Systemic management · Claudio Godoy

When the absence of arbitration creates division

In an organisation, conflicts are not always resolved by more goodwill. They can move into silences, alliances and successive departures. Drawing on an experience lived from within a team, this article shows how a manager’s refusal to take a position can become a way of managing, and how systemic thinking helps us revisit this dynamic without erasing responsibilities.

Introduction

I joined this institution as part of a new recruitment wave, after several professionals had left. There were a few of us newcomers, and I was the last to join the team. I was a social care educator. So I was not arriving in a team with a clean slate, simply waiting for new colleagues. I was entering an organisation already marked by a history, divisions, departures and unresolved questions.

Throughout this experience, I saw how difficult it is to talk about management when writing from within the system. I was not an outside observer who had come to apply an analytical framework. I took part in meetings, informal conversations, disagreements and attempts to keep the work going despite the tensions. I knew the work on the ground, but I was also part of the dynamic I am trying to understand today.

The division did not simply separate established staff from newcomers. It concerned ways of handling conflict, clinical differences, professional frames of reference, ways of relating to the people we supported, and even the words used to name our profession: specialist educator, social worker or mental health practitioner. Some wanted the manager to take a more active role. Others feared that firmer intervention would reintroduce uncomfortable control or top-down authority.

The problem that interests me here is therefore one of management and organisational practice. How can a team of competent professionals, experts in relationships and human connections, undermine its ability to work together when disagreements are not genuinely addressed? What happens to collective governance when the manager refuses to take a position in the name of a horizontal structure? To try to answer these questions, I suggest taking the reflection further: rather than first looking for who is responsible for the problem, observe the relational sequence that produces and sustains it.

A division that changes its face

Before I arrived, a few people had left the institution and others were about to leave. These departures had left a history: some professionals were seen as the “bad” team members, the ones whose way of working had supposedly made collective work impossible. The next recruitment wave was meant to provide a fresh start. Yet changing people is not always enough to transform an organisation. When the rules of cooperation remain implicit, the conflict can be played out again with new participants.

What gradually took hold did not look like an isolated disagreement. Professional differences were often experienced as personal attacks. A different clinical opinion could be interpreted as questioning a colleague’s competence. Alliances and coalitions formed around particular interpretations of the work. The diversity of approaches, which could have become a resource, was thus reduced to opposition between people.

Supervision meetings were one setting in which these tensions became particularly visible. They were not necessarily where the problem began, but they provided a space in which it could no longer be entirely avoided. Much of the conflict was conveyed non-verbally: prolonged silences, tense expressions, facial gestures, raised voices, intimidating attitudes or dismissals of professional competence. It became difficult to share a clinical reflection without anticipating how it would be received.

The conflict then moved into corridors and informal conversations. At the coffee machine, you would hear that a particular difficulty was “because of him” or “because of her”. Under the pretext that it was not one’s place, that one should not be unkind or make the situation worse, important matters were not brought back into the collective space. Everyone knew there was a problem, but no one had a framework that felt sufficiently safe and legitimate to work through it.

A horizontal structure put to the test of everyday work

The manager advocated collective governance and a degree of horizontality. He explicitly refused to take sides: “I don’t want to take sides”, “We are a horizontal team”, “You need to move beyond your disagreements”, “I don’t want to bring hierarchy back in”. This position was understandable. It sought to avoid authoritarianism, preserve participation and ensure that professionals were not reduced to merely following instructions.

But a managerial intention is not enough to produce the desired effect. In practice, corrective conversations were not really followed up within the team, even when they took place individually. Behaviours that weakened the work therefore remained only partially addressed: unfulfilled commitments, early departures leading to missed appointments, requests to work alone when the agreed framework required two professionals, unwritten notes and information that no longer circulated.

Silence was meant to prevent an explosion. At times it protected certain people, the institution or the manager himself. It also helped maintain the appearance of collective functioning. But the conflict did not disappear because it went unnamed. It changed location. It moved into corridors, alliances, refusals to pass on information and attempts to get certain colleagues dismissed.

A management loop then took hold:

Unaddressed professional disagreement → relational tension → silence or avoidance → alliances and coalitions → loss of information and coordination → new work problems → disagreement that becomes even harder to address.

This loop sometimes brought immediate relief. Not raising a subject avoided a confrontation. Separating pairs of colleagues who could no longer work together temporarily reduced the tension. Letting everyone do things “their own way” seemed to preserve freedom. But in the medium term, these responses weakened the management of the team: commitments became less clear, responsibilities more blurred and continuity of work harder to guarantee.

The important point is not to claim that the manager was the sole cause of the situation. It is to see that his refusal to take a position had managerial consequences. When a person in charge does not make a decision, decisions do not disappear: they are made elsewhere, through alliances, habits, power relations or some people’s ability to withdraw.

