Conflict: A critical ingredient to ERP implementation success

Conflict is generally seen as an undesirable thing, and much of society's conflict is. Spousal abuse, for example, is something that should be eradicated from our society, as is terrorism. All over the world, there are a plethora of corporate training courses on conflict resolution skills. Conflict in general is not seen as desirable in the workplace.

However, having different opinions can be healthy. Passionate debate over opinions can enhance creativity and innovation. Ask any marriage counselor and you will find that the ability to fight in a healthy manner is seen as a good thing. In fact, the lack of this skill is a major cause of breakdowns in marriages.

Honesty and healthy conflict often go together. In his seminal work Good to Great, Jim Collins spoke about brutal honesty being the main distinction between great companies and the rest (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't). His work goes on to say that this kind of honesty helps great companies find the right solutions for their problems and challenges. It is almost impossible to make good decisions without honestly confronting the facts at hand and allowing a variety of political influences, including some that may conflict with each other.

So it's easy to see that there are healthy and unhealthy levels of conflict in society. We can then look at how to best utilize a healthy level of conflict to help us achieve the best outcomes possible.

ERP implementations are a classic environment where a healthy level of conflict is needed to achieve the best results. A key sin committed in implementations is that of not guiding change management strongly enough: having the new system represent an old pig with ...