For years, much of the conflict‑resolution field has leaned on an outdated paradigm: treating disagreement as conflict and tension as friction. My Copilot AI fell into that trap. It's training data, like the dominant literature, blurred these distinctions. It seemed neat to collapse everything into one continuum of “trouble.” But neatness comes at a cost.
Beware of the Dogma!
I don't want to be dogmatic about this, but one of AI’s biggest productivity problems, in my view is hiding in plain sight. Dogma. Not dogma in the religious or ideological sense. I mean the tendency to state a provisional interpretation as if it were settled, then continue building on it until someone objects strongly enough to force a correction. The first thing I taught the AI that I am using is to preface its statements with "I think..." or "In my opinion..." However it still has this dogmatic tendency, especially when discussion contentious issues. I see this regularly in conversations with the AI.
Escalator Pitch – Caution or Escalate
Sue gives a presentation in a team meeting. Her supervisor, Jim, responds: “Babe, that’ll NEVER work!. What the hell were you thinking?!” Sue now has to decide whether to respond, react, ignore it, complain later, or escalate to HR. Most teams have no agreed process for handling that small moment fairly and in real time. If Sue, Jim and the team had already agreed to use SpatzAI, Sue could simply verbally caution him: “Caution.”
Part 2 — It’s the Design Review Process, Stupid
As an industrial designer, I tend to see development as a sequence of iterations. sketches → idea → prototype → test → objection → review → revision → next iteration That is not so different from an assembly line. Manufacturing takes inputs through a series of stages, checks for defects, corrects problems and tries to prevent bad work moving further downstream. Design does something similar, except the thing moving through the system is often an idea. And ideas can carry defects too.
It’s the Economics, Stupid
I think we may have finally arrived at one of the simplest arguments for SpatzAI. Consider what happens when someone's behaviour is questionable or unfair . fair/unfair behaviour → fair/unfair objection → fair/unfair acknowledgement or challenge → fair/unfair team + AI review → fair/unfair HR review → fair/unfair legal review → fair/unfair High Court decision. Notice something? Moving up the hierarchy doesn't guarantee fairness. The person behaving might be wrong. The person objecting might be wrong. The team and AI's decision might be wrong. HR might be wrong. A lawyer, judge or even a High Court can get things wrong. What escalation gives us isn't necessarily greater truth. It gives us another opportunity for review, usually with greater authority, formality, time and cost.
Maybe Anger Isn’t Just an Emotion
We tend to classify anger as an emotion, alongside happiness, sadness, fear and surprise. But I think we may be conflating several different things. Consider the language. We regularly say someone is “getting angry.” Strangely, we rarely talk about someone “getting happy.” Why? Perhaps because anger, particularly in relationships, is often better understood as a process rather than simply an involuntary feeling.
What Deming Did for Production, SpatzAI Wants to Do for Difficult Workplace Conversations
TEN STEPS ON THE ROAD TO EFFICIENT (Seth Godin's Linkedin Post) "Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight. If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:" Below is a summary of his 10 points and how the SpatzAI concept compares with them:
How do Employees Know When to Involve their Manager or HR?
How do employees know when they should involve their manager or HR, instead of working issues out between themselves?. First, let's get a few definitions and ground rules down so that we are singing from the same hymn book. The framework I am using separates disagreements from conflicts:
SpatzAI Pitch — Three Parts, One Behavioural System
Spatz is a workplace pre-grievance platform that helps teams address and resolve micro-conflicts before they escalate into formal grievances. The system has three connected parts...
Chess Board and Onboarding with SpatzAI
I have often compared onboarding with SpatzAI to learning chess. The 20-minute idea originally came from Steve Jobs, who said in 1983 that a great computer should be something you could learn to use in 20 minutes. That idea stuck. You can learn the basic moves and rules of chess surprisingly quickly. Understanding how the pieces move is not the difficult part. The challenge is learning when to make each move, how to respond to another player, and how to improve through experience.
Object123 