How rivers of conflict flow

I don't love using Jeff Bezos as an example of anything virtuous, and the anecdote in this post may just be apocrophal, so let's treat it like that, but this is a useful quote:

A group that gathers but doesn’t know how to fight without ‘un-gathering’ won’t remain a group for long. A group that can’t disagree and commit will disagree and dissolve.

The point here is that "conflict preservation" is much more useful to a group than "conflict resolution" for most things. When clients ask me to help people come to "alignment" on things like the organization's vision or mission statement, they often talk about a river, with everyone travelling in the same direction. My response is often to unpack that image.

If "alignment" is like a river, let's really look at how a river flows. When you do you will see that healthy rivers flow slowly, and in many different directions. There are pools of still water, eddies that cause the flow to reverse itself, vertical upwellings, places of rapid flow and others where the flow is slow. And yet, everything is going in the same direction.

It's a question of scale. At fine levels of granularity, conflict and difference are critical. Held skillfully it can also create and sustain the relational capacity that can withstand times when the river goes over a waterfall. In those moments, relationships can come apart just when they are needed the most. Simmering conflict embedded in a reluctance to work with difference requires a tremendous amount of energy to later resolve. 

It's a practice.