A Mir Kiss?
This is a (considered) brain dump on what I think the issues are in the Mir Kiss case study.
I think they go well beyond conflict. Conflict is the result and the symptom, not the cause.
The causes were set well before the conflict issues arose through a number of spectacular
failures of leadership, engagement, team development etc.
Central issues:
1: Contracting
It appears that Ms Lapierre and the other international researchers didn’t fully understand
what they were signing up for. This is probably because the initial contracting between the
IBMP and the researchers was not done properly.
Regardless of whether the researchers were employees of IBMP, or external contractors,
they became part of the overall ‘organisation’ for the time that they were part of the
experiment. As such it was vital that there should be clear, unambiguous statements of
expectation from all parties involved. In the James Berg article it is mentioned that the
agreement was that English would be the common language, but it transpired that the
experiment controllers didn’t speak any English.
Whilst it is mentioned that there were stringent tests applied to select people for the
‘mission’ it is possible that these were either flawed form the start and did not test for the
appropriate aptitudes, or did not identify possible issues that might arise when a
multi-cultural and mixed gender crew was to be put in place.
The contracting aspect I am referring to here is more about the ‘social’ contract rather than
the ‘legal’ contract (although it appears there may have been a legal contract as the James
Berg article makes reference to Ms Lapierre breaching here contract to not discuss issues
openly.
I think the central point here is that when incidents occurred – the fight and the sexual
harassment – the researchers did not really know what to do, so they wrote a letter of
complaint that was duly ignored. Why? There was no proper foundation in place and
agreement between the parties as to what to do when something goes wrong. Consequently
the researchers were left even more disturbed and frustrated and the Russian scientists had
no intention of addressing the issue.
If the contracting in an organisation, team, research project is not done properly from the
start the seeds are sown for future problems and you cannot expect decent employee
engagement (McShane p.168).
2: Leadership
There was a lack of leadership I this whole process. As Ms Lapierre pointed out in one of