The manager as participant-observer

Henry Mintzberg helps us understand why an organisation’s functioning cannot be read solely from its organisational chart. Real management consists of interruptions, negotiations, arbitration, information flows and continuous adjustments. A manager works within a network of interdependencies; their silences and decisions are interpreted by the other participants and alter the relationships between them (Mintzberg, 2005).

In this situation, the manager was not outside the team. When he refused to take a position, that refusal was itself received as a message. Some could hear permission to carry on as before. Others saw abandonment. Others still understood that they had to build alliances to be heard. The absence of arbitration was therefore not a neutral void: it gradually organised the system.

Second-order cybernetics takes this further. It is concerned not only with how a system functions, but also with the position of the person observing and intervening. The manager observes the team, but the team also observes the manager. Professionals watch his reactions, his silences, his delayed interventions and his changes of position. They then adapt their behaviour to what they believe they understand. The manager thus participates in the reality he is trying to manage (von Foerster, 2003).

This observation also applies to my own position. I did not directly experience the exclusion of a pair of colleagues. However, I was one of the professionals who could still work with the colleague whom others could no longer face. That position gave me access to part of the complexity, but it did not place me above the system. I could see certain tensions and share in certain silences. Revisiting this story therefore requires acknowledging my participation, my limitations and the moments when, like others, I may have sought to preserve the possibility of working without making the situation fully speakable.

Revisiting the situation through systemic thinking

Gregory Bateson invites us to move from linear to circular causality. A linear reading would say: “The manager does not arbitrate, so the team is in conflict” or, conversely, “The team is aggressive, so the manager withdraws”. These formulations isolate one main cause. Circular causality instead describes how behaviours respond to one another: the manager avoids arbitrating so as not to worsen tensions; the team occupies the decision-making void; disagreements become more entrenched; the manager protects himself by postponing decisions or separating people; that separation increases mistrust; mistrust makes arbitration even more difficult (Bateson, 1972).

This way of thinking does not mean that everyone is responsible in the same way. Verbal aggression, the dismissal of someone’s professional competence or a refusal to pass on information remain acts for which those who commit them must answer. The manager also bears a particular responsibility: he holds institutional authority and must help protect the framework for working together.

Systemic thinking therefore holds two levels together: responsibility for an act, and analysis of the interactions that make certain behaviours more likely, more tolerated or harder to stop. Without this distinction, two errors arise. The first is to psychologise the problem: a few people are supposedly intrinsically “toxic”, and removing them would be enough. The second is to explain everything through the system and no longer recognise individual acts.

Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch distinguish between first-order and second-order change. The first changes something within the existing rules; the second changes the rules themselves (Watzlawick et al., 1974). In our situation, moving appointments, separating colleagues or avoiding certain subjects could temporarily reduce confrontations. These were first-order changes. A second-order change would have meant clarifying how disagreements were to be handled, defining who would arbitrate and within what time frame, and establishing how behaviours that compromised the work would be addressed.

What managing the team should have made possible

The point is not to conclude that a horizontal structure is itself a mistake. An organisation may want to encourage participation, professionals’ voices and discussion of situations. But horizontality does not remove the need for management. It makes it more demanding.

Collective governance needs explicit rules: who decides when the group cannot reach agreement? How are professional differences distinguished from personal attacks? What happens when a commitment is not kept? How is information passed on? How soon is a difficulty followed up? How does the manager protect the framework without monopolising the conversation?

The management question is therefore not only: “How can we avoid conflict?” It is also: “How can we make disagreement manageable?” Professional conflict can be worked through when there is a space, a rule and someone with the legitimacy to support the process. Otherwise, it turns into a coalition, silence or a departure.

Conclusion

This experience taught me that a manager can want to preserve the collective while unwittingly contributing to its disorganisation. Refusing to take sides may seem like a way to remain fair. But when this position prevents behaviours from being named, responsibilities from being clarified and disagreements from being arbitrated, it leaves the participants to organise the management of the conflict themselves.

The manager does not necessarily need to become more authoritarian. He needs to make the framework clearer. He can support discussion without demanding an impossible consensus, distinguish the time for thinking things through from the time for deciding, address acts that harm the work and explain choices that affect the team.

Writing from within prevents me from concluding by handing out praise and blame. We were all caught, to varying degrees, in a dynamic of silences, alliances and avoidance. But recognising this participation does not mean erasing responsibilities. Systemic thinking does not seek to absolve people of responsibility; it seeks to understand the loop well enough for a different way of managing to become possible.

The question is therefore no longer only: “Who started it?” It becomes: “What way of organising management makes this situation persist, and what decision could change the loop?”

Perhaps this is where management regains its essential function: not to control every relationship, but to create the conditions in which different professionals can continue working together, unlearn their defensive alliances and address disagreements before they turn into departures.