Read this interview summary if you are interested in:

• Understanding how a person’s mindset leads to conflict
• Discovering how justification keeps us stuck
• What it means to be “in the box”
• How to make the choice to avoid conflict from happening

Have you ever withheld information from a co-worker, or took action that made a conflict worse, rather than better? Why do we do these things sometimes and what’s the alternative? Dr. Duane Boyce, Managing Director of The Arbinger Institute, talks about a unique approach to understanding conflict in the workplace, based on a book by The Arbinger Institute called The Anatomy of Peace. He explains how a person’s choices can lead to getting in “the box” and set a person on a course of self-justification that feeds conflict. He also provides some recommendations on how to stay out of “the box” and focus your energies on helping things go right. Different from conflict management strategies, this interview looks at a fundamental perspective that you can choose that will help prevent conflict from ever happening.

Expert bio:

Dr. Duane Boyce is Managing Director of Corporate Services for The Arbinger Institute, www.arbinger.com. Trained in psychology and the clinical treatment of families, Dr. Boyce conducted his postdoctoral study in Developmental Psychology at Harvard University. During this time, Dr. Boyce published professionally, including co-authoring an academic book on the psychology of moral reasoning. Prior to joining Arbinger as a managing director, Dr. Boyce served for a decade as a vice president of a highly successful firm in the steel industry. His responsibilities included human resources, quality, sales, and communications. He is a sought-after speaker, teacher, and advisor for corporate leaders in many industries.

To access the archive of this interview, please click here.

Interview Summary

KE: Duane, I noticed when I read your book that there was no mention of authorship beyond The Arbinger Institute reference. Why is that?

DB: We have long been committed to the ideas in this book and our sense is that we want the focus to be on the ideas rather than on any particular individuals. Also, there are a number of people who work at Arbinger who don’t write books, but whose contribution is equally valuable. The last thing we want to do is treat them as if they are not as valuable as we are by putting our names on the front of a book. We see ourselves as working collaboratively to make a difference in the world.

KE: What promoted you and your co-author, Jim Ferrell, to write this book?

DB: So much of life is filled with conflict. If you think about the typical workplace, the typical workday, it's surprising how much time is spent feeling unhappy, de-motivated, and in conflict with other people.   People are not getting along and working together and then they go home unhappy and take their troubles home with them. There really is a way to greater peace in our individual work lives, and it just seemed like we ought to address that issue specifically, so that is what we have done in this book.

KE: What would you say is the central theme of the book?

DB: The Anatomy of Peace, which is the title of our book, says we typically think our inner peace depends on how others treat us. I would like to suggest something different. Our inner peace depends on how we treat others. That’s the core dimension that the characters in our book learn. Take a character like Lou, who is a central figure. He goes through life embroiled in conflict at work and at home. The one thing he is sure of is that his life would be okay if everybody else would change. It turns out not to be truth and he discovers in the course of the book that actually he is part of the problem and if he is going to feel different and his life is going to be different, it’s going to depend on how he begins to treat others.

KE: You wrote the book as a story and embedded the principles within the story. What caused you to choose that format?

DB: We have discovered over years of consulting with organizations that people learn best from stories. People don’t usually learn best just by being told what to do and what not to do. If they can actually engage with characters in a book, as the characters learn things about their lives, readers are invited to think about their own lives and might discover the very same things these characters are discovering. That’s a deeper kind of learning. It’s just fascinating to see how much we are like one another. We followed this same format in our earlier book called Leadership and Self Deception.

KE: Not only did you embed your principles into a story, you also ran parallel themes within the story, which I found quite interesting. You paralleled conflict within marriage, the conflict in the workplace, and even conflict in the Middle East.

DB: That’s certainly what we tried to do; because our conviction is that the anatomy of peace is the same everywhere. The structure, the nature of peace, is the same wherever we need it, whether it is our home or workplace, communities, whatever it might be. It all begins in the same place and so if we really understand one place, one part of our lives, it allows us to apply it to every other part, and that's what that book tries to do.

