Coaching

This is one of my more recent shifts. While I’ve done executive coaching forever, I often didn’t call it that, or lead with it. It was usually embedded into my culture projects or done as a follow-on to a retreat or other project. Today, I’m leading with it more, specifically because in today’s uncertain environment, the form of coaching better fits our reality. We need a foundation of frequent and deep conversations to ensure we’re staying on the right track. I really enjoy this work, and it’s a great way to start with me. [More on coaching]

Conflict

This is also something I’ve done forever—it’s my original field of study, dating back to the early 19990s, and I’ve done conflict work inside organizations since I launched my consulting practice back at the end of 2001. If you haven’t noticed, conflict is on the rise these days, so this area has moved up for me recently as well. I’ve noticed a lot of conflict on the member side in associations, and I just developed a new program for boards on “Surfacing Conflict in the Boardroom.” [More on conflict consulting and training, including the board session]

Culture

My conflict tenure may be longer, but my culture work has been deeper over the last 15 years, and all four of the books Maddie and I wrote were about culture and the future of work. I still run culture design projects, which include the culture assessment Maddie and I created, and coaching on the implementation of culture change was usually included in those projects. [More on culture consulting]

Keynotes

Ever since Humanize came out, keynotes have been a regular part of my work, and I love doing them. In a few weeks I’ll be doing a keynote in Portland, OR for the Public Sector HR Association on the topic of “Good Conflict.”

I still get calls about culture-focused keynotes, though recently they have been adding a specific context, like “culture and AI” or “culture and change.” My newest topic, that I haven’t really announced yet, is about regaining traction in organizations. I can also do concurrent sessions and workshops at conferences, of course. [More on keynotes]

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Research

This is a part of my work that has always been in the background. Research is a huge part of my trajectory, from the research Maddie and I did to write Humanize and When Millennials Take Over, to our analysis of our 1.2 million culture data points that was reported in Culture Change Made Easy. I’m working on creating some structured opportunities for people (like my readers) to be more actively involved in my research—and get early access to findings in the process. [More on that to be announced here to subscribers soon]

If you want to learn more or have questions about any of this, please reach out.

So what’s happening here?

• Large organizations are pushing hard to get people back in the office, some now asking for 5 days a week. They are also rolling out heavy surveillance programs (mostly monitoring badge swipes) to pressure employees to comply with the mandates.

• The reasoning behind these mandates is all over the map. Some cite the value of in-person work (building more “weak ties,” which supports innovation, improved creativity, better mentoring and apprenticeship, etc.), while others cite the need for better utilization of office space (interestingly, they don’t worry that it’s unused on Saturday and Sunday, so why the problem on Monday?). Some have even openly implied they did it to push people to quit (so they wouldn’t have to lay them off).

• Employees are pushing back. Airbus employees launched strikes, Texas A&M faculty simply quit. And some leaders are pushing back on the push back. When JP Morgan employees created a petition calling for reversal of the mandate in 2025, the CEO said in a town hall “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that *** petition.”

• Emerging research is not backing up the mandates. A Stanford-led randomized trial of 1,600 workers at Trip.com found hybrid employees matched full-office peers on output and promotion rate, while resignations dropped 33 percent. Researchers at Pitt studied S&P 500 companies that mandated RTO and found no bump in financial performance or firm value, only a drop in job satisfaction and a pattern consistent, in their words, with managers using the mandate “for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance.” One study at three tech firms concluded that RTO mandates were driving senior staff to competitors.

There’s a lot going on here, but I want to pull out one really important thread: the big companies that are pushing these mandates are moving backwards.

Ostensibly we all want the same thing here: a maximized balance between the value of flexibility and the value of collocated work. There are two very different approaches to getting there.

One treats our current context as a complicated system that needs to be expertly managed, and that’s what the RTO mandate companies are doing. They issue rules, or what complexity theorists call “governing constraints,” that will force the specific, right behaviors, according to their expert analysis. That’s why they don’t care about your petition; they have (in theory) already figured this out.

But their rules seem to stop at “be in the office.” If they really wanted to maximize the colocation time, they would have other rules (constraints) to ensure that managers are mentoring their employees, or that weak ties are being intentionally developed. I don’t see evidence of any of that, and the reason is simple: I don’t think it would work. Innovation and mentoring in organizations is a complex challenge, not a complicated one. A single rule isn’t going to cut it. You need to try out some approaches, learn from them, and continue to experiment until you find something that works for you.

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Treating organizations as the complex systems they are is the other approach to achieving the maximized balance between flexibility and colocation. You need to experiment and learn by imposing “enabling” constraints (rather than governing ones). Create containers. Give time to teams to create apprenticeship practices that combine remote and collocated activities. Redesign part of your office space to be more open so weak ties can be formed. Those are very different kinds of mandates, based on an iterative process of learning by doing (rather than analyzing and dictating).

So when I say large organizations are going backwards, I don’t just mean back to the pre-pandemic system. I mean they are going backwards to a management world where most things were complicated, and experts from the top could dictate success. This is a signal that I am watching carefully. I wonder if we will start to see this “returning to our old ways” trend in other leadership and management contexts. If you’re seeing examples, let me know (jamie@jamienotter.com).

And if you’re trying to figure out your own approach to colocation, I encourage you to keep a complexity lens on it. Run experiments and look for useful patterns, rather than over analyzing or acting based on concepts alone. The consequences here are real. You do run the risk of losing good people if you don’t handle this well. I’m happy to serve as a coach to you in that process.

But there’s a gap, and it’s one the board is not likely to fill on its own: surfacing and resolving the right conflicts. Let’s look at an example (full disclosure: I’ve had lots of conversations with lots of association leaders over the years, and this scenario contains details spread across many of them, but doesn’t describe any one of them specifically).

You start down the path of governance change, and you get some push back from a group of vocal members who feel the association is becoming too “centralized” or “undemocratic,” and they make their displeasure known both at an open board meeting and on the online community. In the subsequent board meeting, the board addresses the potential crisis and develops talking points for a communication plan, ensuring they speak with one voice about the importance of the governance initiative. They review and clarify the core principles underlying the governance changes, like enabling more agility, stronger financial controls, and strategic discipline—all things that are needed in today’s environment. They leave clear and unified.

Except they’re not. Several board members felt uncomfortable raising some concerns they had about this bigger trend toward centralization. They were fine with the specifics of the proposed governance changes, but they actually agreed with some points the vocal members were making about democratization more broadly, such as not providing enough opportunities for members to have genuine input into decision making. They didn’t bring it up, though, because they weren’t sure the other board members agreed on the issue, and they didn’t want to start a fight at a board meeting that was already focused on a crisis.

This created two problems: an unintended consequence and a missed opportunity. In the weeks that followed, those board members ended up posting on the community about the need for more member input into decision making. They weren’t coming out against the governance changes at all—there was still unity on that—but they ended up unintentionally mobilizing new people against the changes because the board members appeared aligned with the vocal members around the broad issue of democratization. Had the conflict been raised at the board meeting, the board could have woven some nuances into their communication plan that would have addressed that issue.

