Why the Same Problem Keeps Coming Back in Your Business
- Dr. Sean Stokes
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
If a conflict has been resolved more than once, it hasn't been resolved — it's been managed. There's a difference, and it matters.
You've had this conversation before.
Not this exact conversation, maybe. But the same tension, the same dynamic, the same moment where someone says something that should have been said a year ago — and then the same half-resolution that holds for a few weeks before the whole thing quietly resets. Different people, sometimes. Different details. Same pattern.
If you've been running a business for any length of time, you know what this feels like. You address the problem. Things settle. You move on. Then six months later you're sitting in the same room having what feels like the same conversation, wondering why nothing ever actually changes.
It doesn't change because you've been treating a pattern like a problem.
Those are not the same thing.
Problems Have Solutions. Patterns Have Systems.
A problem is an isolated event with a cause and a fix. A pattern is something different — it's a recurring dynamic that lives inside a *relationship system*, and it keeps returning because the system keeps producing it.
This is the foundational insight of family systems theory, developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen and applied extensively to organizational life by rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman. Friedman argued that the emotional patterns that damage families and the emotional patterns that damage organizations are fundamentally the same — because both are relationship systems, and relationship systems follow predictable rules.
When a conflict keeps recurring in your business, Friedman would say you're not looking at a personnel problem or a communication problem. You're looking at the system doing what systems do: reproducing the conditions that maintain it.
*"The same emotional patterns that wreck families also wreck organizations,"* Friedman wrote in* A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix*. "The problem is almost never about technique or intelligence — it's about the emotional regression of the system itself."
That's a clinical way of saying: the issue isn't what people know or don't know. It's the pattern they're all participating in — including you.
What the Research Shows About Recurring Business Conflict
This isn't just theory. Research published in *Family Business Review* — the leading peer-reviewed journal on family enterprise — has documented how conflict in small and family-owned businesses follows specific escalation patterns. Conflicts that appear to be about tasks or decisions frequently migrate: what starts as a disagreement about a business process becomes a relationship conflict, and what starts as a dyadic tension between two people expands to pull in additional parties, spread to new contexts, and harden over time into something that feels permanent.
The 2025 meta-analysis "The Anatomy of Family Business Conflict" (*Journal of Family Business Strategy*) found that the same conflict categories — relationship, task, and process — appear repeatedly across generations in the same organizations. The faces change. The pattern doesn't.
And the cost is concrete. According to data from Gallup, conflict-related turnover costs U.S. businesses over $1 trillion annually. Employees who experience unresolved workplace conflict are twice as likely to consider leaving within twelve months compared to those who don't. In a business with fifteen people, losing two or three employees to a conflict pattern you've never fully addressed doesn't show up on a balance sheet — but it shows up everywhere else.
Why Your Fixes Haven't Fixed It
Here's what most business owners do when a conflict pattern surfaces:
They address the behavior they can see. They have the conversation, set the expectation, maybe make a personnel change. Things settle. They move on.
What they haven't addressed is the *function* that conflict was serving in the system.
In family systems theory, conflict rarely exists in isolation. It's almost always serving a purpose — diffusing tension between two other parties, stabilizing an uncomfortable imbalance of power, giving voice to something the system needs to express but hasn't been able to say directly. Remove the conflict without addressing its function, and the system will generate a new version of it. Different person, same role. Different argument, same emotional structure.
This is what Bowen called *triangulation* — the tendency of any two-person tension to pull in a third party to stabilize itself. In a business, that third party might be a long-term employee, a family member, a new hire who keeps not working out, or even the owner — drawn into conflicts that are really about something else entirely.
The conflict you keep having isn't the conflict you need to address.
What Actually Interrupts a Pattern
Patterns don't change through better communication alone — though better communication is part of it. They change when the system itself changes: when roles are clarified, when hidden loyalties are named, when the function the conflict has been serving gets addressed directly rather than worked around.
That requires a different kind of looking. Not at the latest incident. At the structure underneath it.
Here are five questions worth sitting with:
1. Who benefits from this pattern staying unresolved? Not consciously — but systemically. Whose position is protected by the ambiguity?
2. Who gets pulled into this conflict every time it surfaces? That person is almost certainly triangulated into a tension that isn't primarily theirs.
3. What would have to be said — or decided — if this pattern were actually resolved? The resistance to resolution is usually resistance to that conversation.
4. Has the cast of characters changed but the dynamic stayed the same? If the conflict preceded the current players, it lives in the structure, not the people.
5. What role are you playing in maintaining it? This one is the hardest — and often the most important.
What This Kind of Support Looks Like
Working through a pattern like this isn't the same as conflict resolution training or communication coaching. It requires someone who can see the whole system — not just the presenting conflict — and help you understand what's actually maintaining it.
That's the work I do with small business owners through the Business Relationship Assessment: a structured diagnostic that maps the relational dynamics of your organization, names the patterns that are costing you, and gives you specific recommendations for what to change. Not just the surface behavior — the structure underneath it.
If the same problem keeps coming back, it's not a coincidence. It's information. And it's workable.
A final word for the business owners reading this who also hold a faith perspective: the book of Proverbs returns again and again to the theme of counsel and discernment — not because wisdom is weakness, but because seeing clearly requires help. *"Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed"* (Proverbs 15:22). The leader who can look honestly at the patterns in their organization — and seek the kind of help that addresses them at the root — is exercising exactly the kind of wisdom that text describes.
If you're ready to look at what's actually happening and do something about it, I'd welcome the conversation.
SOURCES
1. Friedman, E. H. (2007). *A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix*. Seabury Books. [admiredleadership.com summary](https://admiredleadership.com/book-summaries/a-failure-of-nerve/)
2. Kallmuenzer, A., Kraus, S., & Filser, M. (2020). The anatomy of family business conflict. *Journal of Family Business Strategy*. [ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877858525000014)
3. Harvey, M., & Evans, R. (1994). Family business and multiple levels of conflict. *Family Business Review*, 7(4), 331–348. [Springer](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-62852-3_3)
4. Gallup. (2024). State of the Global Workplace. [gallup.com](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx)
5. Peaceful Leaders Academy. (2025). The true cost of workplace conflict. [peacefulleadersacademy.com](https://peacefulleadersacademy.com/blog/cost-of-workplace-conflict/)
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