Instant Genius - Why interpersonal conflict is a natural, healthy part of life

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

No matter how gently or politely we live our lives, at one point or another, it’s inevitable that we’ll find ourselves in a situation in which we disagree with another person and find ourselves having to defend our opinion or perspective. For many of us, these situations are hugely uncomfortable, perceived as destructive, and are to be avoided at almost all costs. Why is this, could interpersonal conflicts actually be useful and even healthy in the maintaining of relationships, and what can we do to better negotiate the heated situations we sometimes find ourselves in? In this episode, we’re joined by dialogue facilitator and author Priya Parker to talk about her latest book, The Art of Fighting. She talks us through some of the common situations that are likely to trigger conflict and disagreement, explains the profound effects conflict can have on group dynamics, and tells us about the many benefits we can all gain from developing ‘healthy heat’. Take your curiosity further with a subscription to BBC Science Focus magazine. Every issue is packed with fascinating insights into the science behind everyday life, the latest breakthroughs and expert analysis, delivered straight to your door. Receive an extra £5 when you subscribe using the code SF5OFF, (minimum spend £20, see full terms and conditions on our website). https://www.ourmediashop.com/bbc-science-focus-magazine-pod30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus. No matter how gently or politely we live our lives, at one point or another, it's inevitable that we'll find ourselves in a situation in which we disagree with another person and find ourselves having to be. to defend our opinion or perspective.

For many of us, these situations are hugely uncomfortable, perceived as destructive and are to be avoided at almost all costs. Why is this? Could interpersonal conflicts actually be useful and even healthy in the maintaining of relationships? And what can we do to better negotiate the heated situations we sometimes find ourselves in? In this episode, we're joined by Dialogue Facilator and author, Priya Parker to talk about her latest book, The Art of Fighting. She talks us through some of the common situations that are likely to trigger conflict and disagreement, explains the profound

effects conflict can have on group dynamics, and tells us about the many benefits we can all gain from developing healthy heat. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So we're here today to talk about your new book, The Art of Fighting. So as the title suggests, this is all about conflict. So this word has a lot of different meanings. I mean, you know, some are more subtle than others. You know, we might think of, you know, full-on armed wars, made a bit of fisticuffs, a verbal argument, or even things like giving someone the silent treatment. So what exactly do you mean by conflict and how did you begin to approach this as a subject?

I should start by saying that I am a conflict diverse, conflict resolution facilitator. So I, my profession is, I'm a dialogue facilitator. I help people and groups have conversations that they've been avoiding that have been preventing them from progress. And we are terrible at fighting. When heat rises, we tend to either take one of two stances. We avoid or we escalate and burn the house down. And yet, so much of what connection, friendship, relationship, teams need is good heat or what I call healthy heat. and so much of what we are seeing in our society, in our families, in our friendship groups,

in terms of it's fragmenting, it's fracturing, our sort of rise in loneliness, counterintuitively is in part because we haven't taught how to fight well. Yeah, so let's look at those categories then. So you mentioned their avoidance, which I think probably, I'm not sure, most people would at least think they fall into this category anyway. But we're sort of brought up to avoid conflict at all costs. You know, your parents will say, oh, no good will come of it too wrong so don't make a right, you know, be the pet of person or suck it up.

But having said that, you know, we do follow that advice either by following the advice or due to instinct. So where does that come from? Because, you know, when you look at it, conflicts everywhere. Whether or not you think you fight or you're the kind of person who fight, I promise you conflict is in your life. And so much of what we're taught in popular culture is that conflict is dysfunctional, that it is, that quote unquote, good people don't fight, that it is sort of embarrassing or, you know, don't air dirty laundry, all of these saying, as you're pointing out, And yet, as a conflict resolution facilitator for 25 years, I can tell you, long-term, healthy communities need love and they also need conflict. And when we assume that all conflict is bad, we're actually throwing out relevance. We're throwing out meaning. We're throwing out so much of actually what's at the center of our relationships. And I learned this the hard way. My parents, I'm half Indian. half-white American, and my parents divorced when I was nine years old, and when they separated,

when they announced their separation, everyone was shocked because they never fought. And so I learned from a young age that there's great loss in avoidance. And I sort of kicking and screaming, learned how to hold healthy heat, not because I like it and not because I'm fearless, but because I realize that just because people aren't saying anything doesn't mean that everything's all right. Yeah, so let's flip onto the other sort of type of person that we spoke about. Before we talk about the healthy heat, which is the big, the main meat of the book. And that's those people that sort of seem to relish in conflict and almost seek it out, you know, view it as a competition to be one of some kind.