Here is one of the key things to have in mind. Whenever I mistreat you Karen, I will justify myself, and the way I will justify myself will be to blame you. So let’s imagine that I am working on a project and along the way, I run across some information that I know would be helpful to you. I think to myself, “I ought to talk to Karen and pass this on to her,” but let’s say that I don’t. That’s a small example of mistreatment. I feel like I should do something for you and I don’t. Here is something that will always happen. When I mistreat you, I will begin to see you in that way that justifies that mistreatment.

I am “at war with you,” Karen, because now I will start to say, “You know, Karen doesn't pass information on to me, Karen probably would not appreciate this anyway.” So notice what's happened. I am the one who has done something wrong here. I violated my own sense of what I ought to do and having done that, I now begin to blame you and you haven't done anything at all. That is such a key thing to understand. We really don’t understand human behavior unless we understand this deep need to be justified whenever we do wrong.

KE: You say that conflicts exist because people like the conflicts they are in. Tell us more about that.

DB: It is just fascinating what happens in conflict. If we understand this idea of justification, we will understand that. Let’s suppose that I don’t pass along the information to you as I mentioned in my previous example, and so now I am blaming you for why I didn’t do it. Let’s imagine that now something happens and you delay returning a phone call to me. Here is one of the things that will always happen. I will say to myself, “I knew Karen was like that. I was right not to pass that information on to her in the first place, look how uncooperative she is.” What's happening to you Karen is, you haven't returned this phone call to me and so in some way, you are now mistreating me. Now you will began to see me in a way that justifies how you are treating me.

So now we are both doing the same thing, we are both justifying ourselves, we are at war with each other and even though it’s on a small, ordinary, everyday level, it’s still a war. Here is one of the things that will always happen and it has to do it with this topic you just mentioned. As long as you mistreat me, I will feel justified in however I am treating you, and as long as I am mistreating you, you will feel justified in how you are treating me. And in that sense we both come to like this conflict we are in because it justifies each one of us in whatever we are doing. Just imagine someone coming to me and saying, “Duane, it seems like you are avoiding Karen, you are not talking to her. What's going on? Is there a conflict?”

I can always say, “There is a little bit of a problem and let me explain it to you,” and everything I explain will be in terms of what you are doing. And Karen, if someone approaches you and says that same thing, you will do the same thing towards me. Everything you point out in my behavior will simply justify you in yours and on that level, we come to like the conflicts we are in. We both get justification from it; this is an amazing thing that happens in human behavior.

KE:  What I’m hearing you say is that we tend not to look inward to see how we’ve contributed to the conflict, but rather we immediately look for blame outside ourselves.

DB: That’s right. Whenever we are doing this, whenever we are mistreating someone we are always consumed about how they are at fault and as we get into this situation all we can see is how the other person is to blame. We never look in ourselves for that.

And by the way, one of the things I have to mention about liking conflict, is that I have noticed if we don’t get good results I am able to blame you. You are able to blame me. So, we have this situation where each of us feels justified, each of us feels innocent if we don’t get good results because we get to blame each other, and that’s another dimension of this idea that we actually like the conflict that we are in. The funny thing about all this is that our poor boss is looking around wondering why are we not getting good results and I am pointing at you and you are pointing at me and nothing is changing. It is an amazing thing.

KE: You talk a lot in the book about being “at war” with others. Tell us more about that.

DB: One way to talk about this is just to say, when I mistreat you Karen, I begin to see you in a way that justifies me. We just call that being “in a box.” I am cut off from the truth; I am cut off from you. Whenever we violate our own sense of how we ought to treat someone, we enter a box where we are at war with others. Here are some dimensions that are always present when we are in this box. We are always blaming the other person; we will inflate the other person's faults. For example, if I mistreat you and I need to feel justified, I will take whatever faults you have, and I will exaggerate them. I will make you seem worse than you are, because the worse you are, the more justified I am in how I am treating you.

