Amplifying and Speeding the Natural Conflict Learning Process

4. The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 20, 2026

Guy Burgess often says that “conflict is the engine of social learning.” The point is not that conflict is always good. It is that conflict is one of the main ways societies discover that something is wrong. When people who are being mistreated remain silent, others can easily assume that the existing arrangements are fair enough. Injustice then becomes invisible, or at least easy to ignore. Conflict changes that. It forces hidden grievances into public view and challenges people to ask whether old habits, institutions, and relationships still deserve to be defended. This is one reason why scholars such as Lewis Coser have long argued that conflict can serve important social functions, not simply destructive ones, as summarized in this Beyond Intractability overview of The Functions of Social Conflict.

Still, conflict does not automatically lead to wisdom. It can teach people the wrong lessons. A community may learn to fear the other side more deeply, to punish dissent, or to believe that domination is the only path to safety. The learning becomes constructive only when conflict is engaged in ways that clarify real problems, reduce unnecessary hostility, and open the door to better relationships. John Paul Lederach’s idea of conflict transformation is helpful here because it treats conflict as energy that can be directed toward constructive change. The goal is not to suppress conflict or pretend that deep differences do not matter. The goal is to help people use the conflict to understand what needs to change and how change might be achieved without escalating into hatred or violence.

The natural conflict learning process is often slow, painful, and wasteful. Societies usually learn by making mistakes, suffering the consequences, and then slowly building better practices. A protest may reveal an injustice. A failed policy may expose a mistaken assumption. A public controversy may show that people who thought they understood one another, actually do not.

Over time, these episodes can produce reforms. But the process can take years or generations, especially when people are isolated in separate information worlds or when leaders profit from keeping the conflict destructive. Massively Parallel Peacebuilding, or MPP, is designed to speed up this natural learning process by making it more conscious, more organized, and more constructive.

MPP is not a new program that everyone is expected to join. It is a name for something that already happens whenever many people work on different parts of a large conflict problem. Beyond Intractability describes Massively Parallel Peacebuilding as a way of responding to conflicts that are too complex for any single leader, organization, or theory to manage. Some people focus on better journalism. Others work on dialogue, civic education, institutional reform, trauma healing, or protection against political violence. The point is not to merge all these efforts into one centralized campaign. The point is to help people see how their work fits into a larger whole, as suggested by BI’s discussion of specialized massively parallel roles and tasks.

Amplifying and speeding the conflict learning process therefore requires more than encouraging people to “work together” in a general sense. It requires helping them understand the conflict system, identify missing roles, notice duplication, and share lessons across projects. It also requires enough humility to recognize that no one sees the whole picture and no one person has "the right answer" or the "best aproach." A local organizer may understand community fears that a national expert misses. A scholar may see a pattern that practitioners are too busy to document. A journalist may reveal facts that make reform possible. When these contributions become more visible to one another, societies can learn faster and with less damage. In that sense, MPP is a strategy for turning the unavoidable energy of conflict into a more deliberate process of democratic learning and constructive social change.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.