What can we say about those people? Just because you are conflict seeking doesn't mean you're good at it. So just because, so you may be listening to this and think, oh, yeah, when I, I'm like Priya, when my, when conflict arises, I just want to stick my head in the sand. But there are people who, when conflict arises, they're kind of ready for a fight. Often those two types are married to each other. So you have one person, you know, chasing the other person proverbially around the kitchen table. And the other one's saying, I don't want to fight with you. And so just because your conflict seeking doesn't mean you're good at it.

We tend to oscillate between either avoidance or escalation. And in part, because we haven't been taught first that there is conflicts that actually is healthy. In fact, groups can't form without a fight in group theory. There are the phases, there was a paper in the 1960s by a sociologist called Bruce Tuckman, and he looked at how groups form over time, all types of groups, and a group cannot last over time without a fight. So the first stage is you form, and this could be a trivia night, it could be a book club, it could be a worship or prayer circle, it could be a knitting group, a group forms. and if they last long enough to be relevant,

a period of conflict ensues. And they go through what Bruce Tuckman calls the storm. Because basically, group life is coordination. How are we going to do this? What night are we going to meet? Who's house are we going to have this at? Are we really going to let them chat all the time? They're taking over the entire meeting.

Who's going to say something? Right? At some level, groups human beings have to coordinate. And so there's a period called the storm. and once they get through that storm and answer the questions, well, who are we and how do we do things around here? Then you get into this more stable state where you norm, meaning you together agree upon how you're going to do things, and then you perform. And we're not taught that conflict not only isn't dysfunctional, but it's actually done well, highly functional, meaning it has a function, it has a purpose. But so often we think that conflict is a disaster.

But conflict is actually relevance. It's information. We just need to learn how to hold it well. So you mentioned there the formation of groups. So how about some common ways in which conflicts arise or start? Because everyone's going to have been in the situation where, I don't know, it's with the headmaster or something, you'll be in trouble. And someone will say, well, they started it.

Exactly, exactly. Everyone but me. So in the art of fighting, part of what I am trying to do is I am, I did this with my first book, The Art of Gathering as well, which is I'm trying to create a new shelf on the bookshelf that I call group help. So we have an entire industry of self-help, right, how to help the individual. And those things are very helpful and useful. How do we count our steps in a day? How should we have gluten or not, our sugar intake. But those self-help apps and tools don't answer the question of our shared life. Questions like, how do you run a meeting that isn't terrible? If conflict does arise in your group, how do you not cancel each other? How do you actually hold it in a way

that you come through stronger? And I call that group help. So the art of fighting is full of tools to grow your group intelligence. And there's four common indicators. Basically, what I'm trying to help people do is sort of zoom out, and if you find yourself in a conflict, to become curious, to pay attention to the tension. And in the second part, in the second chapter of the book, I look at, I basically start helping you categorize different types of fights to become curious. What kind of fight is this? As you said in the beginning, a fight is a word that covers all sorts of, all sorts of things. And there's four types of, there's four moments in group life that are disproportionately likely to trigger conflict.

The first is a rapid influx of new members, right? All of a sudden, there's lots of new people in this neighborhood, or all of a sudden your tech company grows by 30% overnight. Or all of a sudden, and it can be members of difference, right? And an all-boys school opens it up to all genders for the first time. But it need not be. It can just simply be an influx of members. So a number of new members, Tinder for conflict.

Number two, the opposite, the group is shrinking. Right? Your church, every Sunday, there's less and less and less members. One day you look around and you realize the pews are mostly empty. Often triggers for conflict. Who are we? What are we doing here? Does something need to change?

The third, counterintuitively, massive success. Your group achieves what it's set out to achieve? Now what? And number four, and this is super interesting, perceived internal hypocrisy. You said that you're a magazine that exists to promote bodies of all types. And all of a sudden it's revealed that, for example, they pay smaller body models more than larger body models, right? Tinder for existential conflict.

And so part of the art of fighting is starting to give you a set of tools and lens to better understand why this conflict is happening and expand your options about what to do about it and how to address it. So if we're talking about groups, we inevitably have to think about the composition of the group that we're talking about. And you talk about some things in the book about this. And one thing that you mentioned, which is really interesting, is seniority or authority in groups.

