Borrowing from Music: Generating from Consonance and Dissonance
What comes to mind when you hear the word conflict? Did other words like misunderstanding, and frustration come to mind? Did you physically tense up? Or maybe have a memory of something unpleasant? You aren’t alone, even Merriam Webster heads to warfare as a synonym.
Teams often are told that they need to learn “conflict management” to be successful. Essentially, we’ve been telling teams for a long time that they need to avoid going to battle with each other. But is that the right lesson? Even when I work with teams navigating toxicity, I don’t call it conflict management.
Let’s talk Mozart
When coaching teams, I often use music as metaphor. The music is created by individuals, each bringing their own skills and perspectives together to create something unique.
Take a moment to listen to the beginning of Mozart’s String Quartet №19 — full of musical dissonance, which is powerful and evocative. Consonance and dissonance bring different qualities and emotions and experience to music, and without this variety our experience of music would be less rich.
Imagine that you have a team full of innovative problem solvers who are holding back because they are worried about conflict more than contributing their novel ideas. I imagine it’s like the team thinking they all need to be violins playing the same chord. And that’s not a song any of us want to listen to for long.
Skills to Generate from Consonance AND Dissonance
Rather than try to “manage conflict,” what if you imagined that your team could move fluidly through times of aligned, consonant thinking and challenging, dissonant thinking? The benefits of this are multifold: not only could you harness the creative and generative power of both states of being, but also your team would spend less time being frustrated with seeing things differently.
Building some team skills to navigate through consonance and dissonance has a few key ingredients:
- Ensure you’ve got the foundations of a healthy, communicative team. I usually work with the Team Diagnostic to help have a healthy dialogue on where the team sees itself here.
- Agree on language and agreements for inclusive dialogue. Practices such as Ouch/Oops can go a long way to help the team shift gears.
- Start by noticing when the team is in alignment/consonance and when it moves towards differences/dissonance — and notice what you notice. When your team pauses to generate awareness that they act differently when they sense dissonance, then it can make conscious choices about how to handle it differently. But first you have to notice.
From here, the team can appreciate the power of dissonance and become more skillful at those conversations.
Rhapsody
If you still need to be convinced that the interweaving of consonance and dissonance can lead to extraordinary music, take a listen to Bohemian Rhapsody. Whether or not you enjoy the song, critics argue it launched progressive rock into the mainstream (and some credit it with shifting the use of music video).
Your team might not be about to compose one of the UK’s best selling hits of all time, but imagine what it could do with the power of consonance and dissonance.