They also missed an opportunity to move forward with some concrete actions addressing the members’ concerns, and instead focused only on communicating the concepts. The communications are critical, but actions speak louder than words, and rolling out some processes where members could provide input could actually bring down the temperature of the governance debate since members would start to see relevant change more quickly.

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That’s a big deal: communications that are more on target, and concrete change that addresses resistance positively and proactively. But you only get those results if your Board stays ahead of the conflicts, which includes surfacing the right ones and not wasting time on the wrong ones. That’s easier said than done, particularly in today’s environment (I predict the “undemocratic” theme will only grow in the next few years).

Boards today need to take a hard look at whether their current practices and capacities result in the right conflicts getting surfaced and resolved. Do board members have the skills to raise and handle tough conversations? Are you designing your agendas to ensure you identify and address the real (and sometimes hidden) conflicts? Does your follow-through ensure that action is taken (and evaluated after)?

Boards do a lot—governance, strategy, stewardship of the organization—and the success of all that effort rests on a platform of surfacing the right conflict, resolving it, and converting it into new practices. I can help with all of this, and the easiest way to start is with a 90-minute Board session I’ve designed on Surfacing the Right Conflicts in the Boardroom. If you’d like to discuss that (or other projects), just fill out my contact form and we’ll schedule a time.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

That is what has prompted my current research project, because I think leaders need some answers to this challenge pronto. As I was formulating my hypothesis, I kept coming back to the phrase “proceed until apprehended,” which has been attributed to Florence Nightingale, who effectively invented the modern hospital as a woman in the 1800s, so she was not one for waiting around for permission. But I like the phrase better than the permission/forgiveness version because you’re not apologizing. You’re taking clear action (proceed), even though you’re fully aware that someone is going to try to stop you (apprehended).

Both the proceed side and the apprehended side are problems for us. First, on proceed, leaders are not taking enough action; organizations over-value concepts while under-valuing practices, a conclusion that came from my own culture change research. Across a decade of culture assessment data, the concept side of every dimension we measure averages 3.92 out of 5. The practice side averages 3.48. That gap shows up in all eight dimensions we measured. We all say we want things like innovation and transparency, and we do truly value those concepts, but we’re not running experiments or creating systems and processes that distribute information proactively. Our practices (actions) are the weak link.

In today’s complex/chaotic world, that bias against “proceeding” is killing us. When AI exploded onto the scene, we spent months debating a policy (concept), when we should have been visibly experimenting with tools (practice). When tariffs upended our supply chain, we commissioned a sourcing analysis (concept), when we should have been placing small trial orders with three new suppliers (practice). When customers started rebelling, we surveyed them one more time (concept), when we should have been creating mechanisms for involving them in decision making (practice).

To be clear, concepts are not bad and thinking is still important, but we are over-valuing concepts and delaying the practices, and we’re paying the price. So the first half of my research hypothesis is:

Leaders that emphasize quick and concrete actions and practices in solving today’s challenging problems will see better results than those who delay action to work longer on concepts.

One reason we don’t “proceed,” however, is that we are afraid of being “apprehended,” and that gets me to the second half of my hypothesis. When you take actions and deploy new practices, you trigger your organization’s immune system, which then sends “antibodies” to try and stop them. Change management has always called this resistance, but I call it a gift.

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The immune system response shines an immediate light on real issues that have been there all along, but you couldn’t see them until you messed with people’s routines. Concepts don’t mess with people’s routines, so the issues remain invisible. The challenge, of course, is that addressing the issues requires difficult conflict conversations, and very few organizations are good at that.

For example, let’s say you deployed an AI tool (even before the policy was finished) and some departments refused to use it. You could ignore that, or you could make some passive/aggressive statements in all hands meetings about how important embracing AI is, or you could have that conflict quickly and out loud so their concerns (some of which are probably unrelated to the tool itself) can be addressed in the next rounds of tool deployments (and in other contexts). The unresolved issues generate friction which makes it impossible to meet the agility demands of today’s environment, so the second half of my hypothesis is:

Moving toward the conflict when resistance emerges and resolving it quickly and comprehensively will deliver faster and more effective change.

One ask: I’m collecting real examples of this dynamic. If any of this rings true, hit reply and tell me one or two things you tried to put in place this year and what came back at you when you did. A few sentences is plenty, and your replies will remain confidential. Thanks in advance!

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

It’s not complexity any more—it’s chaos.

That made some intuitive sense to me. When I look at the world these days, it certainly feels chaotic and “unprecedented,” as we used to say in the pandemic. But as I thought more about it, I ended up falling down a bit of a rabbit hole to parse out exactly what differentiates chaos and complexity, and I ended up at the “Cynefin” framework, explained clearly in this 2007 HBR article by David Snowden and Mary Boone.

Rooted in complexity science, the model identifies four different states that can describe any particular context: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. It sounds like a continuum, where any of the states becomes “too much” and you move to the next state, but it’s not that, well, simple. The four states are actually differentiated based on how (and whether) we understand the core workings of cause and effect within that context.

Simple and complicated can be examined together, because they both assume that their contexts live in an “ordered” world, i.e., you can see the direct connection between cause and effect. In a simple context, pretty much anyone can see it, but in complicated one, you need deeper expertise to understand all the cause-effect relationships. We can all see why pedaling the front wheel of a tricycle will make it go forward, and if it broke, most of us have a decent shot at fixing it, but I, for one, cannot explain in any detail why pressing the gas pedal in a car results in forward motion, and if it breaks down, the best I can do is a good “dad pose”—standing with my hands on my hips, looking down at the broken engine, and scowling (and then calling AAA).

Complex and chaotic are fundamentally different because their worlds are “unordered,” i.e., cause and effect cannot be linearly mapped, because the variables morph and change over time. A car engine is complicated, but traffic is complex. Yes, you can determine patterns in complex systems like traffic or weather and make some very loose predictions, but they don’t happen exactly the same way every time. The patterns emerge, and cause/effect cannot be determined ahead of time. You have to sense it and react to it iteratively based on changing conditions.

To put this in an organizational context, treating a complex context like a complicated one gets you in trouble. Marketing strategy and tactics (complex) are not like managing a logistics supply chain (complicated), so you have to do more testing and responding based on what you’ve learned, rather than laying out a three-year Gantt chart, which can work mostly well for the logistics folks.

In fact, Snowden and Boone’s three-word sequence for complex contexts is probe-sense-respond. You test some things, learn from the results you get, and then determine a course of action, at which point you run that same sequence again (over and over). In the last few decades, complexity has become the norm for leaders, which is precisely why we’ve been evolving leadership and management away from the command-and-control approach of traditional management, which was designed for a more complicated world. When I and others write about the “future of work,” we are mostly writing about strategies for handling complex contexts.