My point of view in the box is, “I could do better if only it weren't for Karen. I am perfect and I am going to feel defensive.” People won’t be able to talk to me very easily about this because I will be defending myself. Through it all, my focus will be on myself, what you are doing to me, what's unfair here, how I am being mistreated, how you are at fault and it all focuses on me. And these are universal elements of being in the box. So just imagine that both people are in this box doing all this to one another. It is no wonder that the people are so unproductive and that the conflict goes on for so long.

Here’s what we are trying to suggest in our work at Arbinger, and it is what the characters in our book discover. If we think about whom we are inside - and sometimes we talk about that in terms of our heart - there are really just two fundamental ways of being, two conditions of heart. One of them is a heart (like we have been talking about) that is “at war.” Whenever we violate our own sense of how we ought to treat others, we enter war with them, we enter this condition where we see them as to blame and we have to defend ourselves. There is another condition that is possible and that condition is to be “at peace,” where we see other people to be just like we are. We work with people to notice these two ways that are fundamental and to understand that we choose which it is going to be at any given time.

When I am at war with other people, one way to think about that is that I see people as objects. I see them either as in my way, bothering me, or I might see people as vehicles that I can manipulate, people I can use. I may see them as objects in my life that are just irrelevant; they just are too insignificant to matter. Those are three ways that I might see people when I am at war with them. They are just objects in my world. But, when we are at peace, we don’t see people that way. We actually see them as real life people who are just as important, just as real, and just as relevant as we are. When we are feeling and seeing them that way, we are at peace with them.

KE: When we are in a place of peace, does that suggest that we would never encounter a conflict?

DB: There will always be occasions of disagreement, or seeing things differently. It’s one thing to disagree with you if I am seeing you as a person who happens to hold a different opinion. But let’s suppose that I don’t see you as the person who happens to hold a different opinion. I see you as an object who is being obstinate, who is troubled, who is always like this and that I am at war with. How likely is it that you and I are going to resolve that disagreement if I am seeing you that way? There will always be differences, but if we are fundamentally at peace with one another, we can resolve those.

KE: It sounds like teamwork and other collaborative, productive interactions require that people come from a peaceful place.

DB: Yes, that’s exactly right. People who are fundamentally at war with each other are going to be at war when it comes to doing work. “Teamwork” is the wonderful idea of people working together to produce something, and that only happens when people are at peace with one another. I worked with a company that was just mediocre in its industry and they were riddled with conflict. They were just about like every other company and that’s why they had results like every other company. In the typical organization there is a lot of conflict going on and sometimes people don’t notice it because they are so used to it; it is just part of the day to deal with the conflicts that occur. But just imagine what it would be like if you could begin to remove those, so that people didn’t see themselves in conflict, didn’t see themselves at war, but actually that they were friends working together to accomplish something that they are both engaged in.

We worked with this company and we shared these ideas with their workforce. We held workshops to teach them and help them implement these ideas in their work lives. Today, that company doubles and even triples the financial performance of their second place competitor. They are so far ahead in their industry they have to look way back to see who is in second place. They did that simply by working as an organization to get out of the box and to reduce conflict. So it’s quite an amazing thing that can happen, when you can have an organization that really is focused on results and on helping each other get results, rather then being dragged down by conflicts.

KE: It seems to me that it’s important to distinguish between conflict and healthy debate. Some organizations try to develop consensus cultures where no healthy debate is allowed, for fear of introducing conflict.

DB: That’s right. I think that’s a mistake that often happens when people are fundamentally at war with one another. What happens is that they say to themselves, “We don’t want all this yelling and screaming, so what we are going to do is just learn to get along with all these idiots.” Nothing fundamentally has changed; we still see each other as idiots. It’s very different when people see themselves fundamentally as friends working on a common result. Friends can disagree all the time about what to do and what is the best way to do things, but none of it is personal. It’s all focused on the result and those people can debate, they can argue, and it leads to better results. But that can only happen among people who are not in the box, who are fundamentally at peace; it can’t happen to people who are fundamentally at war and in conflict with each other. 

