Coaching practices for Designing a Calm Company Fried Hansson During Conflict

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• There’s real friction on my team
• Our meetings are all polite nods and "sounds good," and then the real opinions come out afterward in side conversations and quiet eye-rolls
• Something’s genuinely wrong here and there’s no time to coax everyone to a comfortable yes
• We solve the immediate thing but the same ugly dynamic underneath stays exactly the same, so the next disagreement plays out identically
• We set targets so big that only a heroic, all-out week ever counts as success, so a perfectly good week somehow reads as falling short

Practices that may help

1. Designing a Calm Company (Fried & Hansson)
   Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s "calm company" philosophy holds that urgency, interruption, and growth-at-all-costs are design choices, not necessities — and that deliberately designing against them produces both better work and a more sustainable organization. The practices are drawn from their books (Rework, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work) and direct Basecamp experience; they are practitioner-tested but not controlled-trial validated.
2. Storming: name the conflict without taking sides
   Surface the tension that’s already there rather than managing it away.
   Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
3. Engage in productive ideological conflict
   Teams that avoid conflict don’t avoid disagreement — they bury it, where it grows into resentment and bad decisions.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
4. Competing (assertive, uncooperative)
   Pursue your own position firmly when speed, principle, or stakes outweigh the relationship cost.
   The Five Conflict-Resolution Styles
5. Transform the relationship, not just the issue
   Use each conflict as an opportunity to raise the quality of the relationship itself.
   The Third Alternative, Made Practical
6. Set realistic goals and chip away at them — resist "crush it" culture
   Aspirational goals that require heroic effort normalize crisis; realistic goals with steady progress normalize calm.
   Designing a Calm Company (Fried & Hansson)
7. Default to asynchronous communication
   Treat real-time communication as the exception, not the default — most things do not require an immediate response.
   Designing a Calm Company (Fried & Hansson)
8. Develop challenger safety — dissent and challenge are welcomed, not punished
   Create an environment where questioning decisions, challenging leaders, and dissenting are genuinely safe.
   The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
9. Disagree and commit — reduce the decision drag of endless debate
   Decisions that are made and executed at 80% confidence are almost always better than decisions endlessly refined but never taken.
   Designing a Calm Company (Fried & Hansson)
10. Separate the person from the problem
    Treat the conflict as a problem you face together, not a contest you fight each other.
    The Third Alternative, Made Practical

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