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Which brings us to the opening question—are we now in chaos? I think the answer is yes, but not all the time. While both chaos and complexity operate in an “unordered” world, complexity can be a sustainable state, but chaos cannot. Chaos emerges when constraints inside the system (that are typically out of your control) break down, and cause and effect are impossible to determine, because you can’t even discern patterns. Your job in chaos is to implement some constraints to bring stability back, so you can go back to your work of probe, sense, and respond that works in complexity. At that point, as long as things aren’t devolving into chaos again, you can do your complexity work indefinitely.

Twenty years ago, Snowden and Boone declared that chaotic contexts were “mercifully rare,” and that is what is different about today: they are mercilessly common.

Grant funding disappears overnight, regulations get rewritten (or unwritten), and we’re no longer questioning the role of different departments in decision making—we’re questioning the role of humans. The work in chaos is different. Instead of PROBE-sense-respond, it’s ACT-sense-respond. You take action to create constraints that stabilize the situation; there’s no time to probe.

That’s significant, because frankly, we are pretty early on our learning curve for complex contexts, and now we’re being asked to deal with chaotic ones. Tomorrow I’m announcing a new research project that connects directly to these issues, because the pressure is increasing and we all will need to be upping our game in the coming years. More to come.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

I am not going to claim that every workplace conflict deserves that ratio. But I have a hard time overstating how much of the outcome depends on the definition of the problem. Most of the bad resolutions I have seen in my career were not failures of creativity or goodwill. They were attempts at reasonable solutions to the wrong problem.

The lesson here comes out of the field of interest-based negotiation, introduced in the early 1980s by Roger Fisher and William Ury, both at Harvard, in their book Getting to Yes. If you have ever used the phrase “win-win,” you have them to thank. Before their work, the prevailing model of negotiation was based in zero-sum thinking. You came in with a number, the other side came in with a number, and you fought over the space between them. Winning meant getting more of the pie than they did, and failing to win meant you lost.

Fisher and Ury pushed back on that. Negotiation, they argued, delivers better results when it is based in joint problem solving, and winning means everybody gets what they need.

To get there, they gave us a distinction that is one of the the most useful ideas in the entire negotiation literature: the difference between interests and positions. In this post I’ll cover the basics of interests and positions and give examples ranging from simple workplace disputes to hotly contested international negotiations, and close with some advice about how to apply this idea inside organizations.

Positions and Interests

There is an exercise I run in my conflict resolution training that is a classic in the field. It is a two-person negotiation, and each person has their own context sheet explaining their objectives. In short, they are negotiating to buy a rare crop of oranges that they need for research and development. One side needs them for a pesticide that will save crops all over the region and prevent a famine, and the other side needs them to create a vaccine that will prevent babies from dying in childbirth, and each side needs ALL of the 5,000 oranges in the crop. These are the only oranges of this type in the entire world.

It’s a classic zero-sum game. They each need all 5,000 oranges, but that outcome is impossible, so in the exercise people often resort to compromise: you take 5,000 oranges this year, and I’ll get them next year, or let’s split the difference and each take 2,500 oranges even though it’s not enough for either of us.

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What these examples all have in common is a conflict conversation that never happened. On the RTO issue, there are perfectly valid reasons management wants people in the office more (relationship building, deeper conversations), and there are equally valid reasons employees want to maintain the current level of flexibility (work-life balance, time for focused work), and if they sat down to hash that out, I think they have a good shot of finding a solution that works for everyone.

But they don’t have those conversations, and instead people are turning to a process response—submitting letters, petitioning for a membership meeting, submitting a resolution, running for the board. To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with those process options. They exist for a reason. But they do come with some costs. They take more time, they broaden the scope of the issue, and they end up involving more people than is necessary. That is a lot of extra work—work that could have been avoided if we were good at having our conflict conversations in the first place.

There are longer-term implications too. When we defer the conflict conversations we never hear the real objections, which then sit under the surface and come back to haunt us later. Additionally, the process approach then forces a response, which often generates entirely new issues to deal with.

The lesson here points squarely at your organization’s conflict system. Conflict systems are designed to ensure the right issues are dealt with by the right people at the right time. If RTO mandates are being handed down and employees respond with ADA claims (or worse, a lawsuit), it’s because there was nowhere for that conflict conversation to go.

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I think this is a big leadership issue that isn’t getting enough attention right now. We tend to be surprised by these process-heavy responses by employees and/or members, even a little annoyed by them—why are they being so “difficult?!” At the same time, however, we haven’t put a lot of effort into ensuring there is capacity and space for conflict conversations to be raised and resolved. As I said in my last post, good conflict isn’t based on luck. Now is the time to build this capacity, because I’m not convinced that lawsuit trend is going to reverse itself next year. If you need some help, set up a call and we can talk about it.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

This concept has direct relevance to the “good conflict” I’ve been writing about here. A conflict can never be fully under your control, since there are other parties involved. That can really make it feel like the results you get are a matter of chance sometimes. Yes, luck always plays a role, but how prepared is your mind for the conflicts in front of you?

In my post last week I talked about the conditions required for good conflict to happen. In short, the issue must be relevant, the process must have truth and movement, and the resolution must be generative. You can’t make all that happen by yourself, but there are things you can do to set yourself up for success. Here’s an example.

Elena, the VP of Programs, has a conflict brewing with Susan, the new VP of marketing, because Susan bumped the flagship program down in the fall marketing schedule. Elena knows she needs to raise the issue with Susan (conflict avoidance is almost never a good thing), but she takes the time to think strategically about the conditions of good conflict first:

Issue relevance: Bumping the program is certainly a relevant issue to Elena, but the bigger issue here is how the two VPs are going to work together over time, because that has a much bigger impact on the system than when those emails go out in the fall. So she chooses to make that the frame, rather than her complaint about the apparent de-prioritization of her program. With these conditions it’s never about checking a box—it’s about nuanced choices that maximize the chance that good conflict will happen.

Truth and movement in process: Elena’s initial thought was to bring it up in the Thursday senior team meeting, but she realized that brought the CEO into the conversation, which changes the power dynamics, particularly because Elena and the CEO have been close friends for years, and Susan has only been here six months. That process choice makes it more likely that Susan would dig in her heels, which would only move things backwards. It also makes it more likely that Susan will share more of her rationale for the choice she made, maybe even some new data of which Elena wasn’t aware.

Generative resolution: Elena can’t know how the conflict will be resolved yet, but she recognizes that a resolution where the two VPs end up on the same page about how to support each other’s functions is going to eliminate all sorts of future conflicts. It smooths the path. So she intentionally frames her conversation with Susan with that in mind.

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Elena could have added this to the Thursday senior team agenda, and it probably would have blown up. Classic “bad” conflict. Instead, she asked for a 1-1 meeting with Susan and had a productive conversation about how the two departments can work together well, which included a brief discussion of the marketing priorities in the fall. They didn’t quite finish that negotiation, but they got close, because both sides were able to share new information and problem-solve effectively.

