Structured Issue Identification and Conflict Resolution

Key Economic Insight

Identifying and resolving issues is critical for company health. Two effective methods exist for surfacing key company issues. First, ask each person to imagine they are the CEO and identify up to three most important issues to solve in the next ninety days, which encourages owner-like thinking. Second, at quarterly off-site meetings, teams can individually document their thoughts about the company, sourcing emotions like joy, excitement, sadness, anger, and fear. For anger and fear, entries should detail facts (what a video camera would capture), personal stories (thoughts/judgments on the facts), and proposed solutions (specific actions, DRIs, due dates).

These individual writings are then copied anonymously into a group document. Reading the joy and excitement entries inspires the team and renews collective success feelings. Sadness entries foster bonding over shared loss. The issues and solutions derived from anger and fear provide a roadmap for resolution in weekly leadership meetings. This simple, effective exercise, recommended quarterly for the entire company, transforms raw emotions into actionable insights, providing a clear path to address underlying problems and improve organizational well-being.

Interpersonal conflict, often stemming from unshared feelings and not feeling heard, can be resolved through a structured method where each person is proven to have been 'heard.' The facilitator first asks both individuals to write their deepest work-related thoughts about the other person, categorized by anger, fear, sadness, joy, and excitement. For anger, they detail the feeling, a specific fact, their 'story' (judgment), and a request for future action. The facilitator ensures separation of fact and judgment, prompts specificity, and may act out potential thoughts to encourage participants to articulate their raw feelings, starting with anger, then moving to fear, sadness, joy, and excitement. Joy and excitement sections are prioritized for the recipient to read first to validate the relationship.