Hi everyone! Welcome to Episode 11 of the Negotiate X in Rewind series, where we revisit standout conversations from the Negotiate X Podcast. In this episode, guests Robert Wilkinson and Naseem Khuri join Aram and Nolan to discuss mastering constructive disagreement in negotiation.
Together, they explore why conflict persists, how leaders can harness disagreement productively, and what it takes to model conflict skills for the next generation. With insights drawn from global experience and personal practice, this episode offers a practical roadmap for turning tension into opportunity.
Firstly, Robert and Naseem explain that conflict is not inherently destructive—it arises whenever people pursue incompatible goals. Conflict can be constructive when it creates value, sparks innovation, or clarifies interests.
However, destructive conflict emerges when methods to achieve goals undermine relationships or escalate tensions. Perceptions also shape our response: even in relatively peaceful times, heightened awareness of conflict creates fear and anxiety, fueling unproductive behaviors.
The guests stress that leaders must distinguish between destructive struggles and constructive tensions. By deliberately provoking debate during brainstorming or red-teaming exercises, leaders generate creativity and learning. At other times, leaders should build unity and shared identity to drive collective action. Mastering constructive disagreement in negotiation means knowing when to spark dissent for growth and when to strengthen cohesion for results.
Moving on, Robert illustrates the importance of pausing before reacting. Drawing from humanitarian work and crisis response, he highlights the wisdom of assessing situations fully before acting. The same principle applies in negotiation: slowing down, listening, and observing help leaders respond with intention rather than impulse.
Both guests reflect on how parenting has challenged them to practice what they teach. They stress that the rise of instant communication often fuels reactive, unproductive conflict, but modeling patience, humility, and deliberate action helps build resilience in children and communities. By practicing the skills they want to see, they create ripple effects that extend from family life to global negotiations.
This episode underscores that conflict is inevitable but not inherently destructive. The real challenge is mastering constructive disagreement in negotiation—treating conflict as an opportunity to learn, innovate, and strengthen relationships. By slowing down, asking questions, and modeling the behaviors they want to see, leaders can transform disagreements into drivers of growth and collaboration.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Write to us at team@negotiatex.com. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us on Apple Podcasts to help others find Negotiate X and support our growth.
Thank you for your time!
Welcome. It’s good to have you with us today.
Thanks so much for having us. Great to see you.
Well, listen, let’s jump into this. Time is a precious commodity, and I certainly appreciate that about you both. I know you have a lot of things. You work heavily in the conflict area. Why is conflict so persistent and is it going away anytime soon?
Well, let me start. Yeah, I think the first thing to say is that when I first learned about the kind of discipline of conflict resolution, the first thing that most professionals say about it is that conflict is not equated with necessarily destruction or violence or war. Sometimes we use that word interchangeably with violence or war, and really many conflict resolution practitioners start with the idea that conflict is just incompatible goals between different groups trying to pursue their interests.
And so the form that conflict takes can be very constructive. You know, one of the principles in the classic texts that so many negotiation people look at, Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury and Bruce Patton. They say, it’s a good thing, there’s conflict. Every economy functions on this difference of opinion. I value this more than the thing you’re selling than, you know, $500 or whatever. And the other person values $500 more than the thing they’re selling. And so that’s actually good for us.
Every stock trade is based on the premise that one side thinks the price is gonna go up, the other thinks it goes down. So difference isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s just that when people take methods to achieve their interest, that can be destructive. Now we have destructive conflict. So conflict by definition isn’t going away ever because human beings function like that. It’s the management of conflict in a more constructive way that we’re working to build capacity for in all these different environments.
Yeah. It’s also, I think, the perception of conflict that drives a lot of behavior, right? So one thing that always strikes me is that a lot of historians and experts have said that right now we live in one of the more peaceful times in human history. And it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. And so the perception of conflict is something that often drives our behavior because of this, because it does not feel safe, because it feels like there’s a lot of conflict in the world to Rob’s point, unproductive conflict in the world, then it feels like we’re out of control or we’re living in this heightened sense of anxiety and we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves but that’s largely a function of perception.
So conflict has that ability to play with our emotions as well, and not just that sort of exist on its own, but it’s the perception of it that sort of drives us.
