how conflict becomes a design input

Last week, scribbling late at night in the stacks of notebooks that line my desk, I stumbled into the core question that animates my work:

What does it mean to be human together in liberatory ways when everything we've learned about conflict has been shaped by domination?

As I’ve sat with it in the days since, I keep thinking to myself — this isn’t just a philosophical question, an academic question.

It’s a design question.

Because how we meet each other in conflict determines what kind of change becomes possible.

the shift that’s happening

There’s a cultural moment happening right now in organizational work. The language has changed — what used to be called “DEI work” is has been rebranded as “cultural transformation” or “trust-building” or even a return to “psychological safety.” Maybe a “trauma-informed supervision,” if we’re feeling spicy. And underneath all of it — whether organizations realize it or not — is conflict.

Because what actually happens when we try to transform culture: we run into all the fissures where the old culture is still operating. Unspoken power dynamics show up. Misunderstood expectations jab their way forward.

There are always — always — gaps between an organization’s stated values and its lived practice.

And so conflict is inevitable — not as a failure of the process, but as evidence that something real is trying to shift.

And this is where most culture change efforts stall. People have learned the frameworks. They’ve done the trainings (god, the endless run of trainings since 2020 — most of which end up sitting on a hard drive buried at the back of a dusty file cabinet).

So then when the conflict surfaces — when it gets uncomfortable, when it feels confrontational, when the culture is not yet resilient enough to hold it — people default back to avoidance. They push forward on the surface while the relational infrastructure crumbles underneath.

When change stalls, work stagnates. Growth slowly disintegrates. Trust erodes further. Because a culture of conflict avoidance doesn’t go away. It just goes underground, where it becomes the quiet, unseen architecture of everything that doesn’t work.

conflict as design information

So here’s the question I keep asking my clients:

What if conflict isn’t the problem? What if conflict is the information?

Conflict tells us where the old patterns are still running. Where power is actually operating versus where we say it operates. Where our stated values and our lived practices diverge. It shows us exactly what needs to change — but only if we're willing to look at it.

This is why I get itchy when people ask me “you do conflict resolution, right?” I mean, yes, I do, kind of, but — really, I do conflict catalysis.

Conflict catalysis isn’t just resolution. It’s transition design.

Conflict isn’t something to resolve and move past. It’s a design input. It’s the groundwater moving through the ecosystem. It’s a technology we use to reshape how change happens.

We can’t design change around the thing that’s generating all the design information.

After hundreds of hours in rooms where organizations faced impossible choices, I can tell you: the pattern is always the same. The conflict is just a symptom of the breakdown — and it’s the locus of the transformation.

Over the last decade, I’ve facilitated so many fraught decisions: early pandemic health equity efforts, maternal mortality prevention frameworks at state and federal levels, assessments on how to measure the degree of discrimination in births and deaths, what “counts” as an abuse of power — how bad is bad enough.

I’ve facilitated conversations on organizations’ responsibilities to make statements on current affairs — genocide determinations, pandemic crises, racial justice movements. What would it mean for funding ramifications? What would it mean for the people they purport to serve? What kind of statement, what kind of action?

What kind of organization do we want to be, and whose responsibility is it?

In every single instance, conflict was the design input.

These conflicts weren’t breakdowns. They were the information we needed. They showed us exactly where organizational silos prevent people from doing the work they needed to do — where lived reality crashed up against values. Where people held fundamentally different interpretations of what those values actually meant in practice, and how high a cost they were willing to pay.

The conflict generated the new design. We didn’t resolve it and move on. We worked through it to create something that hadn’t existed before.

why conflict work is relational work

This is where the transition design question and the liberation question become the same question.

As the great Sonya Renee Taylor says,

“When we speak of the ills of the world — violence, poverty, injustice — we are not speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen to bodies.”

Systems live in people’s bodies.

Systems of oppression show up in how we treat each other, how decisions get made, who gets heard and who gets dismissed, whose safety matters and whose doesn’t, how control and safety get conflated.

The individual and interpersonal aren’t separate from the systemic. Our relationships are where we actually practice the new patterns before they become culture, before they become structure.

Relationship is the laboratory. Conflict is the experiment. The question is whether we’re willing to stay in it long enough to learn what it’s trying to teach us.

I believe this is the most intimate way to confront the isms of our world: at the scale of how we’re with each other, right now, when it’s hard.

the work at every scale

I do this work at multiple levels — with individuals learning to stay present to their own conflicts, with organizations building cultures where conflict generates rather than destroys. Same technology, different scales.

All of it is transition design. All of it is learning to be human together in ways that don’t replicate domination. All of it requires us to stop treating conflict as the thing to get past and start treating it as the thing that shows us the way forward.

So I’m curious: Where are you avoiding conflict that might actually be trying to teach you something? What would shift if you treated it as information rather than threat?

I’ll be studying this question for many years to come. I hope you’re here in the study with me.