Why Organisations Feel Like They’re in Conflict
In celebration of International Peace Day 2025 on the 21st September, this week we’re publishing a series of three blogs on Organisational Peace. You might wonder what a business consultancy has to offer on peace work!
At Building20 we value inclusion, kindness, compassion and justice. Peace isn’t some well-meaning ambition for warzones far away but a way for each and every one of us to act and act-out in our daily lives, wherever we are and whatever we are doing. Organisations and institutions can wield their own violence and harms, as we will see. Peace-work is for all of us.
That being said, this week we are particularly mindful of those places where conflict results in devastating, daily fatal violence. Please consider joining us in making a donation this week to WarChild and help them protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children living through conflict.
Find out more about the UN International Day of Peace here.
“These ruptures in our workplaces haven’t just jumped out of nowhere. Our organisational histories have exclusion and exploitation baked-in.”
Why Do So Many Organisations Feel Like They’re at War?
There’s a quote from W. Edwards Deming we love at Building20: ‘There’s no such thing as a broken system because every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.’ It’s a disarming way to look at the gap between what we think we value and what our organisations and institutions actually produce day to day. If the outcomes are conflict, mistrust and churn, then somewhere (by design or by neglect) the system is aligned to create exactly that.
What Your Outcomes Are Saying
Picture an alien landing on Earth and trying to work out what organisations are for purely from the news headlines. They’d see strikes, bullying scandals, high‑profile tribunal cases, and investigations into institutional racism and misogyny. The reasonable conclusion? Organisations exist to generate conflict and harm with their workforce and the public. Even if your workplace isn’t making the news, it doesn’t mean there’s peace.
The data points in the same direction. The latest NHS staff survey reports that less than half of colleagues feel their organisation values their work. Ipsos Karian & Box find similar patterns: less than half say colleagues deliver when they promise, and only about 40% believe poor performance is dealt with effectively. Those numbers speak to two essentials of healthy workplaces: trust and mattering. If I can’t rely on you and you don’t see me, we don’t have a relationship—we have transactions.
History Isn’t Past
These ruptures in our workplaces haven’t just jumped out of nowhere. Our organisational histories have exclusion and exploitation baked-in. Post‑war migration helped build the welfare state, yet many of those workers were met with racism that became institutionalised and persists. Go further back and you find moments like the establishment of the Barber‑Surgeons Company under Henry VIII, which professionalised medicine while legally excluding women and criminalising many community‑based healing practices. Fast‑forward and we still see ‘male‑as‑default’ patterns in research and policy that show up as pervasive inequality women’s access to healthcare and health outcomes. The past is not past in organisations; it’s sediment that shapes today’s riverbed.
Why Looking Back Helps You Move Forward
Why bring this up when you’re trying to look forward? Because strategy isn’t just where you want to go; it’s who you already are (to borrow from Kenneth Boulding). Complex systems also carry path‑dependence: initial conditions and earlier choices constrain the future. If your best hope is a relational, high‑trust organisation that contributes to human thriving, you can’t leapfrog your relational history. You have to look at it, name it and learn from it.
From Restorative Rituals to Real Repair
That’s why when we begin any change work we start with a deceptively simple question: ‘What’s your best hope together?’ It’s energising sure but it’s more than an icebreaker (we hate those by the way, but that’s for another blog). Answering this simple question quickly confronts us with any unresolved grievances. People want to talk about pay fairness that never felt fair, restructures that broke teams apart, promises made and quietly dropped. Restorative practices are showing up more across sectors, which is good news. The trap is using them as compliance tools—nice rituals to get everyone back to ‘business as usual’—rather than as a real container for relationship repair between employees and leadership.
Four Practical Moves to Start Building Peace
This year’s theme for International Day of Peace is ‘act now for a peaceful world’. We can all act now for peace in our world and lives, not just including but especially in our teams and organisations. Here are four practical steps to act now for peace in your workplace.
1) Really listen. Don’t rush to fix; commit to understand. Capture themes in the words people actually use, not managerial paraphrases. Share these themes back, including what surprised you and what hurt to hear. Listen because you value what you’ll hear, not so you can craft the ideal response.
2) Map your history. Build a simple timeline (with others ideally): key decisions, restructures, crises, culture moments, and who was most impacted. Note where accountability was clear and where it was blurred. You’re not doing this to relitigate old battles but to build shared memory and context for the future.
3) Make healing commitments. These can be small and concrete: closing long‑open grievance loops; publishing a clear, time‑bound plan to address a recurring inequity; introducing facilitated restorative conversations for teams with long‑standing tensions. Peace is not a pledge on a poster; it’s the lived experience of repaired relationships over time. Peace is practice.
4) Measure what matters. Alongside performance and delivery metrics, include trust signals (do people believe commitments will be kept?), mattering signals (do people feel their work is valued?), and fairness signals (do people see poor behaviour and poor performance addressed?). Track not just the scores but the stories behind them.
Redesign for Different Results
If your outcomes suggest conflict, exclusion or mistrust, that isn’t an indictment—it’s data. You’re perfectly designed to get those results, which means you can redesign toward different ones. Organisational peace isn’t the absence of disagreement; it’s the presence of individuals committed to each other, strong enough to hold disagreement well and repairing their relationships as they go. That’s the work. Organisational Peace is destination AND journey. It’s the ambition AND the strategy.
Read Part 2: Why Organisational Change Causes Harm
Maybe you’re ready to act now for peace in your organisation, but it seems too big, too difficult, too naïve or too overwhelming. Building20 is collaborating with Resolve Consultants to build a movement of Peaceful Change organisations. Dr Amanda Woolley and Dr Luke Roberts bring their experience and insight to practicing peace in the workplace, making it relevant and relatable.
Talk to us about becoming a Peaceful Change Partner.