A meeting can begin with everyone agreeing that there is a problem and end without any agreement on what happened. One party sees a failure to honour a commitment. Another sees missing information. A third believes the deadline was impossible from the outset. When each person responds to a different description, the conversation accumulates arguments without moving any closer to a decision.
A news report published by the International Labour Organization on 10 September describes a meeting in Brazil where government, employer and worker representatives discussed research on safety and health in the coffee sector. The research examines whether this topic can provide common ground for dialogue and collective bargaining. The report does not demonstrate that the same approach can resolve every business conflict. [S3]
Even so, it raises a relevant question for leaders: which part of the problem can people work on together, even when their interests do not coincide? This editorial analysis explores that question through hypothetical management situations. It is not a legal opinion, a certified mediation technique or a conclusion about the Brazilian meeting.
Consider a fictional company where the sales team promised a delivery date that operations could not meet. Sales accuses operations of lacking commitment; operations accuses sales of making irresponsible promises. Both statements tell us something about how the parties perceive the situation, but neither explains the sequence of events surrounding the order. Who knew what capacity was available? When was the exception communicated? Who could have changed the deadline?
Reconstructing that sequence helps distinguish observable facts from interpretations. The message sent to the customer has a date. The information available at that moment can be retrieved. Attributing an intention to a colleague, however, requires more care. The conversation becomes more precise when the parties can identify what they saw, what they learned later and what they are inferring.
This distinction does not remove responsibility. On the contrary, it can make responsibility clearer. If someone made a commitment without obtaining the required confirmation, there is a specific decision to examine. If no confirmation procedure existed, the organisation also needs to acknowledge that gap. Blaming the system for everything is just as inadequate as blaming a person before understanding the sequence of events.
The parties do not need to agree on the whole story to resolve an immediate situation. In this example, they may share the need to give the customer clear information and avoid making another promise they cannot keep. That objective does not settle the disagreement about the initial failure. It simply creates a task that both sides can recognise as necessary.
A shared purpose works better when it is specific. “Improve communication” can mean different things to each team. “Confirm capacity before giving the customer a new date” describes a verifiable action. The distinction matters because it allows the result to be tracked without first requiring a complete transformation of the relationship between the people involved.
It is also necessary to acknowledge the interests that remain different. Sales remains responsible for the customer relationship; operations remains responsible for managing resources and capacity. An agreement does not require those responsibilities to disappear. It can organise how they come together in a decision, including who communicates, who confirms and how a disagreement is escalated when time is short.
Listening to a full explanation can help, but it does not guarantee understanding. Someone can remain silent while preparing a response. A simple check is to summarise what you understood and allow corrections: was the difficulty caused by a lack of access to information, a later change in capacity or a different interpretation of the commitment? The answer may change the problem the meeting needs to solve.
This practice should not become a performance of politeness. Repeating words without accepting new information merely prolongs the impasse. Its value lies in allowing an assumption to be corrected. If leaders discover that the team warned of the risk and received no response, the conversation needs to incorporate that fact, even if it contradicts the explanation with which the meeting began.
There are situations in which a joint conversation is insufficient or inappropriate. Power dynamics, allegations of harassment or discrimination, or serious risks may require dedicated channels and specialist support. Seeking common ground must not become a way to pressure someone into giving up a protection or accepting an informal agreement on a matter that requires a specific process.
A verbal commitment such as “next time we will check more carefully” can disappear when work pressures return. The agreement needs to specify what will change, who will take action and when it will be checked. If confirmation depends on someone who is absent, an alternative should be provided. If information is slow to arrive, it is necessary to define how that uncertainty will be communicated.
The written record can be brief. In the hypothetical example, it would be enough to describe the confirmation step, the person responsible and the deadline for a response. There should be enough detail for a third person to understand the agreement. This reduces the likelihood that the next incident will begin with a dispute over what each participant believes was decided.
The agreement can also have explicit limits. A temporary solution for one order need not silently become a rule for every customer. An experiment can be reviewed after a defined period. Making its temporary nature explicit prevents a one-off concession from being treated as a permanent obligation, which often fuels another disagreement about expectations.
The next meeting becomes more useful when it examines specific events. Was the commitment fulfilled? Did the information arrive in time? Did the rule create a new difficulty? Follow-up does not need to identify a winner after the fact. It can check whether the change reduced the failure that prompted the agreement and whether the parties can sustain it in everyday work.
When the solution does not work, it matters to understand why. Resources may be missing, someone may lack authority to decide, or the solution may not fit the type of order. There may also have been a failure to follow what was agreed. These possibilities call for different responses. Treating every failure as personal resistance weakens the investigation; treating every failure as a mere misunderstanding can avoid necessary accountability.
Common ground is not complete consensus, compulsory friendliness or an absence of conflict. It is a sufficiently shared description to make a verifiable action possible. The work of leadership is to build that transition: from a general argument to an event, from the event to a decision, and from the decision to follow-up. The conversation improves when people can understand what, ultimately, should happen after it.