You’re trying to resolve a conflict in content strategy. What’s the most common mistake you might make?

One of the most common mistakes is: Ignoring Stakeholder Input: Failing to adequately consider the perspectives, concerns, and insights of all stakeholders involved in the content strategy process. This could include internal team members, clients, users, subject matter experts, and other relevant parties. Ignoring stakeholder input may result in overlooking valuable ideas, perspectives, and requirements, leading to suboptimal content decisions and potentially exacerbating the conflict. Effective conflict resolution in content strategy often requires active listening, collaboration, and consensus-building among stakeholders to ensure that diverse viewpoints are acknowledged and integrated into the decision-making process.

Content strategy needs to be built around what the brand, product or service needs at that milestone in its journey. All the people perspectives, targets, positioning, even mandatories sometimes will start falling into place when the work is viewed from that lens. Sometimes we tend to walk into a strategy with our personality and get a little off-track with the intended goal. It's imperative to look at the strategy from the perspective of the task at hand. This helps to define the situation with clarity, and then lead it to various possibilities before choosing the best suited way to go ahead.

Content strategy also poses a challenge if the entire landscape is hazy. This means that at every milestone we need to be open to ask the right questions however simple or controversial they may sound. Did a situation change? Who new that such a hiccup can arise? Are we malleable to reorient to that sudden deviation? Do we have a backup plan if the response is not on expected lines? These challenges can only be handled if there is a transparency in asking the right questions at the right time and be. Remember, friction is the sum of many forces and we never know where the next twist may arise from, if we don't prepare for it.

A key hurdle in fixing content strategy conflicts is poor communication. Effective communication means being clear, brief, and polite while sharing ideas and feedback. It's also about choosing the right words and style for your audience. Good communication helps avoid confusion and mistakes, making it easier to explain your content strategy’s benefits and challenges to others.

I believe in most conflicts, communicating effectively can help you resolve most stuff. Make sure both ends at the conflict are aligned that they're trying to resolve the same problem, which helps in resolving further conflicts that might arise with a mutual agreement. Put your opinions across in a suggestive manner and always have your ears open to listen to the other side. You might just land on a eureka while resolving a conflict.

Communication is key to every transaction, be it your peers, colleagues, or any team member. It's more than a dialogue, it pushes the team to the openness and oneness needed to go on the same path. At the same time, it's also the reason many debates surface. Reasons could be many, stretching from opinions, timelines, deliverables and even interactions. Content strategy by itself warrants many people giving their feedback and sharing their aspirations. It becomes very important to have a filter that can lead to constructive debates and the best possible solutions. Being iterative in nature, it is important to have clear communication points, formats and collate that info for the benefit of the task at hand and achieve productive results.