Nobody Sees the Whole Beach Ball
I was coaching a senior leader recently whose problem would be familiar to anyone who has worked across departmental boundaries. Two teams needed each other to succeed, yet each had become increasingly frustrated with the other.
One saw unnecessary delay and bureaucracy. The other saw people pushing ahead without sufficient regard for standards, risk or what delivery would require.
Both could explain their position convincingly. Neither lacked intelligence or commitment, and neither was deliberately trying to make life difficult. Yet the more firmly each defended its position, the harder it became to work together. The obvious response was to decide who was right.
I wondered whether we needed to understand something else first: what could each team see that the other could not?
Different seats, different realities
The beach ball model offers a useful way into this. Imagine people looking at a multicoloured ball from different positions. One sees blue, another red, another yellow. Their descriptions differ because their views differ. Trouble begins when someone assumes that what they can see must be the whole picture.
Commercial sees customers, opportunities and the cost of moving slowly.
Operations sees capacity and the work required to honour promises.
Finance sees margin and cash.
Risk sees exposure.
These are legitimate responsibilities. An organisation needs people to notice different things, although the resulting conversations are rarely comfortable when time or resources are tight.
The difficulty comes when a difference in responsibility becomes a judgement about character. “They need more information” becomes “They always obstruct us.” “They want to move quickly” becomes “They never think anything through.”
Once that happens, each new interaction risks becoming evidence for a conclusion already reached. People begin defending their department before examining the problem.
What strengths can help us notice
I had previously worked with both teams using CliftonStrengths. One had more prominent themes in the Strategic Thinking and Influencing domains; the other had more in Relationship Building and Executing. That gave us another way to explore their perspectives. It did not give us a diagnosis of the conflict, or permission to divide people into four coloured boxes.
Gallup groups themes into domains according to how they contribute: thinking through information and possibilities, influencing others, building relationships and making things happen. Looking at the teams through that lens suggested questions worth testing. Were some people noticing possibilities that others overlooked? Were others identifying delivery requirements or effects on colleagues that had received too little attention?
Those were hypotheses to explore with the people involved. A domain pattern does not establish that someone resists change, ignores relationships or cannot think strategically. Gallup's team research also reports broadly consistent reasons for conflict across groups with different leading domains. Strengths can provide a shared language for a difficult conversation. They cannot replace an examination of what actually happened.
Used properly, the conversation becomes more demanding.
Someone who readily spots opportunities still needs to understand implementation.
Someone who prizes reliable delivery still needs to consider whether an established approach should change.
Understanding your strengths should increase your responsibility for their impact. However a useful question to ask is: “what might I be overlooking because this way of approaching the situation comes so naturally to me?”
The organisation may be creating the argument
There was a further layer to consider. Departments often have different objectives, measures and consequences for failure. We ask people to collaborate, then judge them separately on outcomes that may pull against one another. When pressure arrives, protecting their own position can be a rational response to the expectations we have created.
This is an old management problem. Steven Kerr examined it in his 1975 paper, On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B: organisations can reward behaviours while hoping for something quite different. Consider a business that celebrates new sales commitments but holds another team accountable for absorbing the delivery consequences. A demand for better teamwork leaves the underlying bargain untouched.
That does not mean different departments should have identical targets. Their responsibilities differ for good reasons. It does mean leaders need to establish how competing priorities will be resolved, who can make the decision and what counts as success for the business overall. Otherwise, “collaborate” can become an instruction to settle a trade-off nobody has given the teams authority to make.
We must also be careful with the comforting conclusion that neither side is the problem. Sometimes somebody is withholding information, making commitments carelessly or using a process to avoid a decision. Understanding the conditions around behaviour helps us judge it fairly. It does not require us to excuse it. A structural problem and poor conduct can exist together.
When the painkiller becomes the operating model
During the coaching conversation, we talked about back pain. A painkiller may ease the immediate discomfort, but if the problem is how you sit in your car every morning, taking another tablet will not adjust the seat. It is a useful distinction when looking at organisational interventions: what relieves this incident, and what might prevent its recurrence?
Leaders provide immediate relief all the time. They authorise an exception, negotiate a compromise or step into a stalled conversation. Sometimes that is necessary. A customer needs an answer, a risk needs containing or a decision cannot wait. The difficulty arises when the same kind of intervention keeps being required and nobody examines what keeps producing the dispute.
Over time, the senior leader can become the permanent bridge between two departments. That may feel productive because problems move whenever they get involved. But what are the teams learning? If the dependable route to a decision is escalation, they may invest more effort in presenting a convincing case upwards than in working through the tension together.
A leader can therefore become very effective at resolving individual disputes while leaving the organisation increasingly dependent on their involvement. The practical test is what happens in their absence. Can the teams make progress within clear boundaries, or do they wait for the referee to return? Repeated intervention deserves scrutiny, even when each intervention appears successful.
Understanding must lead somewhere
My client's instinct was to consider shared mission, values, KPIs and a clearer operating model. Those may all have a place. Before deciding what to redesign, however, we needed to understand the pressures each team was responding to.
What were they accountable for?
What happened when something went wrong?
What were they trying to protect that the other team barely noticed?
One practical approach is to take a recent disagreement and reconstruct it together.
What information did each side have?
What commitment had already been made?
Where did their assumptions diverge, and who had authority to resolve the trade-off?
That produces something more useful than asking everybody to become more collaborative. It makes the working conditions available for examination.
Shared understanding is a beginning. If the measures conflict, they may need adjusting. If authority is unclear, someone must clarify it. If the agreed behaviour is being ignored, there must be accountability. And if a genuine trade-off remains, leadership requires a decision. Listening carefully to every perspective does not mean every preference can be accommodated.
I would be concerned by an organisation where Risk never challenged enthusiasm, Finance never questioned an investment or Operations never pushed back on an undeliverable promise. Those tensions can protect the business. What matters is whether people can use them to improve a decision, rather than turn them into a contest between departments.
Walking around the beach ball may confirm that your original observation was accurate. It may also reveal how much you had failed to see. The same applies to leaders examining recurring conflict: your teams may need to change their behaviour, and you may need to change the conditions in which they work.
Before resolving the next argument, ask what your last intervention taught them - and what you have done about the problem that made it necessary
If you keep being drawn into the same disagreements between teams, it may be time to examine what keeps producing them. I work with senior leaders and leadership teams to understand competing priorities, clarify accountability and improve how they work together. If this sounds familiar in your organisation, let’s have a confidential conversation about what needs to change.
