I’ve been practicing yoga for a little over a year now and have a lot of time and opportunity to think through what’s going on in my body-mind while I practice (whether it’s postures, breathing, or meditation). What I’m seeking in my yoga practice is integration and balance. In a standing pose, for example, integration involves many forces learning to act in consort but at the same time creating tension and compression. This is just like the deck of a highway bridge where the concrete protects from failure from compression and the embedded steel protects from failure from tension. The two work together in graceful balance but any engineer can do the calculations and tell you that the vertical and horizontal forces on the structure are monumental. But the materials of the structure are up to the challenge.

The materials of the structure are up to the challenge.

That’s the first waypoint I can identify in my path to understanding conflict in an organization. If the concrete and steel are in conflict–if the steel is placed by the deck instead of towards the bottom of the stringers, then as the bridge comes under bending, the bottom of the stringers come under tension and without the steel, the concrete will break apart. The steel at the top of the stringer then can’t take the compression, it bends, and the whole structure fails.

The whole structure fails. Without proper design, the whole structure fails.

This is the second waypoint on my investigation. The first has to do with selection of materials. The second has to do with proper design.

The third point takes me away from yoga and bridges as metaphors and looks instead to natural exosystems that are held exquisitely in dynamic balance. They’re not stationary but subject to evolution just as the life forms that make them up are. Within the ecosystem the whole cycle of life and death and rebirth plays out endlessly. This is all messy and sometimes disconcerting but it keeps the ecosystem viable through distributed action of its components.

The ecosystem is kept viable through distributed action of its components.

This is the third waypoint in the investigation.

So now I think I have three balls that I can juggle in the air (I can’t juggle more than three): materials, design and viability. Design seems to be a uniquely human capability but we can also see that the ecosystem employs distributed mehtods of design: is there anything more beautifully designed than a tree or a leopard? Or bacteria for that matter.

Now I can put conflict in its place. Since it’s inevitable, I can steer it with a combination of attention to materials, a continuing, calm focus on iterations of design and a continuous distributed dialog on viabilty.

Materials would be people–the materials of the ecosystem are living systems and the materials of my yoga practice are the elements of my own body. I don’t get to choose parts of my body but I can choose how I develop the parts. And in yoga, they can’t get developed in isolation. The same goes for the bridge and the ecosystem.

The continous dialog on design takes place in yoga as I hold a pose or observe my breath in meditation. It’s vigorous but gentle and forgiving all at the same time. And there is a dialog going on between the different parts of my body in yoga. In organizations, the dialog on design is an approach that is different than problem solving or conflict resolution. Design puts all of the parties on the same side of the table and facilitates them through building models–whole systems until they discover new heights of viability for the organization. This sounds pretty esoteric, but it’s more like what an architect does than a typical business problem solver. As an architect moves forward in his design, the system that he is designing must remain a whole system. Work on one part affects the other. A whole systems approach prevails or the house will fall down when it’s built. Or the bridge. Or my body when I’m doing a headstand.

The design must happen in a distributed fashion. I think that one of the reasons that most companies are so short-lived is that they remain dominated by a small set of personalities and lack the resilience of the ecosystem with all of its living systems creating the soil, influencing the weather, building and wearing down rock and carving out more viable niches. Few organizations are living below the “head.” They are mechanical (implemented plans, routinized processes) below the senior headquarters. In the jungle, the ocelot manages as much of the “strategy” as the tree frog does. And the lowlier the life form, the more of the strategy it may influence. Not so in human organizations. This inability and unwillingness to engage the entire workforce in a meaningful, distributed way means that most organizations are doomed to failure far short of their potential lifespan. A major exception is the work being done by Ricardo Semler at Semco.

In our experience, if people work on personal development (not just personnel development), focus on design instead of intra-organizational combat, and distribute the role of the strategy and implementation dialog throughout the organization, then they will experience the benefits of the right kind of conflict. This is the active sort of balance found in the yogi, the bridge and the ecosystem.

Hopefully that helps.