Insights
Most Organisational Conflict Isn't About People
I don’t usually read fiction with a professional lens.
But Victory City caught me doing exactly that.
Not following the storyline, but recognising something else entirely: How systems form, drift, and fail.
This piece is what came out of that.
Why Most Organisational Conflict Isn’t About People
I’ve been reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie, the first novel I’ve picked up in a long time, and I found myself doing something unusual.
There is a storyline, but it rambles, shifts, and dissolves. And yet I keep returning. What am I returning for? I don’t page back to remind myself where I’d left off. It doesn’t seem to matter. And yet I keep picking it up and reading further.
That’s when it dawned on me. This isn’t a story you follow. It’s a system you recognise.
A City Built on Trust
At its core, the novel tells the story of a city brought into existence through narrative, through shared belief.
That’s how every organisation works.
Not through policy manuals or organisational charts, but through what people collectively accept as true:
What matters
What is rewarded
What is tolerated
When that shared belief is coherent, the system holds.
When it fractures, people lose a common reference point and begin pulling in different directions.
Where Integrity Begins to Slip
The city in Victory City doesn’t collapse overnight. It drifts.
Leadership begins to reinterpret the founding vision.
Values are still spoken, but no longer enacted.
Decisions are made that make sense in the moment, but not in relation to the whole.
This is the point most organisations miss. There is no dramatic failure. No single bad actor. Just a widening gap between what is said and what is done.
That gap is where integrity breaks.
When Structure Stops Holding
As the system weakens, something predictable happens:
People step in to compensate.
Roles blur
Decision-making becomes inconsistent
Authority depends on personality rather than clarity
Accountability becomes opaque.
At this stage, organisations often double down on communication training or “better conversations.”
But the problem isn’t communication.
It’s that the structure is no longer carrying the load.
The Cost of Relying on Individuals
One character in the novel effectively holds the system together.
She sustains the narrative. She maintains coherence. She compensates for what the system can no longer do. And she pays for it.
This is where I see many leaders today:
Carrying misalignment personally
Over-functioning to stabilise weak systems
Becoming the glue that should not be required.
It works, until it doesn’t.
Conflict Is Not the Problem
What Victory City makes visible, through myth rather than management theory, is this:
Conflict is not the breakdown. It is the signal.
The real issue sits underneath:
Unclear decision authority
Misaligned priorities
Structures that no longer reflect the organisation’s reality.
Until those are addressed, the same conflicts will return, just with different people.
What This Means in Practice
If you are dealing with recurring conflict in your organisation, the question is not:
“How do we improve communication?”
It is:
What are people having to compensate for?
Where has integrity between stated values and actual behaviour broken down?
What is the system no longer holding that individuals are carrying instead?
That is where the real work sits.
Final Thought
We like to believe organisations fail because of difficult people.
It is more uncomfortable, and more useful, to recognise that systems fail quietly, long before people do.
If you want to strengthen performance and improve results, don’t start with behaviour.
Start with the system.
If this resonates
If this resonates, it is likely because you are dealing with recurring issues that are not being solved at the right level. You have likely sensed there are causes underpinning the friction, but lacked the lens to see them clearly.
I write about trust, integrity, and structure in organisations, particularly where conflict keeps resurfacing.
That is usually the point where someone says, “we need help here,” and calls me, as a trusted conflict resolution specialist. Quelle surprise when my investigation moves from the characters to the setting. And even more so when the realisation dawns that the system itself is cracked and leaking.
And then the real work can begin.