You mentioned by, kind of, this perception piece is our response to conflict simply biological? Is it the fight or flight response? Is there more to it? Why are we so uncomfortable with something that, as you both have said, is natural and doesn’t have to be perceived as a negative thing?
If you ever just go on Twitter, you’ll find people are definitely not uncomfortable with conflict. People are very happy to engage in conflict. And just like any other human trait, I think there is different aptitudes, different ways in which we sort of, ways of which it lives inside of us, ways in which we deal with it, some of which we’re born with and some of which we need to cultivate.
So I think there’s this combination of nature, nurture. I think sometimes people treat the scientific sort of physiological aspect of this. Like Aram, you mentioned fight or flight, right? There are absolute, as we all know, and there’s tons of research on it. There’s physiological things happening in our body that make us, perhaps, more conducive to conflict in an unproductive way.
And I think sometimes that’s just used as a crutch. Sometimes people say, we have this fight or flight response and we’ve got cortisol pumping through our veins. And therefore I’m out of control. I can’t do anything about this. That’s just the body and I have nothing to do with that.
And, I would challenge that. I would say that sure, there’s things that we definitely cannot control and there’s plenty that we can control and there’s plenty of work that we can always do. So I like to think that I still have a shot at the NBA, right? But I’m in my forties. And six feet tall and have a bad back. There are these natural things that are limiting me and I can always get better at basketball, right?
There’s always room for improvement. I can always get better at the actual skill itself. So I’d like to think that it’s that balance of nature and nurture as we think of conflict as with anything else, my propensity to have or engage in conflict productively is similar to my abilities as a basketball player.
If conflict can be good and we’ve said that already, how, you know this is a podcast for leaders and how they’re able to take the skills that we teach them and implement them, in their lives or in their businesses or anything like that. So how can a leader manage conflict if it’s so good? And what are some of the keys to success for a leader?
I wouldn’t say a negative way, but we wanna provoke conflict when we’re doing sometimes brainstorming or a process called red teaming where you have one group critique the other and just kinda like devil’s advocate in teams. And there may be reasons we want to do that as a leader.
And then there’s times where we’re trying to maybe build a sense of team, a sense of unity, some inspiration to take on a big challenge. And in that case, you want to maybe do the opposite, build a shared sense of identity and a shared vision. So my sense is for leaders, the judgment between knowing when to explore and expand on the disagreement for learning purposes and when to seek consensus for inspirational and team building purposes is one of those hidden features of excellent leaders, which isn’t really talked about as much as I think it should be.
Rob, can you just say that quote that you always say, don’t just, don’t just do something?
Oh, yeah. In the, so I worked, as you’ve heard in my background in overseas aid work. And so sometimes we had to do some urgent response to a humanitarian issue. And some of the great leaders in that area would always say, don’t just do things. Stand there, and in one case, I remember we had a really.
When I was living in Rwanda, working for Oxfam, amazingly, a volcano actually erupted in Congo next door, and its 250,000 people were fleeing across the border. And so one of those leading thinkers on this question came out to help us. And he said, the first thing we have to do is rent a helicopter.
And we looked at each other thinking, really, that’s our urgent priority. And he said we have to figure out what’s going on, who’s where? Where’s the lava flowing? Where are there already camps set up? Before we do anything else, we gotta just assess the situation. And it turned out to be worth its weight and gold. There was actually very little human cost in that response because the people managing it, I was not managing it, but people who were very thoughtful.
And even all the way through to short term things, like if anyone’s been trained in first aid, for example, if you come onto a scene where someone’s been injured or something, the first thing they teach you is first stop and look around and assess.
Don’t just rush over to the person. What if the thing that hurt them now hurts you and there’s two people down who have you helped then? So it’s the idea of just the same for conflict management: slow down, pause, listen, assess first before we just fire back our response, which is so often the case.
Guys, this has been great. As we get ready to wrap up, one question I’m really curious about is you’re both parents have some beautiful kids, and as you work through this field of conflict resolution, what are you trying to teach them? Demonstrate for them? What’s the world you’re hoping they’re gonna walk into around conflict management? Thoughts on that?
