Organizational, Community and Societal Dysfunction

2. Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity

When intractable conflict pits people against each other such that all problems (or even most problems) are defined in "us-versus-them" terms, and hence the source of the problem is seen by all sides as being caused by one or more "others," the ability of the organization, community, or society to successfully address those problems becomes much more remote. Very few problems are really just caused by a mistake or malfeasance of the other side. They almost always have multiple causes, and most often those causes include errors one's own side has made, often together with outside factors that are independent of any of the actors. And when one diagnoses the cause of a problem wrong, the chances of fixing it go down substantially.

In addition intractable conflicts can take disputants' attention away from solving problems altogether. As we recently heard from Derek Kilmer, the former U.S. House of Representative member from the sixth district in Washington State (and also chair of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress), Congressional representatives often are not focused on solving problems, both because of what he called "will issues" and "skill issues."

The will issues are all of those things that make negotiation and compromise difficult. People being worried about a primary or gerrymandering that has made their district so blue or so red that it makes compromise politically perilous. And campaign finance is a challenge. Those are "will issues" that lead folks in Congress to often look at this more like a game to be won, rather than as problems to be solved.

That was combined with a lack of skills:

Congress is the first place where I've ever worked where, with the exception of freshman orientation, there's really not any professional development for members to get better at their jobs. Things like: how do I negotiate strategically? How do I resolve conflict? How do I have difficult conversations with people who think differently than I do? How do I use evidence to create public policy? Those are all skills. And there are some people who, by virtue of what they'd done prior to Congress, come to Congress with those skills. And there are some people who somehow organically develop those skills within the institution of Congress. But by and large, there's a whole bunch of people here who don't have those skills.

As a result, Congress has been much less functional that most Americans would hope. And the dysfunction in Congress is mirrored in many other organizations and governmental entitles that get bogged down us-versus-them (red-blue or other distinctions) that prevent people from examining problems or developing solutions in a collaborative way or otherwise effective way.