Conflict and fighting are not the same thing, and telling them apart changes how you handle both. Conflict is the tension that builds wherever something is divided into parts or groups that aren’t in balance: between people, between ideas, within yourself. Fighting is what we do to resolve that tension. Conflict is felt; fighting is done. And conflict is neither good nor bad on its own; the way we fight determines whether it turns destructive and divisive, or productive and unifying.
Managing conflict well is a core leadership skill, and you don’t need the title for it to matter: everyone can be an “everyday leader,” and the people who can identify, predict, manage and resolve conflict, staying calm even during disagreement, are the ones who cultivate empowering team cultures. All of it starts with telling conflict and fighting apart. That distinction is also the central idea of a book I’m writing; what follows is the short version.
What is the definition of fighting?
Fighting is what we do to resolve, manage or otherwise experience a conflict. It isn’t always conscious (the fight-or-flight response is fighting too, automatic and unchosen), but it can become conscious, and that’s where choice lives. Arguments themselves, however we have them, are fighting: a kind of dialogue between the divided sides. We can have that dialogue in many different ways: physical, verbal, emotional, intellectual, or a combination of these.
All of us know the usual tools for fighting: punching, yelling, anger, aggression, competition, insulting. But there are many tools we wouldn’t typically associate with fighting at all: curiosity, listening, questioning, perceiving, empathy, compassion, understanding, collaboration. There’s also a difference between fighting for, fighting with, fighting to and fighting against. We can choose how and why we fight.
And fighting doesn’t only happen out in the world. Sometimes there are fights we need to have within ourselves first. A big one is with our own brain’s defence system, the sympathetic nervous system or fight-or-flight response, which can take over and shut down the rational mind, influencing how we fight in ways we didn’t choose.
Our understanding of fighting doesn’t need to stay the same our whole lives, either. The kind we learn first as kids – adolescent fighting, fighting to win and dominate – is so firmly engrained in everyday life that it’s sometimes the only kind we recognize. But there’s a whole spectrum of more mature shades to learn, and choosing among them is a skill. The article “How adults fight” on this site walks through that spectrum in the workplace; this piece stays with the definitions.
What is the definition of conflict?
Conflict is the tension itself, not the argument. The friction builds along a division between two “sides” of something, and that friction is what triggers the urge to argue. The arguing, however we do it, is the fighting. With interpersonal conflict, we create many of the divisions ourselves, through our actions, decisions, beliefs and reactions. You could say conflict is a co-created challenge, and a co-created challenge needs a cooperative solution.
Conflict usually comes into existence where something is divided into two or more parts, and the friction tends to occur along the edge or border of that division. The division can take many forms: a physical barrier, an abstract separation, a grouping, or any other way something can become split rather than whole. You could say conflict occurs in systems of divided things that are in flux or out of balance.
It’s important to recognize that conflict is not good or bad in itself. How we fight in response determines whether it becomes productive and positive, or destructive and negative. Try looking at the conflicts you recognize in your own life and see if you can identify the divisions, the “groups” or “parts”, that led to each one.
Conflict is also messy by nature. A conflict is a system in flux, an unstable state of continuous change, which is why it feels a bit random, chaotic and provocative to our emotions. To fight in a mature way, we must understand, and be able to feel, how conflict affects us and our behaviour, so that we’re empowered to choose how we fight in response. That takes practice and courage.
Conflict is like music, and fighting is how we use our instruments
Think of an orchestra about to play. The conflict is the tension built into the situation itself: vastly different kinds of instruments, and different people playing them, all competing in pitch, loudness and sound. Somehow, all of that tension needs to resolve in a way that produces music instead of noise. The fighting is how each musician chooses to use their instrument.
Adolescent fighting would look like people focusing only on themselves, each playing their instrument independently of the others with no regard for bringing balance to the whole. At the extreme, they might stop playing and beat each other up with their instruments, measuring success by which instrument makes the most effective weapon. Mature fighting brings the sounds themselves into balance, not just the players: the loudness of a trumpet gives way to the softness of a flute in just the right amount, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts – a beautiful song. The conductor is there to help make that happen, guiding the resolution of all that tension through the playing of the piece. And rehearsal is practice at exactly that; through the act of fighting, we learn to refine and mature it.
Now move this from the concert hall into a boardroom. The noise of an unproductive meeting, people talking over each other, ideas being put down, tempers rising, is fighting too: adolescent attempts to resolve the tension that usually end up creating more of it. Handled maturely, the very same tension becomes effective collaboration, and the conflict comes back into balance. A boardroom benefits from a conductor too, someone who helps facilitate the resolution. Without one, each person has to regulate their own instrument, and that kind of self-regulation is a genuinely hard skill.
Adolescent fighting isn’t always what it seems
Watch how martial arts students fight and you’ll see the difference between adolescent and mature fighting from another angle. On the surface it looks like adolescent fighting: physical punching and kicking. If the intention is to win, it is exactly that. Individual attainment of status, like winning a trophy, feeds the ego, produces an extrinsic measure of self-worth, and results in a clear loser; a division is created through domination. That’s not a bad thing, just an early-stage way to experience fighting and conflict. Take the same attitude into the workplace and you get similar results: winners and losers, competition over cooperation, individual attainment over team attainment.
But if the intent is for the students to help each other learn something about themselves through the act of the physical fight, it may be a mature form of fighting, even though it looks identical to adolescent fighting from the outside. The students help each other struggle with, experience and explore the emotions and feelings that arise in a fight, and this kind of fighting is characterized by mutual respect. By exploring their human nature this way, students often become more compassionate and respectful people, because they understand viscerally how fighting can cause pain and fear. It’s like having an argument with yourself, with the help of someone else, to explore your own nature.
Where do we see the enemy?
If fighting makes you think of an enemy, make sure the act of fighting doesn’t trick you into seeing enemies among the other people participating in the “fight”. During productive conflict we can fight with others without seeing them as enemies or feeling the need to fight against them. It’s not the people; it’s the ideas that are under pressure. If you must see an enemy, see the one people have created together: the conflict itself, the fuzzy and chaotic line that divides two or more things or ideas.
This is difficult to do in practice, but each person has the power to choose where they see enemies, and to choose how they respond to someone who is fighting adolescently. Responding with mature ways of fighting can defuse things and break the self-reinforcing cycle. To do that, you first have to manage the fights that occur naturally inside your own mind, like automatic defence mechanisms, so you can stay calm and composed.
Two sides of the same coin
Once you appreciate that how we fight is separate from the conflict we’re fighting to manage, you become empowered to make deliberate, conscious choices about how you fight. The goal is to keep the dialogue going and bring the divided system back into balance, without creating the feeling that people are fighting each other as enemies.
So when you see conflict in your life this week, see if you can separate the conflict from the fighting. Can you spot different shades of fighting, and tell the adolescent variations from the mature ones? Notice how adolescent fighting invites more adolescent fighting, and think about what would shift things towards the mature end of the spectrum. These ideas are the heart of a book I’m writing about fighting and conflict, and this article is a small preview of it. If you’d like to know when it’s ready, send me a note and I’ll tell you personally.