We recently worked with a financial institution that wanted to revamp its process for loan approval. Committees met for months without success, trying to understand why the process took so long, engendered so many disagreements, and created so much customer dissatisfaction. After interviewing several members of the team individually to determine what they thought the problem might be, we brought the group together to work on the issue. One of the first steps was to ask them to map the various conflicts that had emerged. This activity helped de-personalize the issues and helped everyone see what was contributing to their inability to work together. Hidden structural and values conflicts quickly emerged when they were able to step back from the problem and see the problem diagrammed in this way.
