Conflict competence can be learned — and for me that is not only a professional question but a democratic one. A contribution for the Mediation Day.
In my work, in mediation and in civic education, I keep encountering two responses to conflict. Some people go quiet and withdraw, others escalate loudly, and many switch between the two. In private life as at work, people fall silent, sidestep the issue, call in sick, because no one knows how to begin. And just as often there is shouting — at the dinner table as in the team meeting, in the family as on social media. Both, it seems to me, point to the same gap.
Conflict is part of life. Pluralist societies are conflictual, and that in itself is not a defect, it is how democracy works. Ralf Dahrendorf captured this in a phrase that has stayed with me since my student days: “Conflicts are always a creative force, capable of loosening up ossified social structures and bringing forth new forms. In this sense, the existence of conflict is proof not of the sickness but of the vitality of an enterprise and an economic system.” What can be borne — or not — is never the existence of conflict, but the way we deal with it.
My suspicion is that we have fallen into the habit of confusing conflict with quarrel, quarrel with escalation, and escalation with the end of a relationship. Anyone who has experienced it that way once will prefer to avoid it the next time. Those who avoid don’t practice. And those who don’t practice will, the next time around, seek out silence or the loudest ally they can find.
That doesn’t mean that staying is always the right answer. There are escalations in which protection, distance, or outside help are what is needed. And there are moments when deliberately stepping away is exactly what makes the next step possible: catching your breath, sorting yourself out, coming back later. Conflict competence doesn’t mean enduring everything. It means being able to choose and knowing what the moment calls for.
A KPMG study on conflict culture in companies once put a price on leaving conflicts unaddressed: around 30 billion euros in damage per year to the German economy. For private life there are no such figures. But anyone who has ever let a friendship quietly fade because the clarifying conversation seemed too laborious, or who knows a family in which a certain topic hasn’t been spoken about for years, can guess that the balance sheet there is hardly smaller. Conflicts don’t disappear when we pass over them. They keep running, underground, and in the end, often at a higher price.
I don’t have a ready-made recipe but a hunch: what we need as a society is not less conflict, but more practice in conflict. The ability to disagree is a cultural skill like reading or media literacy: listening, standing up for a position, being able to bear a different one. It doesn’t fall from the sky. And it is rarely taught in passing.
What moves me again and again in mediation work is how often a seemingly deadlocked dispute becomes workable once structure, listening, and a procedure enter the room. That is my most important professional experience and at the same time the most frequently underestimated message of my field: conflict competence can be learned.
And this, for me, is the real point. Conflict competence is not a specialist skill reserved for a few professions. It is a task for society as a whole and at the same time something no one can do for me. Schools, associations, adult education centers, and companies can create spaces. But it is learned wherever each and every one of us practices it: at the next parents’ evening, in the team meeting, in the argument with a neighbor, in the conversation at the kitchen table. That is hard work. But it is also a form of self-efficacy that doesn’t depend on institutions or majorities. It begins with the next uncomfortable conversation that I don’t delegate.
June 18 is the Mediation Day in Germany. For me it is less about promoting a profession than a reminder that practicing is possible. In small things as in large ones.
Julia Stadler
CEO & Co-founder @ tuplita.ai
