Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Conflict

While I was going to start on the topic of Relationship building, I think that discussing conflict is appropriate given the events of this date in 2001. September 11, 2001 illustrates how destructive an ongoing conflict can be. On this day 3000 innocent people from all walks of life and countries died because of a conflict half the world away.

September 11th represents another turn in the ongoing destructive spiral of conflict that continues to engulf the Middle-east. As in all destructive conflict spirals the only results, of the event, was an escalation in the conflict. Now two governments have been disposed and the death toll continues to mount.

Looking at conflict from the point of view of events like September 11th may lead you to believe that conflict is a bad thing to be avoided; this view point is as destructive as a conflict spiral. Instead you should look at conflict from the view points of the two classifications used by professionals. These classifications are Constructive and Destructive Conflict.

We already have an example of Destructive conflict, but what’s constructive conflict? Constructive conflict is differing viewpoints that can lead to new thoughts, ideas and ways of looking at things. Constructive Conflict forces you to look outside you current worldview or “box”.

An example of Constructive Conflict can be seen a recent script revision my writing partners and I conducted. During the rewrite a scene was added to show and tighten a major characters motivation. It was a mediocre scene. As the revision progressed my partners got in a conflict over whether the secondary character currently in the scene should be switched with another character. As they worked through the conflict an alternate version emerged which none of us had envisioned. Their conflict took the scene from a mediocre, give the audience some information, scene to an emotionally driven, character defining scene.

As can be seen conflict is a driving force and how it is viewed and handled can have both positive and negative impact, it is not something to be ignored. In future posts we will discuss in more detail the two classifications of conflict and some techniques for handling conflicts. The goal of this discussion is to help you to harness this natural force to drive successful change initiatives

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