• Does the conflict come from the fact that the other person is bad ? Or that you are mean and just can’t get on with other people ?

No, of course not. You can see that you both have positive intentions, and you get on fine with lots of other colleagues, but something is stopping you from working together. What starts off as a feeling of constant disagreement, increasing friction, a difference in the ways you seem to do every single little thing, can transform into visible disdain for the other person and may blow up into constant irritation, open argument, insulting behaviour and even declarations of hostility. You might even have admired the other person’s intellect at the beginning of the working « relationship », but in the end his or her « obnoxious » behaviour just makes you blind to any of the good points. And he or she is also blind to your qualities.

The whole team might divide along the lines of conflict. One half supports you and the other half supports your colleague. Because you all know that consensus is no longer an option, each side begins to try to blindside the other side and to railroad through its choices. Every newcomer to the team is made to take sides. The side that manages to impose a decision then lives in constant anguish about the possibility of sabotage by the other side and if that decision ends in failure it is sure that the other side will be blamed.

The frustration may grow to the point that your half of the team even begins to put in place a strategy to get the other half fired, so that they can be replaced by people who think more like you. Or you may find yourself in the part of the team that looks as if it is going to be fired, so you decide to pull up sticks, get out of the toxic atmosphere and move on to find a group of people among whom the style is more congenial and where you can see people recognise and be grateful for your talents. In the people that are left behind, the ones who managed to expel the others, the result will be a team that finally works well together. But, sadly, this will be because everybody who had a different thinking or decision-making style has been driven out.

The atmosphere in that team may be better, but because of the loss of diversity the effectiveness of the team will go down. However much people of a different thinking or creative style irritate us, the truth is that we need them in order to thrive, not just to survive. Every team needs to have people who focus daily on what is going on inside « the box » and people who « sense » what trends and new competitors are emerging outside it.

• If the team is made up only of « big-picture, out-of-the-box » thinkers they usually trip up or even fail because of some « minor event » or « piddling little detail » or a procedure they did not notice inside « the box » they so much disdain, until it is too late.

If the team is made up only of adaptive thinkers who are good at improving the quality of the system, reinforcing the structure or incrementally adapting what happens inside « the box » it will be an event, a trend or a product coming from outside « the box » that will eventually be their downfall.

Michael Kirton has written in his book Adaption-Innovation, published by Routledge in the U.K. in 2003, that when any two people come together to solve a problem, that problem becomes « Problem A », but before they can resolve « Problem A » they have to resolve « Problem B » which is how they, as people, will work together.

If they have similar thinking styles, « Problem B » will easily be resolved and they will be able to devote 95% of their time to resolving « Problem A », upon which the continued success of the company depends. But, if they lack variety in their thinking styles, their success at working together will not necessarily be reflected in a successful outcome for « Problem A », because their solution did not benefit from diverse points of view.

If they have very different thinking styles « Problem B » may well take up 95% of the time and, in the end, the obsession about imposing one’s own point of view on the other person or the other members of the team can have a very damaging effect on the team’s task or on the company. The couple, group or team may split even before a tentative solution is proposed for « Problem A ».

In the experience of Syre Consulting, conflict between thinking styles can be much more severe than inter-cultural conflict. In fact, engineers from different national cultures, but with similar thinking styles, or marketeers from different national cultures, but once again with similar thinking styles, will get on much better together than two people from the same national culture who have different thinking styles.

Whole teams and departments in companies tend to be made up of one thinking style : Legal thinks in one way, and these guys get on well with Finance and Packaging and Quality and Accounting, but Operations and Sales and Marketing and R&D seem to think in wholly different ways, in fact sometimes the « R » part of R&D doesn’t even seem to get on with the « D » part. The majority of these differences come from the preferred thinking style of each team or department, which is made up of the individual thinking styles of its team members.

Quite often, the thinking style of the Head of the Department is at odds with the thinking style of the people who make up his or her department, but if you do some analysis you will find that he or she has the same thinking style as the Company Management Team, who were the ones to make the decision to hire or promote him. If the Head of Department has the right technical qualifications, and if the team finds him or her legitimate, he or she can be a bridge between the department and the Company’s Management Team. But if the team rejects such a Head as not having the right technical skills or being « too political », or if the management team find him or her too technical or « not strategic enough » the job will not last for long. Inability to handle differences in thinking styles gives rise to some of the cruellest human resource changes in companies.

• The best way to handle this difference in thinking styles is to acknowledge it and to underline to all concerned the need for diversity of thinking styles in successful problem resolution and decision-making. The people involved must then be given some education about differences in thinking style.

