It is difficult to create an accurate visual model of something as complex, unspoken, and chaotic as conflict, yet it has been quite helpful for me, and for mediators world-wide, to be able to diagram the most common responses to conflict, identify their sources, and explain, in an intuitively compelling way, their underlying logic. For this, we can thank Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann.
Originally conceptualized by professors Robert Blake and Jane Mouton in the 1960’s, the idea of using a Cartesian diagram to show typical conflict responses, arrayed along two-dimensional X and Y axes, allowed researchers to simplify these otherwise baffling conflict behaviors, while retaining their innate complexity and highlighting their implicit logic and dynamic possibilities.
In 1974, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann dramatically revised and fine-tuned the Blake and Mouton chart, creating their highly successful “Conflict Mode Instrument,” which has now been taught to thousands of mediators in the U.S. and around the world, and been used by many organizations to test for and “inventory” the conflict styles and preferences of countless employees.
At a basic level, the Thomas-Kilmann Instrument asserts that conflicted individuals, organizations, and even systems will end up assuming one of five fundamental attitudes or orientations in response to conflict, based on their responses to two variables: a Y axis showing concerns for people, and an X axis showing concerns for results. As described by Thomas and Kilmann, these twin concerns lead people to coalesce into one the following five conflict responses or styles:
Each of these approaches results in fundamentally different types of behaviors and leads to differing outcomes, in individuals, organizations, and systems. Each encourages and discourages, permits and forbids, rationalizes and renders senseless different sets of reactions and responses. Each binds people to one another in significantly different ways. Each results in vastly differing actions, attitudes, and intentions, each with its’ own innate logic, rationales, sustainability, adaptability, degrees of freedom, levels of trust, complexity, ability to solve problems, ease of implementation, and time required for resolution, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
By using this diagram, we can quickly notice that our primary responses can be shifted significantly, either by increasing our concerns for people, or our concerns for results, and that collaboration, as a result, as a relationship, and as a process, occurs only when we achieve the highest levels of both. These useful categories can be further elaborated and (using my words) reveal a deeper logic that connects them with a larger analysis of conflict behaviors. Thus, it is possible for people in conflict to behave:
Applying this analysis, we can ask useful questions that reveal other implicit features of these responses. For example, we may ask: what kind of person are we likely to become and how would we be likely to feel if all we ever did in life was use just one of these responses? We could then see that if we only avoided all our lives, we would likely become distant and feel uncaring; if we are only competitive all our lives, we would likely become driven and feel angry, etc. We will; then notice that the only response with no significant negative lifetime downsides is collaboration.
Or, we can ask when in life we are most likely to learn and become skilled in each of these responses, and see that we learn avoidance and accommodation first, aggression and compromise later, and collaboration last, and that the level of skill in building trusting relationships and achieving results lasting often go hand-in-hand.
We can also recognize that when people, organizations, or systems become stuck in avoidance or accommodation as their preferred conflict styles or responses, the remedy might be for the mediator or conflict coach to ask questions that increase their concern for results. Or if they are stuck in avoidance or competition, it might be useful for us to ask questions that increase their concern for people; and if they are stuck in avoidance or compromise, it may be helpful if we ask questions that increase both.
There are many other possible uses for the Thomas-Kilmann diagram, yet there is one limitation in the chart that may not be immediately obvious. That is that axes in the chart describe only positive values for concerns for people and concerns for results, yet we know from our experience with people in conflict, that many choose or are driven to adopt negative attitudes toward either or both. It therefore occurred to me to ask: what would happen if this chart were expanded by extending the X and Y axes into negative spaces, allowing us to assign negative values to both sets of concerns?
In doing so, I found that I was better able to understand a much larger and broader range of common conflict responses, and to see why they feel so enduringly negative. My version of this expanded diagram maintains the existing Thomas-Kilmann parameters, which are located in the upper right quadrant, to which I propose adding a number of additional conflict responses, which I assigned to each of the three added negative quadrants using words that felt right to me, that carried into negative values the X and Y concerns for people and results used by Thomas and Kilmann. My proposed extended diagram looks like this:
This chart allows us to explain a broader range of destructive conflict responses, and reveals how people, organizations, and systems can easily get stuck in negative concerns; how they can can slip into violence, revenge, and hostile behaviors that become self-reinforcing, emotionally traumatic, and harmful, both and to oneself and to others; and how they become much more resistant to being shifted in transformational directions.
Notice also that there are many more negative than positive options, which helps us explain, simply as a consequence of the law of probabilities, what we can think of as “social (or relational) entropy,” and show why it is far easier to destroy trust and collaborative relationships than it is to create them, as there are many more options available to people to respond to conflicts in negative ways.
This expanded diagram also interestingly allows us to adopt, as a mathematical metaphor, what are known as “imaginary numbers,” which consist of multiples of the square root of -1, an operation that is impossible for real numbers as a negative multiplied by a negative must be a positive. [For more discussion, see the chapter on “The Metaphor of Mathematics” in my recent book, The Magic in Mediation.].
Using this metaphor, we can then recognize that the Y-axis is a 90-degree rotation of the one-dimensional number line, which can now be rotated three more times by 90 degrees to create a circle at 360 degrees. This can help us explain some of the innate complexity and dynamic qualities of conflict, offer an explanation for some transformational results, and possibly view people’s conflict responses from the perspective of a higher dimensionality, which brings with it a higher “degree of freedom,” as can be seen in the following chart:
The idea of conflict behaviors rotating in a higher dimensional space based on the metaphor of imaginary numbers allows us to gain some insights into the transformational possibilities of mediation, which often consists not merely of moving in a linear fashion along the X or Y axes, but shifting conversations in a circular direction, from quadrant to quadrant, and from one axis to another.
It might also be possible for us to expand this metaphor and include still higher dimensions, as in mathematics, where “quarternions” (discovered by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843) create a Z axis and create three-dimensional rotations (used often today in computer graphics and MRIs); and “octonions” (discovered by Hamilton’s friend John T. Graves and Arthur Cayley, also in 1843) allow imaginary numbers to be expressed in still more complex eight-dimensional fields (used today in string theory and quantum mechanics). As metaphors, these ideas and mathematical objects may reveal unknown potential paths to transformational techniques and understandings.
What is now required is more discussion, research, and testing, similar to that originally conducted by Blake and Mouton, and later by Thomas and Kilmann, in which we try these ideas out in real conflicts and explore ways mediators and others might use them to help explain what makes conflicts intractable, show how easily polarization turns toxic, and perhaps suggest fresh ways of overcoming impasses.
In the meantime, mediators may now have a new way of modeling conflict that adds to the Thomas-Kilmann diagram, deepens our appreciation for the mysteries of conflict, and points in the direction of more targeted and successful interventions.
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