And, you know, sometimes that's just there because it's your manager. And in other ways, it emerges more organically. But what impact does this have on the idea of conflict? Power exists in every relationship. And we often think, like, oh, no, power is a bad thing. But I try as a conflict resolution facilitator to think about power simply as decision-making, right? Something as simple. Actually, interestingly, another trigger of a lot of group conflict is when somebody tries to make a schedule change.

You've always met on Thursdays, and all of a sudden someone's trying to get in there and move it to Mondays. People flip out. And so there's often these sort of, quote unquote, tiny changes that actually will reveal a larger conflict in part because it affects composition. And so power, if you think about just as decision making, every group has to contend with who holds power? How do we share it? If it's a family as simple as should we go out to dinner tonight? How do we decide which restaurant should go to? Oh, he always decides.

Can't we? Oh, we always go to Mexican? Can't we go to Chinese? And so the art of fighting is a what I call a power literate book that all groups have power. And particularly if you have some amount of authority or agency and you don't realize you have power, that's going to be a big problem for the group. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system.

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Like when I was reading this, I realized that I will sort of hold things in perhaps a little bit too long. And then, you know, like a lot of people, not necessarily blow up, but do you know what I mean? Say something or act in a way that I really wish I hadn't done. And I thought, well, then, must have been a better way of doing that. So how do we navigate that situation? You are not alone. Many of us have that same tendency, myself included. And one of the things I did to research the art of fighting is the question at the center of this book, it's not about

screaming at strangers on the internet. The question at the center of this book is, how do we fight with those we want to belong to? And I interviewed and spent time with three types of people. people and groups experiencing conflict and interviewing them where they allow me in. The second is people who are experts in conflict and hold conflict, facilitators, trainers, lawyers. And the third is people who study conflict. And in the first category, I looked at groups, companies, organizations that are really, really good at holding internal, what I call healthy heat. And one place I've looked at is restaurants. And restaurants, if you've ever worked in the service industry, you will know conflict is baked into every night of service, right, between the staff and the guests, between

within the staff, between the front of the house and the back of the house. Say you have a 20-minute policy where if the guest doesn't show up within 20 minutes, you give up the table, the guest shows up 23 minutes late, what do you do? Right? Tiny micro-conflicts all night long. And one of the things I did was I looked at a restaurant, there was a couple of restaurants, people told me baked in conflict release valves. And one such restaurateur, his name is Gabriel Stolman. He runs a restaurant called Sailor in Brooklyn. And he told me, I always tell my staff, keep molehills, molehills. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, you've heard the saying, don't make a mountain out of a molehill, right? Say, say, Jason, you actually do say something early on

to a friend or colleague, you may get the response, oh, come on, man, don't make a mountain out of a molehill, right? It's almost a way of shutting down the molehill. But part of what Gabriel says is he says, but keep molehills, molehills. And what he means by that is when you normalize within a team quickly, you know, saying, hey, that didn't feel great. Or next time, please don't use that tone with me. Or, right, you catch it in the moment.

It doesn't then build and build and build. And so I actually do this with my team. We call it molehill clearing. And we normalize it. And we have a language for it. And this happens to me recently. Something happened between a colleague and I, and it rubbed me the wrong way. By the way, I'm often on the receiving end of this as well.

But because we have language for it, I can say, hey, would you be up for a quick molehill clearing? And it doesn't mean that my heart doesn't stop pounding out of my chest or my hands don't get sweaty. It's still nerve-wracking. I still feel fear around it. But we are containing it and we have a practice where we're getting it out quickly and our stories about each other don't grow. So it's that sort of thing. So we're talking about groups, but sort of in my experience, that sort of thing has been

more effective if it's done sort of off to one side. Is that right? Deeply. Another restaurant I looked at was called Canlis and it's in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and it's run by two brothers. It's the third generation family-owned business. And they have two rooms, two secret rooms in their restaurant. One is called the cachet.

