Case Study 1 — Chapter 17: Conflict Resolution and Difficult Conversations

Jordan: The VP Problem, Up Close

Background

The VP situation is not going away. Two weeks after Jordan told Dev about the obstacle, the obstacle has become a negotiation. The VP — a man named Warren, fifteen years Jordan's senior, who joined the company through an acquisition and has never quite integrated with the culture — has formal objections to the initiative's scope. Some of the objections are substantive; some, Jordan suspects, are territorial. Warren was not consulted early enough; he feels excluded from a decision that touches his domain; the specific language in the proposal about "restructuring customer touchpoints" overlaps with a project Warren has been slowly building.

Jordan's manager, Sandra, has asked him to lead the resolution conversation with Warren directly. This is partly a vote of confidence and partly a management move: if Jordan is going to lead this initiative, he needs to demonstrate he can navigate the organizational politics that come with it.

Jordan does not feel confident about this conversation. He finds Warren difficult in a specific way: Warren speaks in the slow, deliberate cadence of someone who has learned that pace communicates authority, and he has a habit of looking slightly past the person he is addressing during conversation — not quite meeting their eyes. These qualities trigger something in Jordan's threat-detection system. The old Jordan would have prepared by building the strongest possible case and preparing to defend it. The current Jordan is trying something different.

The Preparation

Jordan applies the three-conversations framework to the Warren situation.

The "what happened" story: Jordan's account — the proposal went to Sandra, who approved it and moved to implementation before fully notifying all stakeholders. Jordan believes Warren's substantive concerns are mostly addressable; the territorial concerns are real but manageable; and the delay this has created is unnecessary and costly.

Warren's account (inferred): He was left out of a significant decision affecting his domain. The proposal language implies duplication of work he has already invested in. He was not treated as a peer in the process. His objections are being characterized as obstacles rather than legitimate concerns.

What Jordan doesn't know that Warren might: The history of Warren's relationship with the company culture, what the acquisition was like for him, what specifically makes the customer touchpoints language feel threatening.

The feelings story: Jordan is frustrated. He has put significant work into this initiative and the delay feels like a punishment for someone else's oversight. He is also anxious — this is his first significant organizational politics challenge in the new role, and a failed resolution would reflect badly on his capacity to lead.

Warren is probably feeling: disrespected, excluded, defensive about his domain, possibly somewhat anxious himself about relevance in a culture that doesn't fully include him.

The identity story: Jordan's identity concern — if this negotiation goes badly, does it confirm the impostor prediction? That he wasn't ready for a bigger role?

Warren's identity concern — probably something about being taken seriously as a peer, about the value of the work he has been doing, about his place in the company's future.

The Conversation

Jordan requests a one-on-one with Warren. In person, not over email.

He begins with a soft start-up — but one calibrated for a workplace context, without the emotional disclosure that would be appropriate with Dev:

"Warren, I wanted to talk directly because I think we have some overlapping interests in the customer experience space, and I haven't done a good enough job of making that visible in how the proposal was drafted. I'm hoping we can figure out what this looks like going forward in a way that actually makes both of our projects stronger."

Warren looks at him. This is different from what he expected. He expected Jordan to come in with a defense of the proposal.

"The language about restructuring customer touchpoints," Warren says. "That overlaps directly with the CX architecture project my team has been building."

Jordan resists the impulse to say "actually, it's different because..." He asks instead: "Can you tell me more about the CX architecture project? I don't have full visibility into what your team is building."

Warren — who has been treated mostly as an obstacle rather than as a project owner — talks. It takes ten minutes. Jordan listens. Not to prepare his counter-argument, but to actually understand.

What he learns: Warren's project is focused on the back-end customer data infrastructure; Jordan's initiative is focused on the front-end customer experience design. These are complementary, not competing. The overlap in language ("customer touchpoints") concealed genuinely different scopes. If they had talked in the first place, the conflict would not have emerged.

Jordan says: "I think we're actually building different things that need to work together. If your infrastructure is what we surface in our front-end redesign, our project needs your project to succeed. I want to make that relationship explicit."

Warren is quiet for a moment. "That would require coordination that hasn't been happening."

"I know. I'm asking for it to start now."

The Resolution Structure

They end the conversation with three agreements:

1. Jordan's initiative proposal will be amended to explicitly acknowledge and depend on Warren's CX architecture project — Warren's work becomes visible as the foundation, not competition.

2. Warren will have review rights on the customer touchpoints component of Jordan's initiative — a formal consultation, not a veto, but genuine inclusion.

3. They will meet monthly during the initiative's implementation phase to coordinate and surface dependencies before they become obstacles.

None of this is what Jordan thought the conversation would produce going in. He thought it would be a negotiation about scope and delay. It turned out to be a conversation about two projects that had never been properly introduced to each other.

The Analysis

Jordan walks out of Warren's office and calls Dev.

"The VP conversation happened," he says.

"How did it go?"

"Better than I expected. Much better. The objections weren't really about the proposal. They were about him feeling invisible."

This is, Jordan thinks, the interest-beneath-position insight in practice. Warren's position was: "This proposal overlaps with my project." Warren's interest was: "I want my work to be seen and taken seriously as part of this company's future." The conversation that addressed the interest produced a different outcome than the conversation that would have addressed only the position.

He also notices something else: the conversation changed when he stopped defending and started asking. The moment he said "can you tell me more about the CX architecture project?" — the moment he positioned himself as genuinely curious rather than strategically prepared — the conversation became collaborative rather than adversarial. Warren became a person with a project rather than an obstacle with a veto.

This is not exactly the assertiveness or collaboration described in the chapter. It is something closer to the humility that precedes effective collaboration: the genuine willingness to understand the other party's world before deciding you understand the conflict.

Analysis Questions

1. Jordan's preparation involves the three-conversations framework (what happened, feelings, identity). Which of the three conversations turned out to be most important in the actual conversation with Warren? How did attending to the identity story change Jordan's approach?

2. The conversation shifts when Jordan says "can you tell me more about the CX architecture project?" — choosing curiosity over defense. How does this relate to the Thomas-Kilmann distinction between competing and collaborating? What does the choice of curiosity over defense accomplish?

3. The underlying conflict turned out to be based on a misunderstanding — two projects with overlapping language but non-overlapping scope. How does the interest-based approach reveal this, where the positional approach would have maintained the conflict?

4. Jordan identifies Warren's interest as "wanting his work to be seen and taken seriously" rather than the stated position of "this proposal overlaps with my project." How did Jordan arrive at this understanding? What in the conversation provided the evidence?

5. The three agreements reached at the end of the conversation — amendment to the proposal, review rights, monthly coordination — do not give Warren a veto. They give him inclusion and visibility. Why is this sufficient? What does it suggest about the nature of the underlying conflict?