You can chalk that up to luck, that Susan and Elena both happened to be having a good day so it went smoothly. I think Elena made that luck happen. Strategic consideration of the conditions as you choose your next moves in conflict situations can really pay off. This, in fact, is the focus of my new “real-time conflict strategy” project, where I work with leaders to map out some strategic choices in a conflict they are actually in.

Don’t leave good conflict up to chance!

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

And the last mile is a tiny fraction of the total distance, but it’s where much of the cost and many of the failures pile up. A package can travel two thousand miles without a hitch and still end up on the wrong porch in the last two hundred feet.

Culture, believe it or not, works the same way.

Over the last decade, I’ve helped organizations get clear on the culture they want and build a playbook to get there. I call it culture design, and I still do it. Some organizations genuinely don’t know what their culture is yet, and that clarity is where they must start, but culture design is upstream work. You look at the big patterns, you name the real issues, and you translate them into action items that will move the needle. Downstream, however, you need to implement those changes, all the way down to the last mile.

Upstream is “We’re going to make decisions faster,” or “We’re going to collaborate across departments.” Everyone absolutely agrees with this, but downstream we find the implementation to be inconsistent. Each department has its own history and its own set of biases, so what seemed to be a clear and agreed-upon directive is not delivered consistently. That’s the last mile.

This is a culture challenge, not change resistance. Marketing and education agreed to coordinate, but they’ve got different information and different instincts, so they keep talking past each other. Everyone agreed to “try things without asking permission,” but one team got burned last time, so they still wait to be told it’s okay. It’s not dramatic, but in the end you’re not getting the collaboration or innovation you need to thrive in today’s environment.

If culture design is the upstream work, culture management is the downstream work, and we’re not focusing enough on it. It isn’t about repeating the message from the top. It’s about going into a specific department and helping those specific people actually do the thing they already agreed to do, working through the dynamics that they may not even realize are holding them back. It’s unglamorous, it’s situational, and it doesn’t appear on a slide deck. But that’s last-mile work, and it makes the difference between mediocre cultures and cultures that employees would never consider leaving.

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This means we need to re-evaluate our culture work right now. Change is moving faster, and the days where we can take months or years to implement an elegant culture design are gone. The last mile should be our first priority, because we need realignment with today’s demands immediately. On a Tuesday, in the room, one department at a time.

This is the work my culture management practice does. I come in and manage that last mile with you, closing the gap between what your people have agreed to and what they actually do, one department and one hard conversation at a time. As I said, I still do culture design work, but design without last-mile management doesn’t work anymore, not in today’s pace of change. It’s time to shift the way you manage your culture.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

But feeling something and making it happen are two different things. After the good conflict post, I dove deep into writing my Conflict Systems Essay (paid subscribers only), and that went to the other end of the spectrum—the systems level—and identified capacities, processes, governance rules, and accountability systems you could put in place inside your organization that would facilitate the existence of good conflict.

That’s important, but I realized recently that I skipped over the middle level that describes what good conflict actually is and how it works. It’s important to understand what good conflict is made of, and the real difference between good conflict and conflict that has a negative impact. The good news is, it’s not that complicated.

All conflict has three basic components: the issue, the process, and the resolution. It’s what we are fighting about, how we engage in the fight, and how the fight gets resolved. For good conflict to happen, each of those components requires certain conditions to be present. If you fail to sustain the necessary conditions in any of those three areas, you’ll end up with conflict that disappoints you or does damage.

The Issue Condition: RELEVANCE

Obviously having a conflict over an issue that is totally irrelevant to the parties will never be good conflict, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Relevance in this context isn’t just binary (relevant/irrelevant); I’m trying to hold the bar a little higher. In good conflict, the issue must truly matter to the people involved.

The issue, for example, should have a genuinely significant impact on the parties or the system they are in. It should be of roughly equal importance to the parties, and the issue should be addressed at the right time. The issue should also be something over which the parties actually have some control (something I wish more people would consider before they start arguing about politics on social media).

I’m wrapping all of that into the word relevance, and if your conflict issue fails the relevance test along any of those variables, it will not be a good conflict. If the issue matters a lot more to you than it does to your colleague, you’ll be fired up and they will be wondering why you’re even having this conversation. If the senior team spends an hour debating word choices in an email marketing campaign (which has very little impact), it’s going to feel frustrating.

The Process Conditions: TRUTH and MOVEMENT

As you engage in the process of attempting to resolve a conflict, there are two conditions required: the process must bring out the underlying truth, and the process must maintain movement and momentum.

“Truth” here doesn’t mean the Truth, with a capital T. This is not about people “not lying” or being their “whole selves.” Truth is about ensuring that the stuff that must be on the table for you to truly solve the issue actually gets on the table. That could mean bringing more data and experiences into the conversation to ensure everyone has a shared picture of what has happened or is happening. It could be pulling out the deeper interests that underlie a position during a negotiation. It could mean sharing a conclusion that you’ve been holding back for fear of the reaction it might produce. This isn’t about everyone sharing everything they are thinking all the time. It’s more strategic than that—it’s the specific data, positions, feelings, opinions, and insights that have the most bearing on finding a solution to the issue. That’s why the truth part is harder than it sounds.

Movement is about momentum and progress. The process in good conflict must ensure that the conflict doesn’t get stuck or spin its wheels. Continuous progress (even if it is sometimes slow) is required in good conflict, and that requires movement of the parties during the process—avoiding circling back to old points, or re-entrenching in positions that have already proven to be untenable.

Note, by the way, that these two conditions sometimes require some balance. Uncovering the truth often slows the conversation down, and pushing for movement will sometimes tempt you to overlook the truth and just decide. A good process holds both—which is exactly why it produces good results.

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The Resolution Condition: GENERATIVE

Finally, good conflict has to land somewhere worth landing, and not all resolutions are created equal. In good conflict, the resolutions are generative—they bring you someplace new, they transcend the previous state, and they set all the parties up for success.

It’s not only about reaching agreement. An agreement that leaves out key issues is one that will need to be relitigated in a few months. An agreement that is fundamentally unfair to one of the parties will damage the relationship, leading to new (and probably worse) conflicts. Agreements that are unclear or too high-level will almost always break down during implementation. Generative resolutions avoid all these pitfalls.

Connecting the Dots

Remember, you need all three conditions for conflict to be good. A conflict about something that truly matters, with a process that maintains momentum, ending in a resolution nobody will honor? Not good conflict. A brilliant, generative solution to an issue that has little impact? Not good conflict either. This is why good conflict isn’t ubiquitous—it’s a higher bar to maintain the conditions needed for all three pieces.

But now we have some indicators to help us improve our conflict. I told you what good conflict feels like, but if it doesn’t feel like that, then start thinking about which condition is missing. Is this even the right issue? Are we being honest and getting somewhere? Are we going to build something that lasts? This can help you adjust real-time and perhaps save a conflict from going bad.