KE: Let’s explore some of the costs of conflict to organizations. 

DB: Suppose we are in conflict with each other and I talk to coworkers and say, “You know, Karen is not very cooperative, have you noticed that?” That is one kind of cost, in terms of dragging other people into our conflict. I have just wasted some time, because now I am talking to other people about you and I am not focusing on getting the result I was hired to get. There is the loss of time that people experience because of the conflicts they are in. Think of the energy that has to go into a conflict. In fact, I have to think not to include you on an e-mail, and just thinking about that is wasted energy. I have to think about not returning your call. I have to think about not inviting you to a meeting, I have to think in order to develop ways so that I can avoid you. All of those are huge losses of energy and they always happen in conflicts. What do you suppose happens to your morale if I am treating you this way and you are responding and treating me in similar ways?

KE: I was just reading research from The Gallup Organization about the importance of positive relationships in the workplace. In fact, it is the topic of next week’s Thought Leader interview. The research has clearly demonstrated the link between satisfying relationships and high engagement at work. So, having people at war would have a tremendous cost.

DB: Yes, it is so right. Think about it this way. If you and I are both engaged in this conflict with each other and with other people at work, how happy are we to go to work? And how hard do we want to work at our jobs if this is the kind of swamp we are walking thorough all day long? And conflict costs extra meetings. You have to call extra meetings to solve all these problems that are being created. Everything takes more time when we are in this conflict. Now, think about turnover. If you decide you have had enough of this, you may decide to leave. he boss has to spend the time and money to go hire somebody else whom I am going to treat the same way. That’s not only a huge human cost, it’s a huge financial cost for an organization.

Suppose you and I have to make a decision together. I believe that if you and I are involved in conflict it is going to take us a long time to make a decision we both agree on. We might take months to make a decision that we could have made in an afternoon, if we weren’t in conflict with each other. Think about the cost that is to an organization when the cycle time is so long to make decisions. Typically in our workshops, we have leaders think of the conflict they are in, think of all the associated costs, and then come up with an annual dollar amount that can be attributed to those conflicts. In a small organization it will be in the thousands of dollars. In large organizations it will be in the millions. Some key executives in a large company once came up with a cost of $9.5 billion that they could attribute to the conflicts they were in. 

KE: The thing I find most disturbing about the scenario where people are enrolling each other to get in the box with them is that there is no focus on the customer; on those people who keep us in business.

DB: It is so true. My focus is on myself and one of the things that means is not only do I take my focus off helping you achieve results, but my focus is now off the customer. I might still be good at talking about the customer, but that’s different than being focused on the customer. When we are in conflict like this, the customer gets lost.  

KE: Self-deception is a common theme in both of the books from The Arbinger Institute. Why don’t you take a moment to elaborate on that concept for us, and how it contributes to the conflict?

DB: Think about the worst people you have ever had to work with. Did they think they were such a problem? The answer is no. People who are problems don’t think they are problems. What follows from that is this, it means that when I am a problem, I don’t think I am. That’s the state of self-deception.

KE: There are many organizations that provide training in effective conflict management strategies. Your work is quite different. Tell us what’s different.

DB: It really is. We think there is a real difference between symptoms and causes. The symptoms of conflict are things like avoiding each other, or yelling at each other, or mistreating each other in some way. We might be tempted to have lectures on how to treat others, or workshops on teaming and the roles people should play. I think all those things are good, but Arbinger’s contribution tries to go deeper than that. We want to treat the root cause, which really is the “box.”

To illustrate, I would like to take you back in time to the history of medicine. There was a time when people did not know there were things called germs. The doctors at the time were really good, they were doing the best they could at treating symptoms, but they couldn't treat root causes. In our first book, we tell the story of the doctor in the 1840’s in Vienna who was really what we would call today an OB/GYN. He worked with maternity patients and he was working in Vienna General Hospital. He discovered that maternity patients were dying by the hundreds and thousands and the doctors did the best they could to treat what was going wrong, but they did not know what was going wrong. They were applying leeches and opening windows, doing all the things they could think of to handle the symptoms of these poor women who were dying. But they did not understand the nature of disease. They were unaware that there was a single root cause beneath these symptoms they were seeing.

