Separate the People from the Problem

Giving clear feedback, as you saw in the last chapter, is one active skill. But teams do not only trade feedback; they also disagree, sometimes sharply, about what to do. When that happens, the conversation can slide away from the problem you are trying to solve and onto the people trying to solve it, and that is the moment a useful disagreement curdles into a bad one. This chapter teaches the first move for keeping that slide from happening: separating the people from the problem.

Why a Disagreement Isn’t an Attack

Picture a small team planning a community event. One person wants to spend the tiny budget on better food; another wants to spend it on advertising so more people actually show up. Voices rise a little, and it starts to feel like a fight. But nothing has actually gone wrong yet. The two of them simply want different things, and that is all that is happening.

A disagreement is what you have when people want different things, or see the same situation differently. It is not a sign that the team is broken, that someone is being difficult, or that somebody has to lose. In fact, a team that never disagrees is usually one where people have quietly stopped saying what they think, which is far more dangerous than a bit of open friction out in the light.

The goal in a disagreement is not to win it. It is to reach a good outcome, the best answer the group can find, and ideally one everyone can live with. That single shift, from “how do I win this?” to “how do we solve this?”, changes the whole shape of the conversation. Winning leaves someone defeated and quietly resentful; solving leaves the team with a better decision and its relationships intact.

It looks that way, but avoiding them usually costs more than it saves. The problem does not disappear, it just goes underground, decisions drift to whoever pushes hardest, and the resentment builds where no one can address it. A disagreement handled in the open is how a team actually protects the peace, not breaks it.

Separate the People from the Problem

When a disagreement heats up, two very different things get tangled together: the problem you are trying to solve, and the people you are solving it with. The single most useful move for handling disagreement well is to pull those two apart and treat them as separate tracks.

This idea comes from Roger Fisher and William Ury, who wrote a well-known book called Getting to Yes about working through conflict without it turning into a battle. Their phrase for it is simple: separate the people from the problem. Go after the problem as hard as you like; go easy on the person.

In practice that means being soft on the people and hard on the problem at the same time. You stay warm, respectful, and curious toward the person, while being direct, even relentless, about the issue itself. “I think this plan will run us over budget” keeps the heat on the problem. “You clearly didn’t think this through” moves the heat onto the person, and the instant it lands there, they stop weighing your point and start defending themselves.

The tell is small but reliable. Watch for the word “you” aimed at someone’s character: “you never listen,” “you always do this,” “you don’t care.” Each one quietly swaps the problem for the person. Trade them for words about the issue, what you need, what you are worried about, what the group is trying to achieve, and the same disagreement suddenly has somewhere useful to go.

Reuse Your Steady-and-SBI Skills Here Too

Here is the good news: you already have the tools that make this possible. You do not need anything new, just two skills you met earlier in the course, pointed now at a disagreement.

The first is staying steady, from Part 1. A disagreement sets off the same heat as hard feedback, the tight chest and the reply already forming, and the same move calms it: notice the reaction, pause for a breath, name it to yourself, then respond. Staying steady is what buys you the choice to aim at the problem instead of firing back at the person.

The second is observable-behavior language, the camera test from the SBI chapter. When you describe what actually happened rather than what it supposedly says about someone, you keep the disagreement on the problem almost automatically. “The report went out with last month’s numbers” is a fact you can both look at; “you were careless” is a verdict that invites a fight. The same discipline that makes feedback easier to hear makes a disagreement easier to solve.

Watch a Clash Get De-Personalized

Let us watch the move in action. A small amateur photography collective, six friends who shoot together and put on one exhibition a year, is arguing about how to run this year’s show. Two of them, Marcus and Lena, are going at it.

Marcus wants to hang the photos by theme; Lena wants to hang them by photographer. The argument has stopped being about the wall. “You always have to do things your way,” Marcus says. “And you never actually listen to anyone else’s idea,” Lena fires back. Both of them have quietly swapped the problem, how to hang the show, for the person sitting across the table.

Then Nia, another member, steps in and does one thing: she separates the people from the problem. First she stays warm with both of them: “Okay, you both obviously care a lot about how this looks, which is exactly why the show is any good.” Then she moves the heat back onto the actual issue: “The real question is what we want a visitor to feel walking through it. Can we start there, instead of with the hanging method?”

Notice what she did and did not do. She did not decide who was right, and she did not smooth the disagreement away; Marcus and Lena still want different things. She simply took the argument off the two of them as people and put it back on the shared problem they are all there to solve. With the target changed, Marcus can say what theme-hanging gives a visitor, Lena can say the same for photographer-hanging, and the group finally has something it can work with instead of a fight to referee.

Your Turn!

Now you try the move on paper.

The setup. You are part of a weekend hiking club that plans its own routes. For the next outing, two members disagree: one wants a long, challenging trail, the other wants a shorter, easier one so newer hikers can keep up. In the group chat, one of them writes, “You’re so selfish, you only ever think about the hardcore hikers and never about anyone else.”

Your task. In a few lines, do two things in writing:

• rewrite that line so it goes after the problem instead of the person, keeping the relationship intact while staying honest about the disagreement;

• name, in one sentence, the actual problem the group needs to solve underneath the clash.

Work this out in your own words, from your own read of the moment, rather than asking an AI tool to rewrite it for you. Turning a personal jab into a problem-focused line is the exact skill you are building here.

Let’s Recap!

• A disagreement is just people wanting different things or seeing a situation differently; it is normal, and often useful.

• The goal is not to win the disagreement but to reach a good outcome the whole team can live with.

• Fisher and Ury’s core move is to separate the people from the problem: be soft on the people, hard on the problem.

• Aiming your words at the person, as in “you never listen,” turns a solvable problem into a personal fight; aim them at the issue instead.

• Staying steady and using observable-behavior language, both from earlier in the course, are what keep a disagreement on the problem.

Separating the people from the problem clears the air, but it does not yet settle what to do. In the next chapter we go one level deeper, past what each side says it wants to why they want it, and find the shared ground hiding underneath.