Most team conflicts I walk into aren't disagreements. They're misunderstandings that never got the chance to be understood.
Before I step into a room with a team, I do intakes. After over 1,000+ of them, one pattern repeats: people hold different versions of the same reality.
But it doesn't stop there. Instead of speaking their version out loud, they hide it. Because the consequences of speaking their truth feel so real, that silence seems safer, easier. That imagined consequence of speaking up is itself a projection. It doesn't have to be true. But it feels true enough to keep people quiet.
So the different versions of reality never meet. Instead, they turn into unspoken assumptions. Unspoken expectations. Unspoken concerns. Unspoken interest. A whole potpourri of misunderstanding, residing in the undercurrent.
And here's the part that gets relations spiraling down. People start thinking they are in disagreement. And when people think they're in disagreement, they act as if they're in disagreement. Guarded, defensive, keeping score. And now the misunderstanding, left unattended, starts showing up as conflict.
This isn't just a hunch. I see it in almost every intake: team members describing the same situation as if it happened in different rooms. Each one is certain they're right. Each one is reacting to a story in their own head rather than to what the other person actually said or did. The default would be to defend their position. Before ever having said out loud what's actually driving it.
Once people feel safe enough to say the unspoken stuff, the "disagreement" often dissolves in minutes. Not because anyone caved. Because there was never as much distance between them as the silence had built.
So the job of a facilitator is often not managing conflict. It's creating the conditions where the misunderstanding can surface, before it hardens into something people believe they have to defend. More on how to do so in another post.
But in order to do this job properly, the first thing I need to attend to is my inner state. I so recall getting lost in those different and often contradicting stories, trying to figure out what really happened, empathizing with some persons more than others, and then getting quite nervous as the drama would build up intake by intake.
Instead, I regulate my need to fix, please and what other reactive patterns I have and come back to curiosity, calm and being unattached to a specific outcome. Knowing that people just see reality differently, it is built into our human condition. I also learned that teams are together for a reason so we can trust that, when given the space, they are very capable to clear (the larger part of the air) between them.
What have you noticed: how often does what looks like disagreement in the teams you facilitate turn out to be something that was simply never said out loud?