Vienna General Hospital was a research hospital, and a lot of the doctors were working on cadavers part of the time in order to understand disease. When it came time to deliver a baby, they would move from the morgue up to the room to deliver babies and they would do that without washing their hands because they did not know that there were such things as microorganisms that they could carry. A doctor who worked there, Dr. Semmelweis, eventually concluded that physicians were spreading disease on their own hands. They were carrying disease from patient to patient.

We tell that story because it’s the same sort of thing that happens in organizations. It's easy to look at symptoms. See people yelling at each other, see people avoiding each other, and so on. What's harder is to understand the core, the root cause beneath all that. That’s our focus at Arbinger and what we share, what we have discovered, what we like to invite people to think about is that this core problem in conflict is simply the box. It’s no more complicated than that. It’s each one of us being in the box and being fundamentally at war with others; either in a small way, or a big way. That leads to problems in organizations. So what's the core solution for us to be getting out of the box? It begins with me thinking about how I might be in the box and with you thinking about how you might be in the box, and then notice how that changes the focus of everything.

KE: How would I recognize that I am in the box? What might be some clues?

DB: There are things like; I inflate the faults of others. I blame, I feel like a victim. Notice whenever we’re in conflict; that is how we feel. We are blaming the other person. We are seeing them as worse than they are. We are feeling like victims. We are defensive. Every one of those can be a red flag to us. I have learned just to assume that if I am in conflict with someone, I am probably part of the problem and I am probably in the box and just don’t realize it. If I begin there with that possibility, I can begin to ask, “Am I inflating Karen’s faults here? Am I feeling like her victim? Am I defensive?” Those are key questions that I can ask myself that open the possibility for me to begin thinking about myself as part of the problem, rather than just about you. So that’s a really important dimension, I am glad you brought that up.

KE: There are a couple of styles that you talk about in the book that helped me recognize the language of being in the box.

DB: There are a million box styles and in this book what we have tried to do is come up with some broad categories of styles of box to help us see how we might be creating conflicts in our own lives. One of them we call the "I'm better-than…” box, and this usually leads to a style where I am pretty pushy and aggressive. I see myself as superior to others, I see myself as important and I treat people that way and so I tend to feel impatient. I might feel indifferent towards other people because they are just not important and that just might be my style of going through life, but that’s a box. That is about seeing people as objects and seeing myself fundamentally at war with them. They just don’t measure up. They are not good enough. 

There is another style called the "I-deserve…” box. This is where I see myself as basically mistreated by others, entitled to things from others. You might think of this as a whiny style of a box. Now notice how different that sounds from the, “I'm better than…” box, which might feel pushy, aggressive, and superior. In this box, it’s not that way, I feel sort of whiny, I feel mistreated by others. The third one is the, "I-must-be-seen-as…” box. This is the box where I am constantly trying to present myself a certain way. It’s important to be well thought of for example, and this kind of box usually leads us to be pretty soft people. We might specialize in niceness, and on the surface that might look good. But, let’s suppose that I need to handle a situation that’s difficult. I need to correct somebody, or tell him or her they have done something wrong. If I am in this kind of a box, I can’t do that because I am focused on myself, I am focused on how people see me. It’s important to me that they see me as nice, and therefore I won’t be able to do the hard things that have to be done. So, this box is just as limiting as the others.

It’s really a key thing to see that even being nice can be a box. The fourth one worth thinking about is the, "I'm-worse-than…” box. This is a kind of box where you might think you see yourself as broken, not as good as other people. Worthless, that sort of thing. It’s a box where I see other people as objects who are just mean to me and I am not as good as they are. If I have this style of box, my view is that no one is justified in expecting anything from me because I have already told them I am worthless. So, if they are expecting anything from me, that’s their problem, that’s their fault. Just notice how self-justifying that is. So in this book we thought we would draw attention to these four basic ways because people have different styles of being in the box.

