What patterns and processes are developing in your organization (aka system) that could be blocking, frustrating, and leading to misunderstanding and unproductive conflict?

How do you even go about uncovering those issues without divulging into arguments or jumping immediately to solve only the surface problem?

Barry Oshry, a noted organizational anthropologist, has many answers in his book, Seeing Systems.  He recommends we become anthropologists and analyze our organizations from a detached, scientific, objective perspective.

This is difficult when you are in the weeds of day to day work.

You need a mechanism for people to 1) tell the truth about issues without being blamed or arguing about the cause and 2) listen to other people without interruption.

A really great activity is to have a sacred cow BBQ.  No, you are not cooking beef together.  You host a company BBQ where people can eat lunch or dinner together to make it a space outside of regular business meetings.  Then you ask people to write a sacred cow on a piece of paper.  A sacred cow is something in your organization that never gets discussed and people have felt uncomfortable asking about.  Usually they are policies, rules, formal, or informal, that someone doesn’t understand or something that is inhibiting their productivity.  After everyone has written a sacred cow on a sticky note, stick it up on the wall and have a discussion about each one.  As an organization leader, you can then see certain places where your system is stuck and ask either at the BBQ or later for advice on how to remove that barrier or take the opportunity to explain the sacred cow to your staff so they will at least understand the history and context behind it.