Tuesday morning. A shareholders' meeting. The minutes of the last four sessions read plainly: investment strategy, digitalisation, pace. Nothing that couldn't be resolved through orderly discussion. On this particular morning, though, one of the two brothers slides his coffee mug away from himself before the other begins to speak. No one comments. The conversation takes refuge in technical details, everyone senses where it's heading, and when the scheduled hour is up, everyone looks relieved. In the hallway afterwards, no one runs into anyone else by accident.
Nothing has happened. Formally.
And that is precisely the problem. Not the conflict. The way it disappears from view.
Four Years of Standstill
The case is a classic. Two brothers, who inherited jointly. The elder has run the company operationally through hard years, took a pay cut when the market collapsed, knows every customer personally. The younger was never operationally involved, built an external career, and sits at the shareholders' table in equal share. On the agenda, for four years running: investment strategy. The minutes read calmly. But the cc line on the lawyer's emails keeps growing. The tax advisor gets turned into an ally rather than consulted as a counsellor. The meetings end earlier than scheduled - not because everything has been said, but because nothing more can be.
Four years of no decision about the company's future. No commitment to growth. No agreement on a possible sale. No clear yes, no clear no. The business keeps running, the numbers are still fine, but strategic paralysis is slowly eating its way into the organisation.
Whoever turns up with a solution here is solving the wrong problem. To see why, you have to lay four perspectives side by side - and none of them alone will do.
Lens 1: The Structure That Produces the Conflict
Friedrich Glasl and Rudi Ballreich would first look at the degree of escalation. Not to attach labels, but because any intervention has to match the stage the conflict has actually reached. What still helps at an early stage of hardening can make things worse in a later escalation. An open conversation assumes that both sides can still hear each other - that it isn't yet about losing face. Without that distinction, you intervene blind.
With these two brothers, a facilitated process is still possible. The tone in the formal meetings remains factual. There are moments when one can at least follow the other's argument, even without agreeing with it. The friend-or-foe schema hasn't yet hijacked perception. Mediation could work - provided it enters at the right level and not two stages too early.
But even perfectly dosed mediation only resolves the current conflict. Six months later, the company faces the next strategic question. Still two co-equal shareholders. Still no tie-breaker. Still no rule for disputes. The architecture that produced the conflict stands untouched.
That is the second move Glasl and Ballreich make. They never think about conflict in isolation from the organisation. They ask not only how to work on the conflict, but which structure is producing it again and again - independent of the topic, independent of the people involved.
For the brothers, that structural tension is obvious: 50/50 governance without a tie-breaker. This is no stroke of bad luck. It is a construction that systematically produces decision blockades. Every strategic question generates the same dynamic because the same architecture sits behind it.
Anyone who works on the current conflict and leaves the structure untouched is repairing a symptom.
But the structure only explains why the conflict keeps returning. It doesn't explain why it cuts so deep.
Lens 2: The Wounded Dignity Beneath the Subject Matter
Underneath the investment strategy, something else is running. Something that appears in no minutes and was never spoken aloud in any shareholders' meeting.
The elder brother gave up part of his salary during hard years. He held customers personally when the market was collapsing. And now someone sits at the table who was never there - and treats the company like a financial instrument. The question he never asks, but which colours everything: "What does this say about the value of my work? About my place in this story?"
The younger brother is a shareholder in equal share. Formally. But in every meeting he feels it: "You don't really belong. Not to the family of the business. Not to the operational reality." The question he never asks: "What does this say about how my brother sees me?"
Arist von Schlippe calls this the expectations of expectations. Not what I expect from the other - but what I expect about how the other sees me. This second layer is the harder one. And it almost always runs beneath the surface, unspoken, captured in no agenda.
The indignation disguises itself. It speaks the language of the matter at hand. The elder brother doesn't say: "My brother doesn't respect my life's work." He says: "The proposed digitalisation strategy is underdeveloped." The younger one doesn't say: "My brother treats me like an outsider." He says: "The investment proposals ignore the market." Both are right in what they say. And neither is talking about what is actually at stake.
Wounded dignity disguised as a subject-matter conflict - that is von Schlippe's "carousel of indignation" in its purest form: a self-reinforcing dynamic of disappointed dignity, assumed motives, and growing outrage. As long as this story cannot be brought into view and worked on, any agreement about investment volume or digitalisation pace remains built on sand. The subject gets resolved. The wound stays. And at the next dispute, it breaks open again.
Clarifying the structure is necessary. Acknowledging the wounded dignity is necessary too. But even both together don't yet explain why this conflict - for all its cost - has been stable for four years.
Lens 3: The Function No One Wants to See
Four years without a decision. No clear yes, no clear no. The conflict hurts, costs energy, binds attention. Why isn't it resolved?
Perhaps because it accomplishes something.
That is the question Klaus Eidenschink asks first in a constellation like this - and it is almost never asked in conflict work. Not "how do we resolve this", but: "what function does it serve? For whom? In the service of which order?"