KE:   What if someone is already in conflict. What is your overall recommendation then?

DB: There are times you need to fix conflict. Picture a pyramid. The pyramid is divided into layers. The very top and smallest layer of the pyramid is labeled “fix and/or correct things that have gone wrong”. Everything below that is focused on helping things go right. What we would like to suggest to people is this. Let’s change our emphasis. We can't ignore conflict, fair enough, but how can we prevent conflict in the first place? How can we create an environment where conflict is reduced? And that’s a different question then asking, how should we handle conflict when it happens? And my experience is this, if we will focus on the things that help things go right, that generate peace and collaboration in the work environment, conflict is reduced and we have less issue with how we should handle conflict when does happen.

So, how should we help things go right? I am going to start with the bottom of the pyramid and walk my way up, because it’s a pyramid for a reason. Every level is foundational for the next one above it and it won’t surprise you to learn that the bottom layer of the pyramid is for me to get out of my own box. Because if my own heart is at war, if my own way of being is at war with other people, I am going to be creating conflict no matter what I do. No advice is going to help me much if I am in the box. So the very first step is to make sure that I am getting out of the box myself.

No one does that perfectly; no one is out of the box all the time. But I have come to believe that we can be better than we are, that we can get out of the box more often than we do, we can get in less often than we do and we can get out faster than we typically do and so the core issue is to get out of our box. That’s the first thing. 

The next layer would be this. To make this organization a place where people know each other and like each other and know each other as people, not just as that guy over there in that other cubicle. Build relationships in general. This really helps things go right.

The third level up would be to build the relationship with the person in question. Suppose I am in conflict with you Karen. Maybe before I try to handle that conflict in particular, it would be good to think more generally and just build the right relationship with you to begin with, maybe spend a little time not talking about work, but talking about something else and getting to know each other. That’s a very valuable thing to do, it’s common advice and I think it’s very important. 

Another thing as we move up the pyramid would be this. To get really good at listening and learning; create an environment where people’s first inclination is to listen to other people rather than to talk, and their first inclination is to learn from everybody, rather than to teach everybody something.

The fifth level of the pyramid would be to be willing to share, to teach and to communicate To share things about my experience, my work life and so on. How do things affect me? If we create an environment where we put those five elements in place, we will have an environment that has much less conflict in it. Also, it is much easier to resolve a conflict.

The final layer, or top of the pyramid, is about fixing or correcting things that have gone wrong. Not only should it get the least amount of attention, but also, when we have the other things in place, it requires the least amount of attention. So we just think if everybody will focus on those five fundamental elements of this pyramid of helping things go right, we will find conflict much less of an issue in our lives.

KE: I appreciate your perspective in terms of helping things go right. Let’s say that in this particular situation, we are at the top of the pyramid. What sort of suggestions might you have for dealing with that?

DB: We don’t always have time, for example, to go back and start from the bottom of the pyramid and put everything in place. So how shall I deal with the conflict that just can’t be delayed? Maybe somebody is failing to do something that I need in order to achieve the result, that sort of thing. I think whenever we want to talk to somebody about conflict, it’s important to do in a context of our results. That the reason we can’t have this conflict is because we are charged with getting a certain result.

If we can identify what our desired result is and how this problem is getting in the way, I think that’s step number one. I am thinking of a situation where I am going to be making a presentation. I need somebody else to provide part of the information and they haven’t done it. Now we have conflict. They are not doing their part. If I want to talk to that person, the first thing I want to talk about is the result that I am trying to achieve and why their part is important in that. Why do I need them? And then step number two might be that I offer to help. Maybe there is a reason they haven’t been able to do their part. A big thing I can do here to reduce the conflict is to offer whatever help I can give. And then if I need to talk to somebody else to explain this situation about why something is missing, I do it in terms of the results and I never blame.

