Why half a position can paralyse an organisation

Half a position per company. Arithmetically a trifle – and yet the decision stood still for months. A case report on how a deadlocked conflict can be facilitated – and what is really being negotiated in cases like this.

The starting point

A group of companies in the German-speaking region. At the centre a head office, around it legally independent companies with their own management, their own culture and their own sense of identity. IT and organisation were to move closer together – duplication out, standards in, costs down.

On paper an arithmetic exercise. In reality a question of power.

Because behind every service that is to be provided centrally in future, there is someone in one of the companies who has so far provided it themselves. And behind that person sits the worry: if we hand this over, we hand over our knowledge. And if we hand over our knowledge, we become dependent – on a unit that can already tell us what to do.

That worry was not irrational. It was the real subject of the negotiation. Only, for months, nobody said so.

Round one: the service catalogue

The first attempt was a service catalogue – the written agreement on who does what in future. Sounds like an administrative formality. It was not.

Every single line was at stake: who is accountable for it, who delivers it, who pays for it, who has a say when it is delivered badly. Every line was a piece of competence that one side either gives up or keeps.

That catalogue took me almost two months. Not because the writing takes so long – the document itself comes together in a few days. But because of the conversations in between: one-to-one talks with each side, joint rounds, facilitated working sessions. The same points again and again, the same resistance again and again, a little further each time.

At the end there was a catalogue that everyone supported. Not because everyone was enthusiastic. But because everyone knew what was in it and why it was in it.

Round two: the positions

Then came the part that actually hurt. The service catalogue leads to a staffing requirement calculation, and the staffing requirement calculation leads to this: whoever hands over services also hands over capacity. In concrete terms, it was about half a position per company that was to move to head office.

Half a position. That is not the figure an organisation should fail over. It very nearly did.

Because half a position is nothing in arithmetic terms and everything in symbolic terms. It is the proof that the fear is justified: it starts now, and it will not stop here.

The situation was accordingly:

• The responsible divisional management could not bring the matter together. It was tried, it did not work, and at some point everyone in the room realised that it was not going to work this way.
• The person responsible on the head-office side was regarded as difficult: professionally undisputed, arrogant in manner, with no feel whatsoever for how such instructions land with independent companies.
• The managers there had consequently withdrawn their willingness. They were not against the matter. They were against the way the matter was brought to them – and therefore also rejected what would have benefited them.

Months without movement. Meetings that were postponed. Positions that hardened. A topic that by then everyone considered unsolvable.

What the dispute costs along the way

People talk about the obvious damage: tied-up management time, delayed implementation, a topic that comes up again in every meeting.

Nobody talks about the more expensive damage. When people fight over a factual question for months, it does not stay with the factual question. It damages the personal relationship. Anyone who has blocked each other in five meetings takes that experience into the sixth. And into the seventh. The next decision, which has nothing at all to do with the first on the facts, then becomes difficult simply because there is still something unresolved from last time.

That is how an organisation loses its ability to decide – not through one wrong decision, but through too many that took too long. Trust is quietly used up, and nobody books it to an account.

Having a conflict facilitated is therefore not a question of manners but of damage limitation. Issues like this belong on the table quickly. Not because speed is a value in itself. But because every week of standstill wears away something on the inside that cannot be reordered later.

What I did

I had one month.

First the one-to-one conversations, not the big round. Anyone who puts several parties in dispute at one table without first having spoken to each of them individually gets not a solution but a performance. I wanted to know beforehand what each of them really needs – and what they only demand in order to protect something else. That is rarely the same thing.

Then name the real issue. All the papers said ‘capacity shift’. What was really being negotiated was dependency, loss of knowledge, loss of face in front of one’s own team. As long as that is not on the table, people discuss figures and mean something else. I said it out loud. That is the uncomfortable part, and the one that decides whether a meeting achieves anything.

Then the right people in one room. Not the delegates, not the deputies, not those who ‘report back and take it with them’. But those who are allowed to say yes or no on the same afternoon. A meeting without decision-making authority in the room is an expensive discussion circle.

And then the rule: a decision leaves this room today. No working group, no review loop, no ‘we’ll take another look at it’. If that sentence stands at the beginning and is meant seriously, the way the discussion runs changes – by the second hour at the latest.

The result

An agreement that both sides could support. Both gave something up. Head office did not get everything it had planned. The companies gave up more than they would have liked.

The decision went in this form to the top management body and was approved without conditions. No escalation, no renegotiation, no measures against anyone involved.

Part of the solution was not the allocation itself but its time limit: the position reached is reviewed jointly every year and adjusted by mutual agreement. That takes away the agreement’s finality – and finality was exactly the problem. Anyone who believes they are signing for ever today does not sign. Anyone who knows that someone will ask again in twelve months can agree.

What I do not promise

At this point, reports of this kind usually serve up a fairy tale: everyone leaves the room as friends, everyone has won, the photo at the end.

That is not how it works. Life is no bed of roses, and a facilitated meeting is no reconciliation party. Anyone who tells you that everyone is happy at the end will also sell you the idea that heaven is one long funfair. That is window dressing, not execution.

What there is, is an agreement both sides can work with. For that, everyone has to give something up, and nobody goes home euphoric. A consensus-oriented approach does not mean that everyone wants the same thing in the end – it means that everyone can live with the same result without undermining it afterwards.

I only promise what I can deliver. But for that, I give everything.

What can be transferred

Seven points that apply to practically every deadlocked issue:

1. A blocked meeting almost never has a technical problem. It has an unresolved balance of power. The technical subject is the language in which the dispute is conducted.
2. Preparation decides, not the meeting. If something fundamental still comes as a surprise in the room, the preparation was too thin.
3. Whoever facilitates must have no stake in the outcome. A participant cannot lead neutrally, and everyone in the room knows it. That is why this role works from the outside – or not at all.
4. Decision-making authority must be in the room. Otherwise you produce minutes, not a solution.
5. An agreement in which both sides win usually does not exist. There is one both sides can work with. That is not a worse result; it is the achievable one.
6. A time limit beats perfection. A reviewable arrangement gets signed; a final one gets fought.
7. Speed protects relationships. The longer a conflict runs, the more it costs in a place that appears in no project plan: in the relationship between those involved.

What it cost

Three months in total: almost two for the service catalogue, one for the decision. On top of that, many one-to-one conversations and a series of facilitated meetings.

Before that: several months of standstill – and an internal relationship that would have been harder to repair with every further month.

It was uncomfortable. It was solvable.

This report reflects a real situation. Sector, institutions, names and functions have been abstracted to the extent that no conclusions about individual persons are possible.