It’s funny, when my kids were younger, they used to like to watch this one Disney show and it was called Dog With a Blog. And it was a pretty silly show, I will admit. But it was about a guy who was like a, basically a psychologist. And at home was pretty useless with his kids, but he was great at his work and the part about being useless at home.
There are some days where I feel just like that character in that show, we teach this stuff and then we come home and it’s hardest when it matters most to you personally. So I think that parenting has been maybe the toughest challenge to apply all these concepts and ideas and skills we talk about all day long.
Right there in front of you is when push comes to shove, you have to really live and embody those principles. And it can be really tough. It can be really tough for the people you care about the most. I feel mixed feelings about the future in a certain way because my kids are, they live a life that kids these days live, the internet and the connections on social media and devices are, how people live. That’s how they communicate. Grownups think it’s rude to get a text with a TY instead of saying, oh, thank you very much, mommy. Whatever, daddy. It’s just like these quick little notes, and it’s not the way that we’re used to communicating.
I also think it completely facilitates all the problems we were talking about before of instantaneous reactions, leaping to conclusions, not very intentional. A passing thought in your brain is instantly translated to text characters and is sent off to people within a second. So that’s not great. But I do think the good news is that we’ve seen in our own kids their ability to build up these skills and capacities over the years because they’re listening to the advice we’re talking about.
And I think trying to live it and seeing better outcomes for themselves. So that’s really encouraging. And the second thing that’s encouraging is even in our local school system here, just outside of the Boston area, they’re, they’re really recognizing that the things we’re talking about now in this whole discussion are essential skills that young kids, even in elementary school should be learning.
So at my own kids’ elementary school, they got copies of the book, difficult conversations that we all know so well and gave it out to everybody, every, the principal, to the teachers, to the students, to the custodians. Everyone got copies. They discussed it in middle school. They got copies of this book by Carol Dweck called Mindset, which is all about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, and encouraged kids to be courageous enough to grow and fail and learn and not worry about getting the right answers.
So the conversation is shifting, which is really encouraging for me, and I think the kids are responding pretty well when they get exposed to it. It’s like you said, Naseem, if you just float through the system without any of that information, then you fall into this systemic way of doing business, which is not the way forward.
So it’s gonna take a lot of work, but there’s some real glimmers of encouragement, I think I would say.
So just to build on what Rob said, there’s a lot of bad news out there, right? There are sort of structural forces that make us more prone to jump to conclusions very quickly, to be very reactive, and I think that the way I get up in the morning is by thinking of relying on my own kind of theory of change.
And that’s this idea that, look, if we can practice ourselves on modeling the behavior that we wanna see, if we can practice our own reactivity and regulating ourselves and having interactions, and at the end of the day, looking back at those interactions and saying, I don’t regret that. I actually did that very deliberately and I’m pretty happy with how that went.
Even if I didn’t get the outcome I wanted, I’m happy with my own performance in that. If we can model that behavior, then I think we can have an impact on others. And so I had better walk the walk when I’m parenting, right? If I’m giving my kid, as Rob is mentioning, if I’m giving my kid difficult conversations and saying, hey, read this, and then I’m screaming at them all the time and being completely, assuming they have bad intent and all these things that difficult conversation says that we shouldn’t do or should be mindful of.
Then what am I doing? What message am I sending? I had better walk the walk and this is what I carry over into my work every day too. My theory of change on Israel Palestine is if we can train and equip enough Israeli and Palestinian leaders with the skills and the appropriate networks.
Again, going back to contact theory, the appropriate networks where they can engage with each other productively, at least on this small scale. Then maybe that will spread out and reverberate from there. And maybe something happens down the road where we actually get a little more productive than we are today.
And I have the same thing with my kids, right? If I can model this behavior that I want to see and if I can try to instill in them and help them work through their own reactivity and have more, take deliberate action and do it in a way where they’re also generous and kind and humble in the world, then maybe that’s a good thing.
And maybe the world will be a better place in x, y, z number of years. But it all starts back with ourselves, right? We’ve better have our own. A, even just articulate a theory of change so that we’re not just walking through the world and coasting through the world as passive participants, and then B, actually doing it and walking the walk and practicing what we preach.
So with that, thanks for listening to the Negotiate X Podcast. Really appreciate it. If you haven’t already, please rate review and subscribe to the podcast and we’ll catch you in the next episode.