From Weeds to Wisdom: 5 Long-Growing Strategies for Softening Conflict

This is a community garden for funders, leaders, solo or part of a team, NGOs, movements, ecosystem leads or family businesses, rooted in today’s supertangled landscape… I’ve heard you say you’d give a lot to soften and shape discord and tensions into something nourishing and midwifing instead… Come and settle in this little thinking allotment.

Warning: My goal is not to sell comfort masquerading as clarity.

There is work, discipline in application, and a drop of discomfort involved in these approaches to soften conflict in yourself or places prone to tensions.

And there’s nothing wrong with that temporary discomfort. Only learning.

Like with any cultivation, we need time and maturation to see change.

This is an invitation to walk in these fields of perspectives.

To chew on the analogies and seeds for reflection.

And metabolise them into your own professional or personal contexts.

(NB: I will play with you as I am experiencing conflict with how some groups of people deal with conflict…)

1. Trust Like Soil: Feed It Slowly, Stir It Gently

Trust doesn’t sprout on command. Like garden soil, it needs moisture, decomposition and patient tending. To build trust in your team across silos, slow down.

Feed the relational ground through intentional care, across roles, seniority, departments and even across sectors.

Learn from unexpected sources: interns, community partners, and your organisational elders.

If you’re in a leadership role, consider yourself less a solo gardener and more of a tender to the ground. Shift from Hero to Host.

When you lead from that hosting posture, you become a convener, a facilitator, and you keep the learner in you very much alive. You enable co-creation and collective intelligence to emerge, instead of issuing perfect directives.

Reflection seed: Who in your organisational soil has been overlooked as a source of wisdom or nourishment? What would it mean to feed that relationship?

Example: Facilitating Trust Building in Networks: A Study from the Water Technology Industry

2. From Transaction to Transformation: Listen Like the Rain

To soften conflict, don’t rush to reply, fix or explain.

Listen like rain, steadily, systemically, soaking into every layer.
Understand how your system breathes, how its soil softens and shoots new roots.

Sense where it’s dry and where it overflows.
Systemic listening means tuning into the whole ecosystem: the silences, the roots, the subtle shifts, the seasonality.

Systemic listening reveals hidden wisdom, invites quieter leaders or team members to rise, recalibrates old hierarchies, and breathes some life into your place.

It turns bland KPI-focused or monologic management meetings and other ailing get-togethers into something much more interesting: relational rainfalls where real transformation happens.

Reflection seed: Where are you still listening to respond, rather than to ignite? What might soften if you listened like rain?

Example: The IOFC’s Trustbuilding Programme in Kenya and Nigeria convened dialogues between police and community members, creating open ground for distrust to recede and trust to take root.

3. Harvest Humility Like Moonlight; Only Visible in The Night

Every garden has its shadows. In organisations, this often shows up as domination, passive silence, or power plays. With care and honesty, you can prune invasive vines and overgrowth to bring clarity and light(ness).
It can be about balancing facts with curious interest (practising “not knowing”), or speaking the unspeakable and necessary and addressing team members’ or stakeholders’ overinfluence or overlooked wisdom. I believe deep and practical transformation happens when rhetoric gives way to relational honesty. Your soil needs redistribution of attention and candour to thrive as inner gold.

Reflection seed: What parts of your leadership or work culture are overgrown with ego? Where could a little humility make space for your new inner gold to bloom?

Example: How Ground Truth Solutions (GTS)’s Constituent Voice reveals the important need to maintain a dialogue with communities that permits changes in the operational context. “Developing systematic feedback mechanisms: the Listen Learn Act project”.

4. Plan Like a Storm-Watcher: Eyes on the Clouds, Hands in the Dirt

In times of polycrisis, planning for sunshine alone is naïve. Resilient gardens – like resilient teams – prepare for heat, floods and pests. This is where foresight and collective imagination come in. Not to predict but to absorb what is possible and more.

When asked early and often, the “What if…?” and the “If we knew that this possibility could come to pass, what else would change for us all?” questions help the team prepare with grace for different disruptions and patterns, without aggressiveness.

Imagination and scenario crafting are not luxury tools; they are essential scaffolding ingredients that your team can use to respond to future storms. You’re repurposing anxiety into calm and readiness, like trellises offer a shape of support in wild weather.

Reflection seed: What future possibilities – beautiful or difficult – have you avoided imagining? What scaffolding could help you face them with less panic, more grace?

Example: During COVID-19, World Vision International engaged community leaders and global experts for rapid “Good Enough Online Context Analysis” (GEOCARR), surfacing unseen livelihood impacts beyond the health crisis.

4. Be the Earth Between Seasons: Let Quiet, Necessary Thinking Rest “In-Form” You

Resting is not quitting. Pauses for reflective practice matter. Structured and sober contemplation, like coaching, mentoring, super-vision or peer-to-peer dialoguing, is an essential “action” tool for impact leaders and their teams.

In a world of complexity and burnout, obsessed with speed and output, these intentional pauses are radical acts that lead to better insights, more understanding, better decisions, and more elastic adaptive strategies. Pauses enable healthier, less conflictual business cultures and the growth of deeper roots.

Reflection seed: When was the last time you truly paused, not to plan, but to notice? What might you hear if you made room for stillness?

Example: Teacups, Aching Teeth and Tendons: A Tale of Two Thinkers in a Room – What happens when two aching bodies meet in a space of radical attention? This is a story of dialogue as medicine, where time bends and thinking softens, where presence, imagination, and tenderness can reanimate our linear and controlling institutions.

So let’s recap your long-growing sprouts to soften conflict: