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Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Amicability and Conflict

Cockburn writes:
Amicability is the willingness of people to hear the thoughts of another person with goodwill and to speak without malice.

Amicability is the weaker cousin to trust. Trust is wonderful and should be nurtured, but amicability is easier to achieve within a group and still confers advantages. I always watch the amicability level in an organization to learn to what extent information is being revealed versus concealed in conversations.

When people conceal information from their colleagues, they lower the rate of information discovery, which raises the lost-opportunity cost as well as the overall cost per idea developed.

Amicability permits successful conflict to occur when the project goes through a stressful period. The people, knowing that the others are not intending to be hurtful, can look past the current disagreement toward resolving the issues.

One might think that removing all conflict from a project team would be the best, but that turns out not to be the case. People need to be able to disagree, in order to identify design problems!


I think being able to listen and without an agenda is really important but really hard for me to do. I start thinking about how to word my response before the other person is even finished talking. I want to be more patient and not be in such a hurry to steer the conversation in one way or another. I need to trust that eventually both people working together will come to the best conclusion.

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