If there is something that’s failed, I can explain why it’s failed but never blamingly, never from in the box, where I am exaggerating somebody's faults. I can explain this situation in a way that doesn't treat that other person as an object. I think that’s a real key thing. I can understand things go wrong for me too, I can understand where they might go wrong for others, and with that attitude I can talk about our overall performance without having the attitude of blame. So those are some key things to have in mind. 

KE: What's the fundamental choice that we make when we choose peace versus war?

DB: The fundamental choice I make is how I am going to treat someone else. It’s guaranteed that if I feel that I should do something for you, and I make the choice not to do it, I am absolutely guaranteed to go into the box and would begin blaming you. And I am guaranteed in doing that to have a heart at war towards you. I can make a different choice. I can make the choice that once I feel that I ought to do something for you, I can make the choice to do it. And if I make that choice, I am guaranteed not to go in the box. I am guaranteed not to be at war with you. I am guaranteed just to continue our friendship. I think that’s the key choice that drives everything else in life. It is the core element of our lives. 

KE: Let me make sure I’m clear. It’s not about another person asking you to do something for her. It’s about you deciding within yourself that there was something you wanted to do for that person or you felt compelled to do for that person, and you didn’t do it. Letting yourself down in that way causes you to go in the box.

DB: That’s right. I think the reality is that we all have a sense that other people are just as real as we are and that we ought to honor them. That means we ought to treat them in a certain way and it’s not even that we need so much for someone to teach us that. It’s just the recognition that other people are as real as we are, are part of who we are, the ability to recognize that. Whenever we violate that, we need to justify ourselves. I don’t need you to tell me necessarily what I can do for you, I just know in my own soul, my own heart, my own mind that I ought to honor you as a person and treat you that way. If I don’t, that’s when I go in the box. That’s why we consider this the key choice in life.

Audience Question: What if one person is at peace and another is at war, how do you move forward?

DB: That is so hard, all I can say is this, it’s very important to recognize. Let’s suppose Karen that you and I have been at war with each other, in conflict, and I decide to change and be at peace. You may not trust that to begin with, because you have been in conflict with me for a while. If I stay doing the right thing, I think the chances are that you will respond to that. Now that doesn't guarantee that you will, but the chances are that you will begin to see and treat me differently. I think the odds are in favor that you will begin to change too, but let’s suppose that you don’t. At least I know this - I am no longer making matters worse. I am making them better. If I go in the box and go at war then I abandon that and I have given myself over to this conflict and I now know that I too am making matters worse and that I shouldn't. So I just encourage people to do the best they can, to stay out of the box, to have a heart at peace just as much as they can.

Audience Question: Relationships are categorized as either in conflict or not in conflict, at war or at peace. Aren’t many workplace relationships in between these two states, in shades of gray? How do we approach this in the context of your view of productive work?

DB: I think there are degrees and in that sense they are grays, and I just think we should keep working to create relationships that are more and more collaborative, more and more like people working as friends for a common result. I believe two things happen from that; one is I believe that the workplace becomes a better place to be, everyone likes it better and secondly, I believe we get better results when we do that. There might be shades of gray and I would say let’s just keep moving them towards the white side as much as we can.

KE: One last question, what do you advise a department do when repeated conflict has created a culture of disrespect?

DB: I would say start on a small scale and commit to each other to begin doing things differently, not only with each other, but also with everyone else. Begin by asking these questions.

1. What's our result that we are trying to achieve as a team?

2. How have we been a problem? 

3. What can we do differently? Not everybody, but us.

That’s how you begin change - two or three people deciding themselves to begin changing. That can happen anywhere and it will spread.

If you’ve enjoyed this Thought Leader interview with Dr. Duane Boyce, Managing Director of The Arbinger Institute, we encourage you to read their new book, The Anatomy of Peace. Or, visit their website at www.arbinger.com.

Coaching Questions

• What did you recognize in yourself?
• Where are you “in the box” with someone?
• What now?
• If not now, when?