When Your Team's Conflict Isn't Personal - It's Systemic

I was working with a health service recently where a leadership team was struggling to move forward. Momentum had stalled. Frustration was rising. In their meetings, the same arguments kept circling - competing priorities, different values, irreconcilable demands. A director confided that morale was low.

What looked like interpersonal tension kept resurfacing, with no clear pathway back to alignment or flow.

As we slowed down and looked beneath the surface, a different pattern emerged. The friction was not just interpersonal, it was systemic. The team was caught in polarities - and they didn't know it.

Polarities Holding the System

These included

• Being innovative and taking risks while also upholding safe, evidence-based practice (how do you pursue breakthrough solutions while maintaining rigorous standards?)

• Optimising for my department AND the organisation overall (how do push for the resources I need for my departmental excellence and also ensure the organisation's sustainability?)

• Caring for patients AND caring for staff (how do you protect service quality while preventing burnout?)

Polarities sit at the centre of complex systems. They are pairs of values that depend on one another. In Barry Johnson's work on polarity management, these tensions are understood as interdependent forces - sets of opposites that cannot function independently.

When we choose one side at the expense of the other, we create predictable problems.

A contemporary example: underlying the adoption of AI are polarities I'm seeing everywhere right now - the push for quick uptake to lead the curve, alongside the need for safe, ethical and transparent use. How do we hold both speed and safety?

But most teams don't recognise they're navigating a polarity. They approach it like any other problem to solve - and that's when things collapse.

The Trap of Polarity Blindness

When a team does not name the polarity it is navigating, shared tensions turn into interpersonal battles. People fight for their side, struggle to hear the opposite view and lose sight of the larger pattern. The system becomes harder to see because we can't step out of our competing parts.

As Barry Johnson reminds us

Instead of contradicting each other's view, the task is to supplement each other's view in order to see the whole picture. Each of them has key pieces to the puzzle. Paradoxically, opposition becomes resource.

This is what had happened in the health service team. Smart, committed leaders had become opponents, each defending a legitimate value while discounting the other. The tensions that could have been a source of insight had become a source of dysfunction.

From Parts to Greater Wholes

The shift that matters is the shift from part to whole. When leaders are locked in their own pole, they argue from their corners and protect what matters to them. When they can hold both poles at the same time, they work with the dynamic. They flow with the tension rather than fight against it.

In practice, this looks like pausing to ask: "What if we need both? What if we're both right? How could we maximise the benefits of both these values, simultaneously?" It means naming the polarity explicitly: "We're navigating the tension between innovation and safety - and we need both." It means designing decisions that intentionally hold both poles rather than choosing one.

As Ron Heifetz observes

Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation. People don't learn by staring into a mirror; people learn by encountering difference.

For the health service team, the shift was palpable. Once they could name the polarities they were navigating, the quality of their conversation changed. They stopped defending positions and started designing together.

Within weeks, decisions that had been stuck for over a year began moving forward. The energy in their meetings transformed from tension and frustration to creative problem-solving.

Practice Prompts

• Where are the hidden polarities in your team or organisation that might be masquerading as interpersonal conflict?

• What legitimate values are on both sides of your recurring tensions?

• What would it look like to hold both sides of the tension and let something new emerge?

I work with public sector senior leaders to develop the capacity to see and work with these systemic patterns through executive coaching, masterclasses, and strategic system interventions.

If you're navigating stuck dynamics in your leadership team, reply to this email and let's find a time to talk.