conflict? There was a study done that looked at how important political identities were to Americans. Over the last 10 years, particularly with the election of Donald Trump, that identity has moved way up the ladder in terms of importance. The Christian theologian Joyce Ann Mercer wrote this great essay about how she and her family used to be able to tease each other and engage in these conversations across the political aisle. It was kind of all in good fun. And over the last four years, the vibe was off, getting closer and closer to disgust and having different moral worlds. She said when you have a relationship in which you want to maintain ties for any reason, and there is a line around which, if you enter, you’re not going to be able to come back from, she encourages engaging in strategic conflict avoidance. As I read that essay, it helped me understand the many decades-long conversations that I’ve had with my father. At some level it’s not actually avoidance if you’ve had every conversation over and over again and realize you’re not going to change this person but you still want to be in relationship with them. One of the things that I found, both in my own relationship with my father but also as I’m looking at the country, is to grow the warmth between the people that you love. Have fun together, and remember all the different reasons you love one another.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.

Director of photography (video): Zackary Canepari