TOCICO

The majority of cases of tension in an organization and the inability to move on are of the nature of an organizational conflict of interests between influential stakeholders: between owners, between owners and top management, among top management, between major organizational functions (sales and production; production planning and purchasing planning; precut development and production; finance and operations, etc). The conflicts are genuine and each side’s position is strongly justified. What adds to the difficulty of the situation is that either side in the conflict has the means to fully block the other side from achieving their desired objective. This often brings the company to a stall, loss of control over the situation and frustration of the key people in the company. In the workshop we will learn how to analyze such cases starting from presenting them in a format of an organizational interest conflict cloud and transfer it into a series of internal dilemma clouds of each side. The attendees will be presented with practical recommendations and examples. Through examples and their involvement in constructing the clouds based on a real business case they will learn that: 1. The major difficulty of constructing the interest conflict cloud is to detect A – the common objective between the two sides, and what mistakes typically happen in detecting A. 2. Detecting and having agreement on A helps to open the way to collaboration between the parties on trying to better understand their side and the other side. 3. Better understanding of the position of each side comes through the realization that the conflict between the parties persists because each side is locked into a series of managerial dilemmas regarding the actions demanded by the position of the other side, and without solving their individual dilemmas, neither of the party is able to solve the joint two-sided conflict cloud. The work will be done on a real business case with intensive interaction between the presenter and the audience and will involve the following techniques: Organizational Interest Conflict Cloud construction; Using the protocol of checking logic in the cloud; Developing assumptions; Listing actions that are perceived to be “forced” by each side; Developing a series of internal dilemma clouds for the forced actions; Developing assumptions for each dilemma cloud; If relevant, consolidating dilemma clouds to better understand the core behavioral drive of each side in the conflict; Developing logical reasoning to negate assumptions in individual clouds; Developing injections for individual dilemma clouds; and Listing possible actions within an injection and recording “short-cut” NBRs. We will have the discussion how to use this approach in the presence of the both parties with the objective of mediating between them.