And to tie this back to the Conflict System essay: the three conditions don’t happen by luck. When your organization consistently lands on relevant issues, handles them honestly, and generates resolutions that hold, that’s not because you got a room full of unusually mature people. It’s because you have a system that produces those conditions on purpose.

In the end, conflict is sort of like culture. Conventional wisdom tells you culture is vague and squishy and hard to manage, but, in fact, it’s a tangible business tool that you can manage directly to produce better results.

Good conflict is the same. Good conflict produces results. It’s conflict that works, and it’s more within your reach than you realize.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

Here’s the problem with this debate: “real” is the wrong word, and it sets up a false choice.

Those who argue that generational differences are not real reject the idea that being born within a particular set of years will determine how you, as an individual, will behave, and they are 100% correct. The problem is, those of us who take generational differences seriously in our work were never making that claim in the first place. It’s a mis-framed debate.

Of course your birth year doesn’t determine your values, behaviors, opinions, or beliefs. But your gender or your race don’t determine those things either, yet we still talk about gender, race, and nationality as real lenses on experience—not because they lock individuals into a script, but because they shape the context we grow up in. They matter.

Sociologists have long argued that the social, economic, and political context you live through when you are coming of age—roughly ages 15 to 25—has a lasting influence on your values and beliefs. So if you can point to an extended period in history where the social, political, and economic forces moved in a distinct direction (like “the sixties,” for example) then you can make the case for a generational cohort that came of age during that period (like the Baby Boomers). Going further, there was a period of unraveling that followed the “sixties” era, and people born in that period are now often referred to as Generation X. Then the social internet era arrived, and the Millennials entered the scene.

Generational differences are rooted in the analysis of historical patterns and trends. They are not deterministic. They are stories—narratives we create based on the historical analysis, and narratives that many people happen to see themselves in.

These narratives helped us transform the conversation we were having about Millennials entering the workforce fifteen years ago, away from the initial discourse of complaining (Millennials are entitled!) and toward a discourse of understanding, recognizing, for example, that Millennials grew up in a period where the status of children was elevated, where they negotiated with their parents and referred to adults on a first-name basis. So yes, Millennials came into the workforce expecting access and influence on people higher in the hierarchy in ways previous generations didn’t. That didn’t come out of nowhere or out of individual entitlement; it reflected a generational trend rooted in the history of how adults treated children during that period.

In that way, these narratives are not only real, they can be useful. They can help us see things that we were missing, and they can help us have more empathy for people who are different from us. They can help us have more productive conversations in the workplace, even though every individual in your office will be a unique mix, in some ways aligning with the story of their generation, and other ways not. That uniqueness doesn’t prevent the larger narrative from being helpful to us.

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To be clear, these narratives can be unhelpful too, and we have to watch out for that. Don’t use them to promote negative stereotypes (Millennials are entitled! Gen X are cynical slackers!), and never tell someone born in 1967 (like me) that they must be independent and cynical because they are a part of Gen X (though that’s kind of true for me, but that’s not the point). That’s treating the generational differences like they are deterministic, and we’ve already established that they are not. The solution is not to abandon the narrative, but to use it with care: as context, not as a diagnosis.

Generational differences are also not an exact science, and there is not a clear consensus on who the generations are, where the cutoffs lie, etc. That does make it more difficult to use the narratives in positive ways, but it doesn’t make it impossible, and I’m okay with that limitation. I personally subscribe to Strauss and Howe’s body of work on this topic, but I’m not pretending that they have been “proven” right in any way. I just think their approach is the most comprehensive, and the depth of their analysis of historical trends is valuable, even though some historians and social scientists have been critical of their specific cycle claims.

So where do we go from here? The conversation about generations has been pretty quiet lately, which makes sense to me, because the Millennials are now just moving their way up the corporate ladder (looking at BLS data, I estimate 25% of all CEOs are Millennials), and the generation that follows them hasn’t arrived in enough numbers for us to notice. That could very well change in the next few years. When the next cohort arrives in force, we will, once again, dive head‑first into a familiar discourse of complaining. That’s exactly when generational narratives, used wisely, can help us shift from complaining to understanding.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

The tools involved in tending to plants are well known—seeds, water, soil, sun (or grow) light, plant food, etc. But it’s not always easy. Sometimes she does everything she’s always done, but the plant struggles.

In these cases, the tools themselves didn’t change, but the underlying conditions did. The ratio of root size to pot size passed a threshold, or the angle of the sun streaming in the window changed as summer moved to fall and winter. Different conditions require a shift in how you deploy the tools, and it’s not always obvious (though she is quite good at it).

This is precisely what is happening in today’s leadership environment. We are all applying the leadership tools we’ve been using for decades, but they are not working like they used to. I hear this from almost every leader I talk to. What used to produce results is now producing frustration, burnout, and turnover, particularly since 2025.

Organizations trying to fix the silo problem, for example, will reach for solutions like clarifying roles, sharing more information, or running senior team off-sites to improve top-level collaboration. Ten years ago, those solutions would produce a noticeable improvement, but today they break down when they hit the speed and complexity of the current environment. Today’s world isn’t just busier—it has made the leap from complicated to truly complex, and that’s why our proven solutions aren’t working. No wonder we’re so stressed and burned out.

There is a way out of this mess, but we need to shift our focus away from the solutions and toward the underlying conditions inside our organizations. The conditions we have in place now were designed to deal with a complicated world, not the complex one we live in today, and until we address the conditions, the solutions will continue to let us down (kind of like with Maddie’s plants).

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Conditions are internal capacities, and they exist at three levels: individual, relational, and structural. I’ll write more about these in future posts, but here are the basics:

• the individual level is about your people’s capacity to stay coherent amidst uncertainty,

• the relational level is about our collective capacity to face reality together, and

• the structural level is about the organization’s capacity to sense and correct itself.

These are the underlying conditions you must have in place to be successful in a complex world.

So if you really want to bust your silos by clarifying decision making roles, you must simultaneously develop an individual-level condition that is necessary for that solution to work. You need individuals who don’t default to self-protection or the protection of the department at the expense of the larger system, otherwise there will be unspoken conflict built into the decision-making roles you define, which will break things down later. So as you fill out your RACI chart, you must call out your colleagues when they hold positions that are rooted in self-protection. That’s a tough conversation, but it is a condition that must be present for the role clarity solution to be effective in actually busting the silos.

The solutions you know won’t work anymore, unless the conditions that enable success in a complex world are cultivated at the same time. This is the work of today’s leadership, and that’s not what we were taught. We were taught to have the right answers, but that’s no longer sufficient. I am actually recalibrating all of my work to ensure it addresses the underlying conditions, because that is what will make the difference between frustration and growth in the coming years. Yes, you have fires to put out, silos to fix, and big changes to make, but you must tend to the conditions at the same time, so the fires don’t come back and the change really sticks.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

At the end of July I’m doing a four-day bike ride, covering 350 miles (yes that averages 87.5 miles a day), starting in Cleveland and finishing in Cincinnati. It’s called the Pan Ohio Hope Ride and it’s a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. I’m an avid cyclist (I ride about 2,000 miles each year) so yes, the thought of riding 90 miles a day is actually appealing to me, but I do this ride for a very specific reason:

I’m a cancer survivor.

