A leaf from the book of the Great Peacemaker

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is an alliance of (now) six Indigenous nations in northeastern North America: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and (later) Tuscarora.

They call themselves the People of the Longhouse — a metaphor for communal living and shared governance, built around unity, peace, and respect for tradition. Their oral constitution is known as the Great Law of Peace. It is one of the most enduring systems of consensual governance in human history.

But it did not begin that way.

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Once, the nations were at constant war. A time of great bloodshed, bitter rivalries and cruelty. A perennial conflict; a cycle of loss, grievance and retaliation. All based on identity. Each nation warred with the other, because that nation was exactly that: “the other”. Conflict for the sake of conflict.

Armistice eluded the nations until the conflict between them became so entrenched, it seemed any hope of peace was lost.

Then came a man who history would later know as the Great Peacemaker. He realised something that may feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has experienced organisational conflict: peace cannot be imposed, negotiated, or forced into existence. It has to be reconstructed.

The Great Peacemaker’s plan was simple. The nations would not be asked to abandon who they were, but to see themselves as part of something larger: the longhouse. A shared roof. A shared obligation to one another, symbolised by the Great Law of Peace.

Many of the ideals and symbols of the Great Law of Peace were later borrowed and incorporated into what was to become the Constitution of the United States of America.

This didn’t mean that the conflict ended overnight. Conflict is rarely snuffed out in one sitting. But rivalries became harder to sustain. The nations still existed, but the lines had been blurred. The boundary between “us” and “them” had fractured.

What the Great Peacemaker understood, long before the language existed for it, was that conflict is sustained less by disagreement than by identity. Once people organise themselves around who they are against, conflict becomes a default. But by giving the nations a shared political and moral home under a unified identity, it made retaliation cognitively and socially costly.

Over time, the people of the nations learnt that collaboration was more beneficial than conflict, and what disagreement remained focussed on issues, not people. Eventually, they stopped fighting. After all, they were all the People of the Longhouse.

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Most organisational conflict follows the same arc. People are no longer colleagues dealing with a shared difficulty; they are roles, departments, or functions defending territory. They are seen as “the other”, obstacles to be overcome or removed, not people to work with.  

The task is not to try to change people’s identity, but to make them part of something bigger. People have to be enlisted into a brand, and that brand has to have a clear, shared set of values. One roof: one longhouse. A brand is, after all, nothing more than a shared narrative.

The key is if you want conflict to de-escalate, you often have to change where people think they belong.