Conflict Capability as a Foundation of Holding in Turbulent Environments

In my work as General Counsel for international companies, psychodynamic training and experience increasingly helped me to resolve complex and turbulent conflicts in ways that allowed people to look each other in the eye again afterwards. The essential task was to create a shared space for thinking in which parties could find a constructive approach, avoiding litigation while managing conflict in a meaningful and respectful way.

This experience lies at the core of what it means to speak about holding in turbulent times. People and organizations are increasingly forced to assume responsibility under conditions of incomplete knowledge and to make decisions without reliable certainty. Turbulence describes external instability and a psychological experience of uncertainty. Under such conditions, conflicts are threats to stability, cooperation, or belonging. The pressure to replace complexity with simplification and certainty becomes particularly visible within organizations. This raises a central question: what is the relationship between conflict capability and holding under conditions of turbulence?

The ability to engage in conflict is therefore a central competence of functioning organisations. Conflict capability means the capacity to tolerate tensions and aggression, to make different positions visible, and to work through conflicts without destroying relationships or institutional structures. Organisations often avoid conflict because it is experienced as threatening. Yet when conflicts become thinkable and workable, organisations are able to learn and develop.

The paper introduces an organisational matrix of conflict capability. One dimension describes the way conflicts are handled, ranging from cooperative and ambivalence-capable approaches to directive or morally charged forms of leadership in which conflicts are decided through power. The second dimension differentiates between manifest conflict issues and latent psychodynamic motives. Under turbulent conditions, the temptation grows to avoid complexity and to neglect these underlying dynamics.

A central question of the paper is whether, and in what way, conflict capability and holding are related. Does holding enable organizations to work through conflict, or is the capacity to engage with conflict a prerequisite for holding itself? The paper suggests that holding does not emerge through harmony, avoidance, or control. Rather, organisations are able to provide holding when tensions, differences, and aggression can be acknowledged and worked through without fragmentation or authoritarian simplification.

The paper argues for a psychodynamic approach that creates organizational spaces for reflection in which conflicts can be understood in their emotional and relational meaning. Invisible conflicts and underlying motives can thereby be taken into account, anxiety can be addressed, and organizational dynamics can be understood more clearly. Organizations that are capable of holding tensions are better able to maintain cooperation, creativity, and shared thinking even under pressure. The paper proposes that conflict capability is not merely compatible with holding, but a prerequisite for it. Organisations can provide holding only to the extent that tensions, differences, and conflicts can be acknowledged, contained, and worked through rather than avoided, suppressed, or decided through authority.