In 2015 I endured a month of radiation for cancer that was on my vocal chords. Having your throat fried from the inside out is no picnic. I lived several weeks on only ginger ale and high calorie drinks. I had to wake myself up to take my pain meds on an exact schedule because if I waited, the pain would be too much to even swallow the pill. I lost about 50 pounds. Maddie has destroyed every photo of me from that summer.

But I’m still here. For five years I’d go in for scans to see if there was an evidence of the disease, and all my scans were clean. With my type of cancer, 5 years of clean scans means I’m cured—not remission, cured.

But let me be perfectly clear: the reason I’m cancer-free is because of research. Period. The reason so many of us survive cancer lies in the years and years of research behind the treatments, and the money we raise for this ride directly funds new research. Please consider making a donation to support this effort.

And if you want another reason, the ride also supports the Hope Lodge in Cleveland, where patients and caregivers can stay during treatment. As hard as my journey was, it is nothing compared to what many other cancer patients have to endure, particularly those who must rely on experimental treatments to save their lives, and those are the folks that rely on the support from the Hope Lodge.

So please donate. Any amount is welcome. Support me in what is not an easy endurance ride, and help make it possible for others to survive cancer and ride with me. Thanks in advance.

Not all of those systems talk specifically about conflict, though you can usually figure it out, and in the end, I think you should. We all have a style or an approach to conflict. This isn’t about liking conflict or not, or avoiding it. It’s about your approach and your preferred process for working through conflict conversations. You probably don’t even realize that you have a style, because it just feels “natural” to you, but that’s precisely the problem here. When you’re working with someone who has a different approach, and each side feels their approach is the “natural” way to do it, you can get yourself into trouble.

If you want to go all in on conflict styles, you can take the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which is designed specifically to measure how you handle conflict. But honestly, almost any personality assessment will give you useful insights.

For example, a lot of people know their Myers-Briggs type, and it has some particularly useful implications for conflict. If you’ve taken it, you know there are 16 personality types based on four pairs of preferences: Introvert/Extrovert (I/E), Sensing/Intuitive (S/N), Thinking/Feeling (T/F), and Judging/Perceiving (J/P).

For understanding conflict styles, you really only need to pay attention to the last two letters in your type: T/F and J/P.

Thinking versus Feeling is about where you go first when making decisions. Do you immediately focus on logic and objective criteria? Or do you start with feelings and relationships? (And before the Thinkers get defensive: this isn’t about whether you have feelings. Everyone has feelings. This is about what you prioritize when making decisions.)

Judging versus Perceiving is about how you approach and organize your outer life (so it’s not about judging or perceiving, really). Js like structure, planning, and knowing what’s coming; they often schedule, set goals, and feel better when things are decided. Ps like flexibility, spontaneity, and adapting as they go; they often keep options open and are comfortable changing course when new information appears.

When you combine these two dimensions, you get four basic conflict styles: TJ, TP, FJ, and FP (I’m an FP, for the record). Each style has a very different approach to conflict, which, as I said above, can be a source of conflict in and of itself.

Years ago I ran a conflict resolution training as part of a leadership development program for the federal government. The day before the participants came to my session, they had done a session on Myers-Briggs where they all took the test and knew their type. This gave me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how dramatically different these styles can be. In an exercise, I divided the group based on their types: all the TJs together, all the TPs, all the FJs, and all the FPs. Then I gave each table the same assignment. They were parents of a little league team who had made the state finals. They had 22 kids on the team, but only 15 are allowed to go to the championship game. The assignment, at each table, was to come with the criteria they would use to determine who goes and who stays. It wasn’t about creative problem-solving and finding a way for everyone to go. It was about how you decide who can go and who can’t.

I ran this exercise with five different groups during the week, and every single time it played out exactly like this:

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1. Define the problem clearly

2. Identify the root causes

3. Choose a solution or solutions carefully

4. Implement the solution(s) and adjust, as needed, along the way.

This absolutely works for most problems, but there is a category of problems that are resistant to this methodology. Take culture as an example. Let’s say you’ve been having some unwanted turnover and you look at your glass door reviews and see negative comments about the culture. You realize you have a culture problem, and you want to apply the four steps.

Step 1: Define the problem clearly. So what is the problem with your culture? I’m betting that you don’t have a clear answer to that question. Heck, many leaders can’t even tell me what their culture is, let alone what the specific problems are inside the culture that drive people to go work somewhere else. Without this clear definition, the remaining steps (root cause, choose, implement/adjust) have at best a 50/50 chance of working, so the problem doesn’t get solved.

Here’s another example: your senior team has some clear dysfunctions. Nobody is speaking up in the meetings, department heads point fingers more than they collaborate, leaders say one thing in the meeting, but then something different when they go back to their teams, etc. In this case you have a clearer sense of what the problems are. So you move onto Step 2: Identify the root causes.

Unfortunately getting to the root causes would require the team to talk about things that Chris Argyris defined as “undiscussables.“ Issues that are threatening to the team members get glossed over and dealt with lightly, so if the root cause is in those undiscussables (as it often is), it’s hard to access. This is not merely a failure of the individual leaders—the organization can reinforce the undiscussables too. Plus, as Argyris points out, the fact that we have these undiscussable issues is in and of itself a topic that is undiscussable! This can be a tough nut to crack. As with the culture problem, the failure at this step in the problem-solving process makes choosing and implementing solutions difficult. The solutions either create new problems or they don’t stick, and you’re still left with the problem.

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Culture and team dysfunction are just two examples, but problems like these are numerous: hybrid workplace issues, stalled change initiatives, strategic AI adoption, employee turnover, board challenges… The list goes on. You try to solve the problems, but you never get there.

To be clear, these problems are not unsolvable, they are only resistant to solutions, and they tend to be the ones that leaders struggle to solve on their own. My entire career has been devoted to helping leaders solve “solution-resistant: problems, and if anything, the need for that work is greater today than it ever has been, because time frames are compressing and complexity is increasing.

Solving these problems requires behaviors, approaches, and conversations that are not part of your standard operating procedures. If you want some help, check out my leadership coaching and consulting services.

1. How do you manage yourself as a leader when it’s impossible to have the answers?

2. What do you tell your people about that big initiative when you have no idea how it’s going to play out?

3. How does your senior team align on what to do next when your strategy is under this much stress?

4. How can you convert your endless meetings into decisions that move the needle?

The level of uncertainty in today’s environment is scary. Starting back in the pandemic, a slew of blog posts and articles came out to support leaders in leading in “uncertainty” or “the unknown.” Most of that advice boils down to “be true to your values, communicate a lot, and take care of your people.” All true. But if you’ve done all that and you’re STILL exhausted and unsure what to do next, it’s because that guidance stays high‑level and obvious. It doesn’t tell you how to move forward when you actually don’t know what’s coming.

