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New View EDU Episode 84: Good Conflict with Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

March 24, 2026

Available March 24, 2026

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

Is conflict always something to avoid? Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, journalists and trained conflict mediators, are on a mission to answer that question and to help shift how we recognize and engage with conflict in our everyday lives. They join host Morva McDonald to reflect on how conflict shapes everything from our news cycle to our relationships and why we need to develop new skills to move toward healthier forms of resolution. 

Amanda Ripley headshotHelene Hofer New View EDUAmanda and Hélène began their work at Good Conflict because they realized they could no longer engage in the business-as-usual journalism that shaped their careers. They share their journeys from working within the news cycle to stepping out of it and questioning how stories in the media are actively contributing to deeper polarization. They eventually began working with other journalists, news outlets, government officials, corporations, and nonprofit organizations to upend the system and rewire the way dominant cultural narratives fuel conflict. And very quickly, Amanda says, they realized that educators were actually their number one clients.

The pair describe their work with educators as a two-way street. Teachers and administrators come to their workshops highly motivated to manage conflict more effectively at all levels. But also, having the experience of managing and mediating conflict in the classroom and with parents and stakeholders often means that educators can impart just as much wisdom about the process as the workshop leaders. Amanda notes that while journalists and other types of clients are often hesitant to engage with ideas around conflict, educators come with a solution-oriented mindset and don’t fear the challenge.

That openness to the process is helpful in getting from the typical high-conflict disposition that most of us operate under to the “good conflict” space Amanda and Hélène strive for. They describe high conflict as being a more natural state of affairs in society right now, defined by its reliance on binary thinking: good vs. evil, us vs. them. They note that high conflict usually involves disgust and contempt and diminishes our capacity to think and behave rationally. Unfortunately, it also tends to be a self-perpetuating cycle—a doom loop that’s hard to exit once you’re in it.

Good conflict, on the other hand, is actually healthy for us. It’s useful and makes a contribution to our well-being and to our relationships with others. Hélène points out that it can still be quite stressful and difficult to navigate—but it’s also productive. To engage in good conflict means to take the time to consider others’ perspectives, recognizing that we neither have all the answers nor can survive and move forward alone. We need to build communities of people with differing viewpoints who can work together to stay out of the perpetual loop of high conflict that so often dominates. Hélène and Amanda recommend becoming “conflict-fluent,” rising to the place where we can experience a wide array of emotions and have difficult conversations but remain open to gaining a greater understanding of other perspectives or of the situation at large.

How to do that is the challenge, of course. Hélène and Amanda share several observations and techniques, covering their advice for dealing with “conflict entrepreneurs,” finding common ground, mapping conflict (and understanding our own places on those maps), and identifying the “understories” that lurk beneath difficult interactions. They discuss how their work helps people from all sectors learn and practice conflict fluency and how they hope to continue to influence positive cultural change. Ultimately, Hélène says, this work isn’t going to be easy, but we have to keep trying. 

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Morva, Hélène, and Amanda explore in this episode include:

  • What is the definition of “good conflict?” How does it compare to other types of conflict that we see every day?
  • What is the role of educators in conflict resolution work? How does good conflict show up in school communities?
  • What are some of the common fire-starters and understories that contribute to high-conflict situations, and how can we understand them better and transform the way we respond?
  • How can we actively change the stories we tell and engage with to help shut down the perpetual cycle of high conflict that dominates our cultural spaces right now?

Episode Highlights

  • “So with good conflict, we might have these conversations where our emotions are all over the map, but at least we're experiencing them, than just stuck in this loop of, you know, feeling revenge and wanting revenge and deep anger. But there are these flashes of surprise and good conflict when we're having these good-conflict conversations. There are these moments of clarity, opportunities for humor. Who would have thought that potentially that could happen, but there are sparks of that. There's this openness to, that I mentioned, to hearing the other side. So our emotions kind of go on this roller coaster ride, but we get to a place of understanding and it's understanding something on a deeper level about ourselves, about the other person, or about the situation that we're facing.” (12:29)
  • “One of the things that we work with people to identify in that map are these four fire-starters, which are things that tend to really distort conflict and make things go sideways very quickly. And so one is humiliation. And another is conflict entrepreneurs. These are people who exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. And then corruption. So when institutions aren't trusted, whether they should be or not, that's another kind of tripwire into high conflict. And then false binaries or splitting, kind of when you separate people into two camps, good and evil. So you see that in how we talk about people, right?” (17:46)
  • “Oftentimes with conflict entrepreneurs, there is some kind of internal pain that just has not been dealt with, right? And they are spreading that internal pain around and around and around. And I think, to this idea of, well, my gosh, they're so destructive. How in the world do we even think about managing them? I think just recognizing first that there is some deep pain there that they are not aware of, that's a helpful first step in thinking about developing a plan to manage them.” (23:32)
  • “We can't find the news that we want to consume. And we are tired of feeling frustrated by the way many outlets cover controversy and division. And we understand why that is, because we did the same thing for many years. But now that we've stepped away from it, it's easier for us to have that meta view, right? Like we can kind of see how this is actually…not only is it not helping, but it's not that interesting. Like it's not even interesting, which is the number one thing that stories should be.” (40:55)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guests

Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author and an investigative journalist. Her projects combine storytelling with data to help illuminate hard problems—and solutions. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Amanda also spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris, helping Time win two National Magazine Awards. She has reported from Colombia, South Korea, Finland, Poland, the United Kingdom, Israel, Jordan, Oman, and France. Ripley is also a trained conflict mediator and a (less well-trained) soccer coach. She lives with her family in Washington, DC. 

Hélène Biandudi Hofer is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and trained conflict mediator. For nearly a decade, she led an award-winning news magazine program focused on exploring remedies to societal challenges. Her work spans investigating police reform in Camden, NJ, to examining education opportunities in South Sudan. Hélène developed and managed the Solutions Journalism Network’s Complicating the Narratives (CTN) project. CTN is a journalistic practice that can transform news coverage about controversial issues. She trained more than 1,000 journalists across 125 newsrooms throughout the world. Hélène has worked with CBS, NPR, and PBS. She credits her passion for journalism to her Nkoko (great-grandmother), who was the oral historian of the Biandudi family in Kinshasa, DRC.