And the other one is called the hooch. And they encourage their staff if they need to do a clearing, a clearing with another staff member, which they also normalize. They say, you know, you should be doing this many times over the course of year. If not, you're going to be blocked up. They send them to these two, rooms to do one-on-one and they to do one-on-one clearings and I'm just trying to find it in the book

and read you they have a they've baked how they think about conflict resolution into their employee manual and one of the things they say is do it with kindness and not in front of other people pull people aside talk privately this is not within a group this is one-on-one the restaurant actually has an entire section in its handbook about navigating conflict and if it's okay I'll just read it to you because I think it's so elegant. It reads, quote, there will be conflict, and here are two good rules. One, assume the best in others and look for their true north. And two, hold short account. And then they explain how to do this. And then they practice it with their employees. They say, to thrive in this business, we've got to figure out how not to hold things in.

We've got to figure out how not to let things fester. Unless you want a small issue to grow into a big one, think twice about leaving work without having the guts to sort things through. Even still, things may get really sideways with someone. And this is to your point. When they do, we're going to talk about it. If at all possible, this won't happen in public. If you want to have a conversation that you know will be hard for someone else, the kind thing to do is to find an un-public place.

We've built a few of these, but my favorite is in a private room called the cachet. And then it goes on. But there are places that when we don't think of conflict as only dysfunction, And again, there is some conflict that is dysfunctional. There is conflict that can become abusive or manipulative. We are not talking about that. We are just an invitation to say some conflict is actually deep relevance. It's also how we negotiate with one another.

And so the places that expect some amount of conflict find structures and rituals and ways to actually build skills in their people to kind of to hold it, to clear it. Yeah. So sort of, am I right in saying? in some ways, though this is easier said than done, we can maybe treat certain conflicts as an opportunity for learning. Absolutely. When you look at it, I'm a conflict resolution facilitator.

And when I am brought in to work with a group or a family business or an organization, I look at conflict as relevance. Conflict is relevance. People don't fight about the things they don't care about. and people don't fight with people they don't care about. And again, I'm not talking about yelling and yelling at strangers on the internet. I'm really talking about who we want to belong to, who we are in community with. And when we actually, and by the way, sometimes we have an issue with someone else,

but we are also causing issues. So one of the books that I loved reading and I would highly recommend is called On Repentance and Repair by Donner Wittenberg. And one of the things she says is we all cause harm. We all experience harm and we all witness harm. And when we pretend that's not the case, we are leaving ourselves high and dry to not have the skills to either repair

or when we have done something we regret to know the building blocks to acknowledge it. Yeah, so we were talking about the idea there that was so elegantly put from the restaurant example. but you're talking about taking something, taking a conflict aside outside of the group. But of course that doesn't always happen. And I think a lot of us have been in the situation where we are in a group and two people are engaged in the conflict. And usually everyone goes absolutely quiet. It's really uncomfortable. Nobody knows what to do. What can we do if we're

observing this sort of thing? Is there anything we can do to help or diffuse that situation? Or, you know, or give any guidance to the people who are in that conflict? I mean, it depends on the context, but there are actually programs in more extreme situations that have a lot of wisdom and methodology in them. I know that in neighborhoods where there have been problems with violence and with gangs, there are actually programs called violence interruptors, and they train neighbors on what to do if they,

see fight brewing, in part to not have it escalate. And so there are programs. And often, as a facilitator, I look to more extreme contexts because there is wisdom and tools to take from there and bring it back into our everyday life. And so programs, I know one is called the violence interruptors and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, but there are sometimes just stepping in and actually this is asking a question. It distracts. And it doesn't have to be a question about the fight. Do you know, do you know, do you know, which way is North? It just sort of disrupts. It interrupts. Sometimes using humor. And again, it needs to be, it needs to be done well. Sometimes simply, physically, as facilitators were taught to do this, in groups where I'm facilitating,

I use my body in a lot of different ways, right? If someone's talking too much in a circle and I'm sitting down, before necessarily saying, okay, that's enough, I'll often stand up. And that just simply shifting the room a little bit, they'll look and they sometimes, you know, lean back. And so there are ways to shift the context. So it basically interrupt, often distract, making a joke, just moving your body over, and, you know, depending on your size and your safety levels. But if you do feel safe to just, you know, coming over and sometimes even there's somatically calming people coming over and putting your hand around them, there's a lot of ways and there's so many tools. Again, I think of a different example in the U.S. here in January when we had, many different states

