When is disagreement about something and when is it about nothing?
Perhaps it may help to rephrase that… Often conflict causes disagreements about not very much or even nothing at all! The problem is the conflict, not the issue. We see this all the time in mediation. It’s why mediation is so much better at resolving disputes than litigation. The legal system can only deal with the legal basis of disagreements, even if there isn’t really a legal basis, it cannot help with the non legal conflict drivers, even when that is the problem that needs sorting out.
Let’s look at a typical example. Two children are deeply jealous of their mother’s attention for the other child. They grow up and courteously dislike each other. They always compete for parental time and attention and resent the time the mother spends with their sibling. If challenged they would deny this, but the conflict is deeply embedded in their sub conscious minds, it will never go away and informs all their exchanges in relation to their mother. That mother becomes ill and develops Dementia. One of them starts to look after her. The other has difficulty seeing the mother and is sometimes denied access. There are huge control issues and a legal dispute may well emerge. On the face of it that dispute will be about the Power of Attorney, who controls the mother’s money or makes decisions about her health and welfare. There may be a dispute about her jewellery all the terms of her Will, whether she had capacity to make the Will or Power of Attorney, particularly if it favours one sibling over the other. Was it fair, was it right or was undue influence brought to bear on the elderly parent?
In reality, assessing the capacity of someone with dementia is notoriously difficult, as it comes and goes. So legal proceedings on this can be fraught with difficulty and be a bit of a gamble. Also, the dispute originates in the sibling relationship and entrenched conflict. The legal dispute is an expression of that. Hence settling that litigation will be really hard, because it isn’t just about the legal rights and wrongs. Costs will mount and relationships worsen and all the time the cure would be mediation. Mediation is the medicine that reaches the parts litigation can’t reach. Mediation deals with the root cause, not the symptoms. Litigation in cases like this is akin to amputation for an infection. Treat the infection and you may well preserve something precious and save great suffering and stress. Litigate and the losses can be incalculable. It certainly rarely improves the situation!
It’s the same in the workplace, in the work team. If people can’t get along they quarrel and precious work time and energy is wasted in their conflict. If the the conflict is bad enough then stalemate can result, paralysing your business. Yet the reason you may have recruited two very different people and asked them to work together may be good. They may have a complimentary skills and you want to stop the conflict between them and harness their different skills to produce useful outcomes for your business. The legal remedy is disciplinary or grievance procedures and finally termination or redundancy. This is an incredibly expensive gamble and diverts you and your team from what you want to be doing – running the business. A workplace mediator can often help teams work together, solving your problem so amputation isn’t necessary.
So when you seem to have an intractable problem between people, ask yourself is it ‘them’ or the presenting issue? If you solve this issue, will there always be something else? Might a chat with a mediator be the most use to you?
You have nothing to lose and quite a lot to gain.