“It can be hard when a team experiences disagreements or conflicts, and often we feel like our training does not adequately prepare us to face those challenges. So one of my favorite ways to deal with conflict on a team is to create a safe space where we can begin to explore openly the roots of our conflicts… when I sense that there’s conflict or strife, and to talk about what’s difficult for each member of the team. And what this often invites us to do is inhabit a kind of space I think of as the compassionate imagination. When we invite that kind of compassion for one another, we can begin to attenuate some of the cognitive errors that we start to make in the assumptions that we make about one another and our intentions.”

Jillian Horton, physician