I’ve seen this movie before. For years, “culture” talk stayed at the level of values and slogans and vague definitions like “how we do things around here.” It sounded good but drove very little change. My answer was culture design: make the hidden patterns visible, prioritize what to change, and build a concrete playbook of action items, and create a process for ongoing culture management. We didn’t need more “stay true to your core values” advice—we needed a concrete path forward. That’s what culture design does.

We have that same need now for leadership, because the future isn’t just unknown, it’s unknowable.

Unknown implies that if we wait long enough, today’s fog will lift and we’ll arrive in a new, knowable steady state. That used to be a reasonable story, but today, the change drivers are bigger and faster. The “present” is shrinking. The next wave hits before we’ve even adjusted to this one, so we’re not really walking into an unknown future we’ll eventually understand—we’re leading into a future that is, in important ways, unknowable. That’s a big part of why so many leaders are tired and anxious. The work of leadership has changed for good, but our models haven’t caught up.

As was the case with culture, I think we need a concrete path for moving forward in this context. Here’s the basic model I came up with (modeled, roughly, on culture design):

Step 1 – See the present more clearly: Name what’s truly unknowable, what is knowable, and what’s currently unsaid, so you’re not making decisions based on a distorted picture. This is the “what is” piece. Example: an honest conversation with the board about how your 75-year old volunteer process/structure makes adapting to today’s change essentially impossible.

Step 2 – Decide what you’ll say and do moving forward: Make explicit choices about priorities, messages, and no‑regret moves that you can start implementing right away. This is the prioritized action planning piece. Example: Add real consequences if people don’t follow your RACI model (internal decision-making roles), so “going rogue” has costs to it.

Step 3 – Have the right conversations that bridge to the future: Design and facilitate some key conversations where those choices you made become real and are evaluated continuously (with execs, managers, staff, board). Example: Your senior team meets mid-year to have the hard conversation about pulling the plug on a big initiative that’s already cost you a lot of time and money, and this time you push past the defensiveness and egos.

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Most leadership models don’t naturally push you through this sequence or demand this kind of courage—just like most culture models don’t push you into the real work of culture design. We need to be intentional about this shift, and make room for it. To support that, I’m offering some consulting services to help leaders move down this new path:

When you’re carrying the unknowable alone, executive coaching (tying back to question 1 at the top of this post) can help you manage how you show up and what you take on.

• If you don’t know what to tell people without over‑promising, internal communications coaching (question 2) helps you build a transparency approach calibrated for this environment.

• If your senior team is not aligned on how to move forward, facilitated retreats (question 3) that are true working sessions (not just strategic planning) can help you align on what matters now, what you’ll stop doing, and how you’ll talk about it.

• If you feel like your internal meetings don’t generate enough clarity or leave too much unsaid, then meeting design and facilitation (question 4) can ensure your critical conversations moving forward produce real decisions and clear next steps.

If you’d like to have a conversation about how I can support you in any of these areas, complete this contact form and we’ll set up a time to talk. Or just hit reply and let me know which of the four questions is biggest for you right now and how you’re managing it (even if the answer is “I’m not”).

Back in the 1900s the present lasted much longer than it does today. We had time to sit in the new reality and work it, adjust to it, develop it, and then think about what’s coming in the future as the next unknown. That’s not how it works any more. Today’s change has dramatically reduced the time that we experience as “the present,” and the new unknown is challenging us before we’ve even adjusted to the current present state. Unknowable. That is why everyone is so tired, and anxiety among leaders is high. The work of leadership is changing for good, and leaders need to respond.

• Responsible

• Accountable

• Consulted

• Informed.

The big challenge, however, is that those words are not crystal clear. “Responsible” and “Accountable,” for example, could easily be interchangeable. And if you look it up on the internet, you’ll find a LOT of different interpretations. I’m not claiming to be the authority here, but I have developed a description that has been consistently useful to clients, so I’m sharing it here. What follows is what Maddie and I included as an appendix in our Culture Change Made Easy book. We start with the four roles themselves.

RESPONSIBLE

This is the decision maker, i.e., the person responsible for deciding. This is usually a single person, and this person will always be deeply and actively involved in the project. If you’re thinking, “this is MY project,” then you’re probably the R on most decisions. It is possible to have multiple Rs, though in that case, ALL of the Rs must be in unanimous agreement before making a decision (which can complicate things).

ACCOUNTABLE

This is typically the “boss” of the decision maker—someone who is accountable for the results that will happen (or not happen) depending on the outcome of the decisions made by the R. The A is usually the person who delegated decision-making responsibility to the R. While they do not get into the weeds of the project, an A is regularly updated on progress and technically can exercise veto power over decisions if it’s really important. That veto power is the key characteristic of the A role (and is often a source of frustration for Rs).

CONSULTED

This category is for people who must be consulted before a decision is made. You don’t need to identify everyone who might be asked a question or provide input on a project, but this is for people who the R knows need to weigh in before the decision is made. In other words, it would be a mistake to decide without their input. However it should also be noted that the R still gets to make the decision—you can always say no to input from a C (if you couldn’t say no to their input, then they are probably an A).

INFORMED

The last category is for people who should be informed about the decision after it is made. They are relevant enough to need to know what the decision was, but they do not need to be part of the decision-making process. This role doesn’t usually cause too many complications unless the people in this category feel they should be either in the A or the C roles. Many senior managers are in this role—they need to know what’s happening—but they sometimes slip and feel like they are accountable and can veto just because of their position. Even the CEO can be in the I role, where they give up the power to veto. Theoretically, the CEO could be an A on every decision—if the buck stops with them, can’t they veto anything? Yes, but is that what you want your CEO to spend time on?

Here are a couple of real-world examples that we included in the Appendix that show you what this looks like when it’s done well, and what it looks like when there is subtle confusion that never gets resolved. In the second example, the lines are blurred because of the need for extensive collaboration and input from various departments, and it causes problems (subscribers only).

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In my experience (assuming the retreat isn’t a complete failure, which is very rare), that kind of conversation will end up in one of two places: it will either feel good, or it will move the needle.

The Feel-Good Version. This is the most common outcome. The facilitator usually structures the conversation around some kind of external model, like Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions or the DISC personality assessment. The conversation is productive, and your team recognizes some patterns that are problematic. They agree there needs to be more collaboration across departments and are resolved to do better. The conversation felt good. The tension that was there before is dissipated. When you get back to the office, however, you notice that some behaviors do change, but not enough. Departments are collaborating and sharing information more, but mostly on the small stuff. The problems you wanted solved end up still there, and those bad decisions are still cropping up.