were experiencing ice raids. In Minneapolis, there were all sorts of protests that came up both with the ice raids and then after the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Preti. And if you look at how the organizers protested, there were so many different ways that were practicing de-escalation. One of them, there was a minister who posted this online, there was two, as she described them, little old ladies who would come into the protests, and they had carried in a flask of oaky tea and were carrying little ceramic cups and they were walking through the protesters and just literally offering people tea. And a minister, a female minister observed them and saw a moment of heightened tension between

a protester and an officer. And this little old lady, again, I'm saying it in quotes, this is how she wrote it, just came in and looked at them, would anyone like a cup of tea? And they were so surprised and they twisted off their flask, like one of those camping thermases and smelled, and she's, smell, it's oaky. And it just calmed the situation. And so, again, I'm talking about group intelligence. There's so, when we begin to, it's like anything as facilitators think of themselves. I think of facilitators as high performing athletes. And we're taught and trained how to hold heat, just like firefighters in a forest. And part of what I think,

think is that these should not be specialized skills. Yes, for extreme examples, bring in the professionals. But conflict is part of our daily life. And so there are actually, these exercises shouldn't be kept, you know, in a specific field. This should be part of everyday human living and training and access to how do you hold heat with the people you love and learn to stay in the room and also help hold and diffuse our daily practices of living together. Yeah, so let's move on to something that I think, perhaps before I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I read the book. I didn't really think about very much. It's what happens after a conflict. You know, so you think, well, you know, there might be different scenarios. Someone might go home

from work, be really pleased themselves. Like, you know, well, honey, I really let Peter have it at work today. That was great. Oh, you know, somebody else just might be unable to sleep and be just like, oh no, you know, what happened there? That was horrible. You know, in one by other, something that they did or something that happened to them. So how can we approach that, you know, for our own well-being and for the well-being of others? I designed the book based on the life cycle that groups go through, communities go through when there's a fight and when there's an ex-and-and-particular, and I'm really interested, not in all types of fights.

I'm not interested in bar brawls, right, or fist-acuffs. I'm really interested in what I call existential conflict, which means conflict in which a group or a community or even within a group of friends, forces the members to ask, well, who are we? And what do we allow here? And what are we about? And so the first third of the book is called tear. The second third is called grapple. And the third is called cleave, which means to both cut and to bind. And the fight itself, the facing, is only one chapter. There's five chapters before and five chapters after. And part of it is because what happens after is still live. And so there's a chapter after the facing that is called the aftermath, meaning making, hangovers,

and a vacuum. And part of what happens is when you have a facing and even when it goes well, there's often a nebulous period after where people are asking, did that go all right? Do I regret that? Did I say what I wanted to say? Should we have done that at all? Oh, man, maybe it's better to pretend nothing's wrong. Now what do we do? And so part of the aftermath is first knowing that's normal. And then as I say in the book, water the garden. So immediately after a grapple, immediately after, well, a tear in a grapple, we go into this sort of nebulous period where we're not, in part, because if the fight has revealed something, something might need to change. Right? In an organization, things have been revealed that aren't good, right? And so it's not just

you hurt me or I hurt you. It's like, oh, we need to change our hiring policies or, oh, we need to stop an entire line of service or, oh, as I talk about in the book, we now allow gay marriage. That's more than just a decision. That actually affects the entire church. How do we become the type of church that allows gay marriage? And so part of becoming an artful fighter is in the immediate aftermath to do things that remind people that grow the love that aren't tending to the wound. I sometimes use sort of a sports metaphor or a physical therapy metaphor. When you have a tear in a muscle, you don't go for the tear. You work the muscles around the tear to strengthen the area around the tear so that the tear can heal.

And so in a church, that means continuing to do Sunday worship, continuing to have the bake sale, continuing to clean out the closet. And so making sure you're doing it in a group of friends, there's a group of friends in the book that go through a really a reckoning. And afterwards they don't, you know, like many of us, we sort of have a bad taste in your mouth. You don't really feel like seeing them. And they all happened to be invited to the same party.

But none of them were hosting it. None of them had to be on each other's turfs. They ran into each other. And the song Cotton Eye Joe came on. And it was sort of like their song and they all ran to the dance floor and started, you know, almost despite themselves, slapping their knee and laughing as they had for 20 years since in college. And they kind of looked up and laughing and they like remembered each other. Right.

So it's like also make sure you're watering the garden. And conflict is so much easier when you also have other points of connection, when there's warmth. When you remember why you want to be with these people doing this thing. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Priya Parker. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Art of Fighting. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus.

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