Navigating Boundaries - Teams
COLLEAGUE: Imagine if someone comes one day to you [and] says: “what you have been doing all these years is wrong”. I don’t think it builds good communication bridges to create the right environment to conduct this interesting work…
The tension in the room – er, rather across our three internet-connected rooms – was palpable. Two social scientists had now delicately called out our colleague’s technical profession for rarely including adequate attention to gender analysis in their research. Thanks to our asynchronous conversation by email, I had time to contemplate this conflict and await lowered temperatures.
This issue had flared before, and each time we seemed to get closer to laying out the issues in a mutually understandable form. Key for me was to 1) keep my ego out of the conversation, 2) identify a common denominator in our perspectives, then 3) zoom in ever closer to describe the dispassionate details of the points on which we might agree, including increasing precision in use of mutually understandable terms and frameworks. Eventually that increased detail was framed in the context of increased rigor in scientific methods, a shared value of all involved, and we agreed that our work would contribute to improved documentation of gender responsive approaches in the three countries in which we worked. The ability to articulate that detail and find a connection point in our perspectives was, to my mind, a small, albeit significant innovation within our team.
MY REPLY: “I like to think of these conversations that [we] have had as a sort of ‘creative conflict’.” I went on to highlight a quote from Perich-Anderson emphasizing that: We need to learn how to have creative conflict–the kind where people come together and have spirited and lively discussions and brainstorm sessions. There is argument and disagreement, but it feels alive and exciting, like something important is happening, like something new might be born (2001:1).
COLLEAGUE: Creative conflict….I like it. By all means keep the conversation going…this how we all learn.
Why write about conflict in a blog on my evaluation business website? Because evaluation team diversity can benefit from creative approaches to conflict. My work as a social inclusion specialist, as that described above, brings attention to who benefits from social and economic development programs based on gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, age, etc. In the case of creative conflict just noted, we had already carried out a needs assessment and redesign of the research project theory of change. Moving forward, we plan to adapt a prototype tool (conceptual framework) for gender responsive plant breeding to assess the priorities of both men AND women producers, processors, and consumers in three Sub-Saharan African countries. We will then assess its effectiveness and feasibility for capturing and responding to end user knowledge and concerns along with opportunities and constraints for future use in each country setting.
Here, we described creative conflict occurring among diverse stakeholders linked globally in asynchronous time. However, this same dynamic of conflict creativity applies just as well to social program innovations coming together in Southwest Michigan in real time. As we as a society more fully realize the complexity of the wicked global and local problems faced, workarounds to avoid conflict no longer serve us well. Linda A. Hill goes so far as to assert that “Breakthrough ideas rarely emerge without diversity of thought and conflict” (Hill 2016).
Fortunately, we finally have the methodological tools and the evidence base on social inclusion to drill down into the core variables behind and within economic inequality, systemic racism, gender inequality, and sexual identify disparities. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to engage multiple voices and their knowledge bases, something only achievable through collaboration with diverse stakeholders and embrace creative conflict.
My hope is that this blogspace will promote creative conflict and other positive methods for navigating boundaries, whatever that difference may be. Next month, I will take a look at navigating boundaries between national and local cultures and subcultures of evaluation participants, together with my own steep learning curve on this crossing. I hope to see you then.
Hill, L.A. (2016) Is this what it takes to be an innovative leader? World Economic Forum, 5 January 2016 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/is-this-what-it-takes-to-be-an-innovative-leader/.
Perich-Anderson, J. (2001) Creative conflict: generating innovative ideas. Futurist.com https://www.futurist.com/articles-archive/creativeconflict/