The Move-the-Needle Version. This is the outcome most teams want, but rarely achieve. The facilitator structures the conversation primarily based on data from the team itself. External models can help move the conversation forward, but it always starts with “what is,” based on data, not assumptions. That way the conversation gets concrete rather than staying abstract. You talk about what processes need to change to facilitate more effective collaboration, rather than all agreeing to collaborate more. The conversation is systemic rather than one-off. You don’t agree to share one piece of information across department lines, you focus on a true transparency architecture. The conversation is deeply honest, rather than being polite and comfortable. With the data painting a clearer picture, people stop holding back and put their real views on the table. The conversation is solution-focused, rather than settling for high-level conclusions. Action plans are clear and designed specifically to move the needle on the toughest challenges.

Data-centric, concrete, systemic, honest, and solution-focused. That’s what makes the difference between conversations that feel good and ones that actually move the needle. And this concept applies beyond senior team retreats. It applies to teams trying to resolve a difficult conflict, to a culture team trying to redesign an organization’s culture, and to a cross-functional team preparing for a big change initiative. In each of those contexts, failing to get real system data into the room at the start, or choosing to stay high level, or failing to bring the whole truth into the room dooms the project to mediocrity.

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You know I like metaphors, so here’s one way of looking at it. In each of those contexts there is a group of people, and it’s like they are in a room that seems to have no exit. Four walls, but not a single door. There is a door, of course, but it’s a secret one—you can’t see a handle or even the hinges. “Move-the-Needle” conversations are designed specifically to make the hinges visible, and once you see them you can go right to that panel and know where to push to open the door. “Feel-Good” conversations don’t reveal the hinges, so the team wanders around fairly aimlessly looking for the exit. They may find it eventually, but the delay will have cost them.

This has been at the heart of my work my whole career—getting to the “hinge” conversation that moves the needle. I helped a senior team change their approach to decision making roles rather than continuously argue about “who’s in charge.” I helped a culture team analyze their own culture data and then make specific changes to their project management system that made cross-functional collaboration much easier. I helped a mixed group of staff and volunteers confront the inefficiencies and lack of trust in their system so they could design a change initiative that would turn their situation around.

Conversations that move the needle make the difference between competence and excellence.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.

What Good Conflict Is, And How to Get More of It

Good conflict feels alive, has traction, stretches you, and draws you in. Good conflict solves problems, creates value, and supports change. But the only way you get good conflict is if you have a good conflict system, and most organizations don’t even know they have one. In this keynote, I’ll shine a light on your conflict system, revealing how it operates, and showing you how to make concrete changes to the system that will start delivering good conflict right away. Stop trying to survive your conflicts, and start turning them into a strategic advantage.

AI Will Learn Your Culture, and That Could Be a Problem

The AI train is not stopping, and organizations of all shapes and sizes are integrating it into their operations. Unfortunately they ignoring the role of culture—and not in the usual “what culture do we need for AI to work” sense (though that’s also important). They are ignoring the fact that the frustrating parts of their culture are now being codified into permanent problems by AI. In this provocative session, Jamie shines a light on the hidden patterns and competing commitments in your culture that AI will learn whether you want it to or not. If your culture has invisible resistance to collaboration, transparency, or innovation, your AI will quietly amplify and automate it. Understanding how culture really works—and how to change it through small, intentional experiments—has never been more important. You will leave with practical ways to spot your own culture patterns and design simple culture “plays” that teach your AI the culture you actually want, not the one that has been holding you back.

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The Good Fight: Why Innovation, Change, and Retention Run on Conflict

You’re investing in innovation. You’re managing change. You’re working hard to keep your best people. So why does it feel like none of it is paying off? In this keynote, culture and conflict expert Jamie Notter makes the case that nobody is noticing the single, upstream solution to achieving the three things leaders want most: your organization’s ability to do conflict well. Drawing on two decades inside organizational culture and a master’s in conflict resolution, Jamie shows why innovation depends on the disagreements people are avoiding, why resistance to change is rooted in unresolved conflict, and why your best people leave not because of money or managers, but because the chronic drama wears them down. You’ll leave with a clear-eyed view of the hidden “conflict system” already running in your organization, along with concrete strategies for improving the system and generating more of the good conflict that will drive results.

Six Ways Your Culture Blocks Change

Now, more than ever, we need to be good at change. Every aspect of our strategic landscapes seems to be shifting beneath our feet, so our very survival depends on our ability to change, adapt, and pivot with skill and speed. In most organizations, however, change feels like we’re trying to turn the Titanic. We often blame this on resistance, poor communication, or lack of resources, but the real culprit here is your culture. There are six roadblocks to change that most cultures create, without you even realizing it. In this keynote I’ll share my research on how these roadblocks are formed and show you how to make concrete changes inside your culture that will transform these roadblocks into change accelerators. You’ll leave knowing what to do—and stop doing—to turn change into an ally rather than a disruptor.

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Perplexity’s version was “dangerous turning point.” I see why conflict resolution people would like the danger/opportunity version, because it’s part of our philosophy that conflict (which often happens in a crisis) is ultimately a good thing—it’s how we learn and grow, even if it can be painful sometimes. “Opportunity” implies that positive potential.

But I like “dangerous turning point,” and it feels pretty accurate for what is happening these days. We are facing a lot of crises right now (dangerous turning points), but I’m not sure we’re turning enough. A crisis is a turning point—it requires a response—but we’re trying to push forward with old approaches, and that is why we’re not emerging from these crises in a better place. Burnout and AI are two clear examples.

Burnout is a crisis right now. We’re all moving too fast and pushing too hard, and while AI can make us more efficient, we’re early on, so we’re still at the point where it is adding a lot to our cognitive load right now. This is a dangerous turning point, and many organizations have seen the danger play out in the form of reduced engagement, quiet quitting, and even some loud quitting. The response has been to do things like offer sympathetic messages, wellness webinars, and “remind” people to take time off.

That is trying to push through with the old approach. What we should be doing is directly confronting the tough conversations about real trade-offs that are driving the burnout, like which initiatives are we going to stop doing to make room for this new one, clarifying productivity expectations and how we’re going to measure them, and challenging leaders who espouse work-life balance and then reward people who work 70 hours a week.

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AI is a crisis right now. As I mentioned above, it does have tremendous potential, but we’re still figuring it out and it’s adding to our stress. This is a dangerous turning point because “figuring out” AI has huge implications for how all of us will work in the future. This goes beyond efficiency and taps into deeper issues like identity, security, status, and fairness. Your people are deciding if this is a future they’re building with you, or a future being done to them. Yet most AI initiatives are being run like a standard tech project: a business case, some training, and some talking points about “augmentation, not replacement.”

What we’re not doing is having the tough conversations about power, trust, ethics, job transformation, and, yes, job loss. We all know those issues are there, and never addressing them generates a very cynical narrative among employees. Resistance moves underground. It reinforces that not speaking up about important issues is the norm in the culture, which makes it even more difficult to adapt to AI-driven changes.

So much of our collective ability to work through these dangerous turning points involves having the right conversations at the right time, and (importantly) actually taking the conversations all the way through to resolution. The more you put off those conversations, the harder it will be to turn the way we need to during these crises.

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For more information on my speaking or advisory services, visit JamieNotter.com.