I have been thinking about a possibility that sits at the heart of workplace conflict research. What if disagreement and conflict are not the same thing? Reference: Understand Conflict Most conflict researchers seem to define conflict broadly enough to include disagreements....
Addressing Workplace Impingements
For years I've been interested in workplace conflict or micro-conflicts, but lately I've been thinking about something even smaller. Not conflict. Not even an infringement. An impingement or someone impinging on the other player's space. In soccer, a player can subtly tug an opponent's shirt. It may be almost invisible. The referee might miss it. The crowd certainly won't notice most of the time....
Ideas Assembly Line: Early Quality Control for Team Thinking
I think most teams run an "ideas-assembly-line" without realising it. Ideas move from person to person, meeting to meeting, slowly taking shape. But unlike a factory floor, there’s usually no explicit quality control built into the flow. So small issues get waved through. A comment that lands poorly. A challenge that feels one-sided. A tone that creates friction.
Still Cleaning Up the Manure at Your Workplace
Most people can see the problem. Employees stay silent. Warnings are missed. Risks are hidden. Bad behaviour is tolerated. Retaliation is feared. Boards and leaders are surprised by issues that many people lower down already knew about. There is even a new name for it when these things are present it is considered there is a lack of "psychological safety".
Maybe Fairness is the Oxygen in Teamwork
If fair teamwork is the flame that keeps organisations alive, then burnout may be what happens when that flame is starved of oxygen. Fair teamwork gives an organisation energy, warmth, movement, and shared purpose....
The SpatzChat™ App for Disciplined Dissent
I think many workplace stories about “speaking up and getting into trouble” miss a key point. The issue is not always that someone dissented, but how that dissent was delivered and how the team was set up to receive it....
Can I Interrupt While You’re Interrupting
“Can I interrupt while you're interrupting?” sounds ridiculous, but it captures something real about conversation in workplace teams. Many teams treat interruption as though it is always the same thing. In my view it is not....
Fair Play, Real-Time Fairness and the Future of Teamwork
I think the future of teamwork may belong to teams that can disagree well, not avoid disagreement. As AI takes over more routine, analytical, and repeatable work, the human advantage may lie elsewhere. Not in being faster.
Objective Intelligence OQ with SpatzAI
For a long time I have been searching for what might help me become a little more objective, or at least a little less subjective. What I keep coming back to is this. Objectivity does not just come from better thinking. It also comes from better conditions for thinking together.
Fair Play in the Workplace
Q. How do we get fair play in the workplace? A. By giving team members a standard way to address objectionable behavior in real time.
Object123 