S3 Ep5 - Pip Murphy, Principal Consultant, Serendis Leadership

What if the conflict your team is avoiding is actually the key to better decisions and stronger performance? In this conversation, Maud Lindley speaks with Pip Murphy, Principal Consultant at Serendis Leadership, about one of the most critical challenges in today's workplace: how to navigate conflict and disagreement constructively. Drawing on her career across trading floors, top-tier consulting, and executive leadership, Pip reframes conflict not as a threat, but as a diversification of ideas. Just as portfolio diversification lowers financial risk, diversity of thought leads to better decisions. The challenge is that our human instincts work against us. Pip explores the fight, flight, and fawn responses that drive workplace conflict, from open aggression to invisible patterns like groupthink, white-anting, and political manoeuvring. She shares a practical framework for diagnosing the root cause of conflict and introduces the concept of above and below the line thinking to help leaders guide others through high-stakes conversations. For mentors, her advice is clear: pause, diagnose, and focus on the person in front of you, not the ghost of the difficult colleague. If your organisation is serious about performance, this conversation will change the way you think about disagreement.