Your three-person team has six weeks to bring a new service to market. All three are good at their jobs. Lately they have been bad at working together.

Lea wants to understand what clients really need. Every week she brings new interview notes, and every week they raise new questions. Ben has ideas, lots of them, and on Thursday he redrew the plan the team agreed on Monday. Kerim wants to ship. He has the launch plan, the timeline and the vendor contracts ready, and he is losing patience.

In this morning’s meeting, Kerim snapped: "We have been going in circles for three weeks." Lea closed her laptop and left the room. Ben looked at you.

You lead the team.

This case moves with you. Make your first call, and the story jumps ahead to show what your decision set in motion. Then you decide again, and your path leads to its own ending. Finally, compare your route with our AI’s and with the research, and see which problem-solving style your choices reveal.

You & AI · Case 4 · An interactive story

  1. 1Your call
  2. 2What happens next
  3. 3Your next move
  4. 4Your type, our AI and the research

Your first decision: what do you do?

Our AI replies to what you write. Please leave out personal details. Privacy

The story continues from your choice. Each path unfolds differently.

Your second decision: what do you do now?

The fix

One possible ending, written by our editors. Real teams vary.

Your path

Our AI replies

Reading your reasoning

Written live by Ati, our AI editor.

Three people, three ways to solve a problem

Look at the team again. Lea, Ben and Kerim mostly disagree about order: what comes first, and when to stop. Each of them stands for a style many of us know from ourselves.

The Clarifier

Wants to understand the problem before anyone solves it. Asks the questions others skip. Like Lea.

The Creator

Sees options everywhere and keeps improving the idea. Brings energy and new angles. Like Ben.

The Deliverer

Wants decisions to stay decided and the work to ship. Turns plans into results. Like Kerim.

A playful mirror based on your two clicks. Most of us use all three styles, depending on the day and the task.

Our AI's call: C

"Lea, Ben and Kerim are arguing about sequence, and each believes the others are the obstacle. Splitting the work into phases with fixed windows gives every strength its time and takes the personal sting out of the conflict. The open question is what happens when someone’s phase is over and they still have something to say."

"Where I am unsure: if the team has never talked openly about how differently they work, I would spend one meeting on that first, as in option B."

What the research says

The fight is often about the task, and then it turns personal. Karen Jehn distinguished conflict about the work from conflict about people.¹ A later meta-analysis by Frank de Wit, Lindred Greer and Jehn found that conflict about relationships consistently hurt team performance, while conflict about the task had no clear overall effect, and was more helpful when it stayed separate from personal friction.²

People solve problems in different styles. Psychologist Michael Kirton showed that people differ in how they approach problems: some prefer to improve what exists, others to reinvent it. Differences in style, he argued, are a common source of friction between capable colleagues, and they become useful once a team understands them.³

That makes C the strongest structural answer, and B the strongest human one. A works for the deadline and costs you the insight you will need next. The research above does not test this exact scenario; we connect it to the case from practice.

The AI's call and its replies are written by Ati, our AI editor, and published unedited. Answers are stored anonymously. How we use AI · Privacy

Talent Takeaway

When capable people keep clashing, look for the pattern before you look for the culprit. Often one person wants to understand the problem, one wants to invent the solution, and one wants to get it done. Give each phase its time, agree on when it ends, and make room for ideas that arrive late.

¹ Jehn, K. A. (1995). A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), 256–282. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393638

² de Wit, F. R. C., Greer, L. L., & Jehn, K. A. (2012). The paradox of intragroup conflict: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 360–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024844

³ Kirton, M. (1976). Adaptors and innovators: A description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61(5), 622–629. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.61.5.622

Further reading: Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002), a fable about trust and productive conflict; Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2018), on the climate teams need to disagree well.