It is useful to use our methods, at the beginning of a project or a new team, so that the members, of different thinking styles, can resolve « Problem B » as quickly as possible. They can then spend more than 90% of their time contributing their diversity to « Problem A » and not fighting about it. But our methods can also help in teams which have unsuccessfully tried to work together for years.

We find that when people are confronted with different thinking styles their reactions can be classified into six phases. The first three are negative and, if they are not made aware of the need for diversity, many people may stay blocked in one of these three phases.

1. Denial that any difference exists
2. Acceptance of difference, but minimisation of its impact
3. Stereotyping of people with different thinking styles, e.g. « bean-counters », « change resisters », « dope-smokers », people who are living in « cloud-cuckoo land »

The next three phases are positive, and emerge after education about differences in decision-making and thinking-style :

4. Full acknowledgement of difference, which leads to exploration of one’s own and other people’s thinking styles and other approaches to creativity, decision-making and problem-solving
5. Ability to communicate this knowledge of difference to other people inside the team or company
6. A knowledge of how to switch styles as needed, between adaptive « in-the-box » thinking and innovative « out-of-the box » thinking and the acquisition and the reinforcement of the ability to do this.

1. Individual completion of the KAI inventory by all participants (John Gaynard has been certified for this activity by Michael Kirton, the inventor of the instrument). The results of the inventory will give them knowledge of their own preferred thinking style.
2. Explanation of the preference or lack of preference for structure among different people and the impact this has on problem resolution or decision-making.
3. Activities to increase sensitivity to differences in thinking styles and how they can create conflict, groupthink or, preferably, fully diverse teams.
4. Activities to demonstrate how to communicate successfully with thinking styles different to one’s own
5. How to build successful groups and teams made up of different thinking styles

• Our method can be used in individual coaching of people who have a style different from their team’s and in conflict-resolution between people or within teams. It can also be used when a whole team is not performing satisfactorily to meet the requirements of its internal clients.

Here is one example, upon which we worked, of a thinking-style conflict between a team and its internal clients. This arose in a marketing and sales company that grew increasingly unhappy with its internal finance team. This team was either off-hand or aggressive to all telephone requests for assistance and instead of concentrating on day-to-day financial matters it was always looking for new challenges, to the point that its members often complained that they were being deprived of opportunities to get high bonuses like the sales team. This is not exactly the style you would expect in a fact-based accounting and finance team and a new manager was hired to try to turn it around.

After analysis, it was found that the thinking style of the team was not detail-oriented or even client-oriented. These were guys who had no real love of finance. They had been under considerable stress all the way through their accounting and/or finance education and many of them had had to adopt extreme coping behaviour during their years of study and to get through their final exams. Their big-picture style and love of challenge then led them to seek jobs with a world-famous marketing company, but once hired they spent most their time looking over the other side of the mountain, to marketing and sales, and saying to themselves that the grass was greener over there. The real Marketing and Sales people found themselves having to spend hours, days or weeks in competition and argument to get the business analysis and the financial data they needed. They would have just preferred to make a calm phone call and receive good service instead of coming across unsatisfactory colleagues.

The paradox of it all was that at first Marketing and Sales people had liked these Finance guys on a personal basis when they met up in the company restaurant or in a bar after work. They just couldn’t understand why these supposed « beancounters » just didn’t want to talk about anything to do with figures.

Further analysis showed that the company used the same head-hunter to hire all of its Marketing, Sales and Finance staff and they were all hired according to the same unconscious criteria, similarity to the thinking and decision-making style of the head-hunter.

The recruiter had a bias towards the marketing side of the business, because that is where he had earned his first sucesses at a time when the company was still an aggressive start-up. Later it had evolved into a much larger institution that needed « in the box » accountants, controllers and financial analysts. But the head-hunter continued to hire people with whom he felt comfortable. They happened to have an accounting or a financial qualification but they would have been happier in Sales or Marketing.

As a result of our work with this company, the people in the Finance team discovered how their own thinking style was preventing them from giving satisfaction to their colleagues. In workshops, they came up with the behavioural changes they would need to make if they wished to stay in finance. Some of them decided to move into areas of finance and marketing where challenge and risk, but not routine, was a daily part of the job. A head-hunter more experienced in finance was hired to handle the recruitment of all new hires to the group.

©John Gaynard, 2004. Based on the work of Doctor Michael Kirton and the experience of Syre Consulting.