Which Conflict Resolution Technique Should You Use?
Ask which conflict technique to use and the received answer arrives quickly: collaborate. Work through it together, find the solution that meets both sets of needs, and everybody leaves better off. That is good advice about a third of the time and actively wrong often enough to be worth examining, because collaboration is slow, it needs both parties to want it, and it assumes the disagreement is the kind that has a shared answer waiting inside it.
Choosing well starts with a diagnosis rather than a preference. Most of the work sits in establishing what the disagreement is actually about.
What the disagreement is actually about
Three kinds turn up on projects, and they respond to completely different handling.
Some disagreements are about facts. Two people believe different things about the world: how long the test takes, whether the part is within tolerance, what the contract says. These feel like conflicts and are not. They are settled by going and finding out, and any negotiation, compromise or relationship-building spent on one is time thrown away. The tell is that both parties are certain and neither of them has the document.
Some are about interests. Two people want different outcomes and both positions are legitimate: production wants the aircraft to move, quality wants the rework done, and neither of them is being unreasonable. These are where collaboration earns its cost, because there is usually a third option nobody has articulated and it takes a conversation to find it.
Some are about priorities, which means about whose objective wins. When two legitimate interests cannot both be satisfied, no amount of discussion produces an answer, because the answer is a decision and it belongs to somebody. Teams that keep talking in this situation are avoiding an escalation they have decided counts as a failure.
Four conditions that pick the response
Section 5 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition treats interpersonal and group techniques as project tools, and choosing among them comes down to four conditions that are usually knowable inside a minute.
How much time there is. Collaboration takes hours or days. Where a decision is needed in the next twenty minutes because something is about to happen, a direct decision by whoever holds the authority is the right response, and it is not a failure of leadership. Safety situations are the clearest case and they are not the only one.
What is at stake in the outcome. Where the substantive result matters a great deal, the response has to protect the result. Where it matters little and the relationship matters more, accommodating, which means genuinely accepting the other position, is cheap and buys something real. Project managers under-use this, because conceding feels like losing, and it is the most efficient thing available when you are wrong or when the issue matters far more to them than to you.
How much the relationship has to carry afterwards. A supplier you will work with for three years and an auditor you will meet twice are different situations, and a technique that wins today at the cost of the next eleven months is a poor trade in the first case and irrelevant in the second.
Where the authority sits. Some disagreements cannot be settled by the people having them, and spotting that early is a service to everybody involved. The useful move is to name it: this is a decision about which objective takes priority, it belongs to the sponsor, and here is what each of us would say to them.
A bracket and thirty-six hours
An aircraft sat at a station on an assembly line with thirty-six hours before it moved to the next one. A bracket had been fitted with one flange standing proud of its mating face by a small amount, outside the drawing tolerance, and a shim stack had been proposed. Production wanted acceptance and a shim. Quality wanted the bracket removed and refitted, which was eleven hours of work and would miss the move.
It looked like a textbook conflict of interests, and the two managers spent an hour and a half on it, which is what people do. The project manager who joined them asked a different question: what does the stress case say about the as-built condition? Nobody in the room knew. The disagreement had been about a fact the whole time, and the fact was two hours away in the stress office.
The answer came back marginal. The as-built condition was acceptable for flight with a reduced inspection interval, which was a real cost to the operator and none at all to the programme. At that point it became a conflict about priorities, genuinely, and it was settled the way those get settled. The chief engineer decided in eight minutes that the bracket came out.
Ninety minutes had gone on a disagreement that was never negotiable, followed by eight minutes on the part that was. That ratio is usual, and the diagnosis is what reverses it.
For a PMP® candidate, classification comes before choice. Two people disagreeing about a fact are asking you to go and establish the fact, and an answer that convenes a workshop is doing the wrong thing politely. Two legitimate objectives colliding with nobody present holding the authority is asking for an escalation, and escalating there is not a failure to manage. Ask what the disagreement is about before asking how to handle it. Disputes about facts dressed up as personality clashes are worth meeting in a structured PMP exam preparation course before meeting them at work.
Make the first question in any conflict a reflex: is there something here that could simply be looked up? A surprising proportion of project disagreements are two people confidently remembering different versions of a document, and thirty seconds of looking ends them. Whatever is left after that is the real conflict, and it deserves a technique chosen on purpose.
Interested in going further?
Collaboration works often enough to become a habit and fails often enough to be expensive. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through conflicts where the response depends on what kind of disagreement is in the room.
Conflict handling sits among the interpersonal techniques in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A147: Conflict Is Not Always a Problem
A191: Product Backlog vs Sprint Backlog
A193: Backlog Refinement: What It Is and Why It Matters
A177: Five Whys vs Fishbone Diagram
A180: Facilitation Techniques for Difficult Project Conversations
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