How conflict can be a source of creativity: the pioneering work of Mary Parker Follett

There are some very important thinkers who have been forgotten, and we would do well to rediscover them. Such is the case with Mary Parker Follett. She was a pioneer of management in the broadest sense in the 1920s. Many of her innovative ideas were taken up and developed by people who went on to become very famous, such as Peter Drucker, who acknowledged that he owed a great deal to her. In particular, she wrote some very important things about the relationship between conflict and creativity that should be of interest not only to entrepreneurs and innovators, but also to business leaders and, let’s face it, politicians.

Mary Parker Follett has had a long career, but she is best known for her work with associations and labor disputes. She is interested in what she calls the “moment of mystery” that leads from the existing to the new. How does the new emerge? This fundamental question stems from her experience in managing labor disputes.

Conflict gets a bad rap: thinker after thinker has tried to find a way to get rid of it by imagining an ideal city. But for Follett, to try to eliminate conflict is to deny human nature. In a society there are necessarily divergent and conflicting interests. To live in a society, therefore, is to be constantly confronted with conflicts, large and small, and to have to resolve them if the society is to continue. To deny that conflicts exist and to wish that they could be permanently eliminated by some means of social engineering is to ignore the fact that “most of us, even those who are peace-loving, do not wish to live like ants and beavers. Follett’s pragmatic view is that we must accept life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential characteristic. But it’s not just a matter of resigning ourselves to conflict; she believes it has virtues and that we can benefit from it.

In a fundamental passage that sums up her thinking, Follett believes that the confrontation of interests can indeed lead to one of four things: (1) voluntary submission by one side; (2) struggle and victory by one side over the other; (3) compromise; or (4) integration.

Voluntary submission or victory by one of the two parties is an act of violence. The conflict is resolved because the stronger party imposes its solution. The Allies won the war in 1945. Violence can thus resolve a conflict definitively, or it can resolve it temporarily and set the stage for a subsequent conflict (the crushing of Germany in 1918 set the stage for World War II). Compromise is also a balance of power, but it’s more balanced and seems perfectly reasonable: everyone makes an effort, takes it upon themselves, as it were, and the conflict is resolved. The unions wanted a 15% increase, and the employers refused to pay for the days of strike. In the end, the unions agreed to a 7% increase, management agreed to pay for some of the strike days, and work resumed.

For Follett, however, the compromise is temporary and futile. Everyone is proud of what they’ve won and can claim victory, but also frustrated that they didn’t get as much as they’d hoped, and no doubt a little humiliated that they gave in. Compromise usually just means kicking the can down the road, because the truth is not to be found between the two parties. It’s like sharing a cake without making it bigger; it’s a zero-sum game. Also, it’s a compromise between the old ways, or it’s a combination of the old ways; it always keeps us in the old ways. Everybody makes themselves a little smaller so that we can fit together in a framework that doesn’t move. What’s more, according to Follett, to advocate compromise is to abandon the individual: He or she must give up part of himself or herself in order for action to take place. Compromise is oppression. To believe in compromise is to still see the individual as static.

Integration, Creative Conflict Resolution

Integration is imagining a new solution that respects everyone’s deeper goals. Follett gives a very simple example (it’s the ’20s): a couple of his friends couldn’t agree on the choice of boarding school for their son: the husband preferred one because of his educational level, while his wife preferred another because of the companions the boy would have. To get out of this dilemma, they decided to renounce boarding school and keep the child at home: his mother could have her say about his companions, and he would go to a good school, but without boarding school. This is not a compromise, because neither of them has given up anything: the father has a school whose standards match his own, while the mother is more satisfied than with the original option. The solution is new because it is not that of either of the original parties; it has been created through confrontation; there is therefore creativity, and the objectives of each party – but not their solution – have been respected and integrated in its formulation. This important idea is also found in Effectuation, the entrepreneurial approach, with its third principle of acting based on cocreation.

The secret of conflict mediation is invention. We reach agreement not by adapting, but by inventing; not by reconciling our ideas through compromise, but by finding the new idea that is always different from the sum of the previous ideas. For Follett, then, there should be no conflict in the sense of conquest of one by the other, or compromise, a futile and frustrating “middle way”; but there will always be conflict in the sense of confrontation, a clash that must be followed by integration. Confrontation, then, does not mean battle.

Creative resolution

This creative dimension of conflict resolution can go further. In the school example cited above, Follett adds that the parents might decide to start their own school. If it turns out to be a good school, their initial conflict will have had community value. Thus, any well-managed conflict can lead to “something new,” but if one submits to the other, or a compromise is reached, that “something new” doesn’t emerge. Each must persevere until a means is found by which neither is absorbed, but by which both can contribute to the solution.

For Follett, the basis of all collective action is integrated diversity. The question to ask in conflict resolution, then, is to what extent will the way we resolve the conflict allow us to continue to live as a collective? To what extent will it even enable us to live better as a community? For a well-resolved conflict is progress. So conflict is not only a necessary evil, it’s also something we can seek out and nurture because, managed civilly, it is a source of energy for the collective. This creative virtue of conflict is something artists know well, as I demonstrated with guitarist Keith Richards in an earlier article. We’ve all experienced it: the initial stress of conflict gives way to the joy of resolving it satisfactorily with the other. Each respected the other, and both grew together. Follette emphasizes this in a passage that sums up the originality of her thinking: “The heart of human development, expansion, growth, and progress is the confrontation and grasping of opposites.

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🇫🇷 French version of this article here.