What We Get Wrong About Conflict, and What to Do Instead
Middle Temple — and it’s gorgeous gardens — above.
Earlier this month, I spent a full week at Middle Temple in a mediation training course.
We were taught by Jonathan Dingle and his team. Jonathan is a former barrister who’s spent decades working in some of the most complex and emotionally charged disputes you can imagine. Real loss, real money, real relationships at stake – including cases involving child death. And yet, he shows up in those rooms as a mediator with a level of steadiness and care that’s hard to fully grasp unless you’ve seen it.
And yet, sitting there, it became clear: the dynamics in those rooms are not that different from the ones we navigate every day.
Especially in environments where roles overlap, ones where family, business, ownership, identity, and history are all in play at once.
Here’s what I took away.
1. We tend to shut down conflict too early.
One of the most consistent mistakes new mediators make is stepping in too soon.
They cut off the conversation or try to move things along, not because it isn’t useful, but because it’s uncomfortable.
As leaders, we do the same thing. We tell ourselves, “This isn’t productive.” But often, the actual truth is, “I don’t like how this feels.”
The risk is that if you shut it down too early, you miss the most important moment when people stop performing and start saying what’s actually true.
That’s where the real information is.
2. Conflict is data.
In mediation, you are trained to listen far more than you speak.
Not to respond. Not to fix. But to understand.
When people are given the space to fully express themselves – even when it’s messy, repetitive, or emotionally charged – something shifts. You start to hear what actually matters, which often is buried underneath the surface.
And often, they don’t fully know it themselves at the start. It’s only by staying in it – long enough to say it out loud, to hear themselves, to feel it – that it becomes clearer what they’re actually upset about.
Most of us are too quick to manage the moment, to soften it, reframe it, move past it. But conflict, handled well, is one of the fastest ways to understand what’s really going on in a system.
The work is staying curious long enough to see it.
3. Separate the issue from the concern.
One of the most useful distinctions in mediation is this: the issue and the concern are not the same thing.
The issue is what’s being argued.
The concern is what’s driving it.
A demand for more control may be about fear. A position on money may be about fairness.
In a family enterprise, what looks like a push for an asset, a payout, or a position is often framed as a question of fairness or entitlement. But underneath, it’s often about something else entirely – a need for recognition, a fear of exclusion, or uncertainty about where someone fits as the system evolves.
What’s being asked for on the surface can be standing in for something much harder to name: the desire to feel valued, included, or even loved within the family system.
If you respond only to the issue, you can get stuck quickly, especially if it’s something you can’t give. But if you understand the concern underneath it, entirely different paths open up. This is as true in leadership as it is in mediation.
If someone on your team is pushing hard for something you can’t accommodate, the better question becomes: what problem are they actually trying to solve?
If you can understand that, you’ll often unveil a potential solution where none seemed possible.
4. People often want to be heard more than they want to win.
This was one of the simplest and most powerful observations from the week.
When people feel genuinely heard, rather than managed, redirected, or subtly corrected, the intensity drops. Not always immediately or completely, but almost always meaningfully.
We tend to overestimate how much resolution depends on the “right” answer, rather than people simply feeling heard. Especially in high-pressure environments, people rarely feel fully listened to or properly understood.
Often, when someone finally feels understood, something shifts.
5. Don’t rush to direct. Create space first
In mediation, you are explicitly not allowed to direct the process.
You don’t tell people what to do. You don’t impose solutions. Your role is to create the conditions for a better conversation.
Leaders don’t have that luxury all the time. Decisions need to be made. But, many leaders move to direction far too quickly. We often skip the part where:
people make sense of what’s happening
tensions are surfaced properly
different perspectives are actually heard and understood
And then we wonder why alignment is shallow, or short-lived.
There’s a real skill in holding the space long enough to uncover what’s actually going on, and only then knowing when to step in, rather than trying to move things forward before that’s clear.
Where this matters most
These lessons apply anywhere. But they matter most in environments where things are layered, such as where family and business, ownership and management, history and future, and personal identity and professional role are all intertwined.
In those systems, conflict is rarely just about the surface issue. And trying to solve it too quickly often makes it worse.
Final thought
The biggest takeaway for me is this: If you can stay in conflict a little longer, without rushing to fix or control it, you start to see what’s really going on.
And crucially, so does everyone else. That’s often what makes movement possible.
A small experiment: the next time you feel the urge to fix or move things forward, stay in the conversation a little longer and ask a few open questions, like “What’s really bothering you here?” or “What feels most important about this?”