The decision that is being avoided here is not "growth or sale". It is: "does this constellation even still hold?" Two brothers, equal shares - one carried the company through the crisis, the other never entered it. Either one buys the other out. Or both sell. Or the 50/50 structure stays, and it will produce the same blockade at every strategic question.
Each of these decisions makes visible something the shareholders' agreement has so far concealed: that the two brothers were never truly equal. A buyout translates the inequality into a price. A sale ends the shared story. Both cost more than the quarrel costs. The fight over investment volume, by contrast, is bearable. It allows them to remain brothers.
As long as they are fighting, they do not have to decide that this fiction no longer holds. In this sense, the conflict is not the opposite of order. It is a stabiliser - for a state no one actively wants, but which is less threatening than the alternative.
This has a striking consequence for anyone who intervenes in such situations. Whoever reflexively smooths things over takes away the system's stabiliser without the underlying decision having been made. The result is not peace. It is disorientation.
Sometimes, therefore, the appropriate intervention is not de-escalation. It is bringing the conflict so far into the open that the avoided decision can no longer be avoided. Eidenschink speaks of the ability to work in both directions: to be able to calm, but also to be able to stoke. Not out of aggression. Out of clarity. Because a cleanly stoked conflict is sometimes the kindest thing an organisation can offer its members: the imposition of an overdue decision instead of months of ambivalence.
This assumes that one knows very precisely what one is dealing with.
Lens 4: The Anatomy of the No
Anyone who wants to hold all of this in view at once - degree of escalation, structural trap, wounded dignity, hidden function - needs one final discipline. Fritz B. Simon would call it the discipline of keeping three things apart that, in conflicts, fuse into a single stew.
What is actually observable here? What is a hypothesis about causes? And what is a moral judgement?
Description. Explanation. Evaluation.
The elder brother says: "He is blocking the future of the company." That sounds like a description. It is an evaluation disguised as a fact. The younger brother says: "He clings to the past." That too sounds like analysis. It is an accusation in the language of objectivity. Without being able to separate these three layers, one cannot see how much of what one takes for fact is already interpretation.
And one cannot ask the decisive diagnostic question: "Where does the truly firm No sit - and where is there still movement?"
Not every No is equal. A hard, blocking No calls for a different intervention than a soft, still negotiable one. Without that distinction, you find yourself fighting convictions that aren't convictions at all. Or missing the one boundary that is genuinely non-negotiable.
Simon's view is the most sober of the four. He does not explain what the participants feel. He describes what is happening communicatively. That is less warm than Arist von Schlippe, less artful than Klaus Eidenschink, less action-oriented than Glasl and Ballreich. But sometimes it is the clearest view available in a stuck situation.
Diagnostic Depth
Four lenses. One case.
None of them suffices alone. Glasl and Ballreich provide the map: where are we, which intervention fits, which structure reproduces this conflict again and again? Von Schlippe opens the room beneath: the unspoken narratives, the wounded dignity, the carousel of indignation that has been running long before anyone said a word. Eidenschink asks the uncomfortable question about function - and gives the courage not to prematurely resolve what may first need to become fully visible. And Simon insists on precision: what is observation, what is hypothesis, where is the firm No?
This conflict at the shareholders' table is not a misunderstanding. It is not a communication problem. It is the result of a governance structure that produces blockades, an unspoken history of wounded dignity, a function the system has been stabilising for four years, and a conflation of observation and judgement that undermines every attempted resolution from within.
Four layers. Simultaneously active. None of them can be worked on if they are not first seen.
It is not a question of methodological variety. That sounds like a buffet. It is a question of diagnostic depth - the capacity to look at structure, emotion, function and language at the same time, and to recognise where the intervention has to start.
The Real Mistake
The greatest mistake in conflict work is not choosing the wrong tool.
It is arriving with a tool and not asking in the first place which one is needed.
Back to Tuesday morning. The coffee mug slides aside. The hour ends. The minutes read calmly.
Nothing has happened. Formally.
Whoever treats this meeting as a communication problem will not change it. Whoever reads it as what it is - the surface of a structure, a wound, a function, and a tangle of levels - at least has a chance to start in the right place.
References
Ballreich, Rudi / Glasl, Friedrich (2025): Praxishandbuch Konfliktmanagement und Mediation in Organisationen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Eidenschink, Klaus (2024): Die Kunst des Konflikts. Konflikte schüren und beruhigen lernen. 3rd ed. Heidelberg: Carl- Auer.
Glasl, Friedrich (2024): Konfliktmanagement. Ein Handbuch für Führung, Beratung und Mediation. 13th, revised edition. Bern: Haupt / Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben. English edition: *Confronting Conflict. A First- Aid Kit for Handling Conflict* (Hawthorn Press).
Schlippe, Arist von (2022): Das Karussell der Empörung. Konflikteskalation verstehen und begrenzen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Simon, Fritz B. (2022): Einführung in die Systemtheorie des Konflikts. 5th ed. Heidelberg: Carl- Auer.
Read also Decisions in organisations
The conflict stabilises a fiction - the fiction of symmetrical brotherhood.
