How can you manage conflict in your Operations Research team?

There should be high engagement and collobration between team members and leaders should define goal and expected outputs clearly. Team members should make literature review and discuss methodology that suits the best to reach desired goals. In conflict of different perspective between teams, leaders must define the best path that serves company's purpose. Finally, every one should be commited to path that will be followed and update each other about any completed phase or breakthrough. The key terms: well defined goals and clear outputs, full commitment to the plan, high collobration.

One of the good conflict resolutions is argumentation and I mean not the figurative meeting but the literal meaning Break down the conflict into smaller arguments, and try to find our inconsistencies in the smaller arguments. Keep dwelling deeper till you either exhaust the arguments or find an inconsistency. In the five-why approach, we stop after the five whys are answered. But the number five is more of a guideline because five iterations are generally sufficient to get to the root cause. Whereas, in argumentation, there is no such guideline you can iterate as long as it takes

To manage conflict in your Operations Research team, promote open communication, define roles, encourage collaboration, provide conflict resolution training, and establish clear decision-making processes. Use mediation and document agreements, and ensure fairness in workload distribution. Regularly review and improve conflict management processes to foster a harmonious team environment.

OR involves lots of research and development stuffs. All the members should be open minded and they all should understand that in case of research stuff, there is nothing right or wrong; all about trying different things. Hence, they all have to collaborate and obviously in some cases, have to compromise a little to give space for other things to be tried.

I would like to avoid repeating about behaviour aspects as all those will definately help. Beyond behaviour comes aligned goals, focus on whats important for the company. e.g. a pharma company where value of the organisation teaches to focus on patient first, every aspect of OR trade-offs should be viewed from patient perspective, if anyone forsees a patient will be deprived of medicine revisit the decision, don't manupilatively use the companies values or objectives, if someone does use the aspects of behaviour stated by other i.e. speak up, free and open communication, challenge and align towards common goals.

A lot of what this article talks about is general and not specific to OR. For instance, identifying the root causes, communication, and managing stress are applicable to handling conflict in general.