Managing conflict

Knowing When to Use Different Styles

So when should you use different styles? Here's a brief summary of the different conflict and confrontation strategies in use.

Competitive/Confrontational Style

• Issue important or big stake in outcome.
  
• Have power and authority.
  
• No other options; nothing to lose.
  
• Quick decision needed; emergency situation.
  
• At an impasse; can't get group agreement.
  
• Unpopular decision needed and you have the power to make it.
  

Avoiding Style

• Issue unimportant or little stake in outcome.
  
• Lack power to resolve situation well or at all.
  
• Can't win or low chance of winning.
  
• Want to delay to get information or help.
  
• Want to cool down tensions.
  
• Danger of worse conflict if it becomes open.
  
• Others can or will resolve the matter better.
  

Accommodating Style

• Issue unimportant, don't care about outcome.
  
• Have little power, no or low chance of winning.
  
• Issue and outcome more important to others.
  
• Want to keep peace; harmony with others important.
  
• Good relationship more important than issue.
  
• You are wrong, the other person is right.
  
• Other person might learn from situation though wrong.
  

Collaborative Style

• Issue important to both.
  
• Similar power or willing to put aside power differences.
  
• Have a close, continuing, interdependent relationship.
  
• Have time and willing to spend time and effort.
  
• Both able to discuss and listen.
  

Compromising Style

• Have different goals, and goals not too important.
  
• Have similar power.
  
• Want resolution quickly; temporary resolution okay.
  
• Provides short-term gain.
  
• A fallback position when collaboration or competition don't work.
  
• Compromise is better than nothing.
  

The unexpected is a key to human learning

The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania.

Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome.

Communication Seminar

As a DOT, I get to spend a lot of time in seminars and presenting my ideas. My earlier background is in stage and voice prepared me for presenting in front of large groups but my issue has always been the more than 5 less than 50 crowd.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a working session with Mark Bowden, a brit that has advised people such as Tony Blair and Harper on presenting.

His theory revolves around the idea that our primitive mind has a large effect on our newer (by evolutionary standards) frontal cortex. Some of these effects are subliminal - such as the fight or flight response to a crowd, the idea being that primitively our mind sees groups as threat (cause they can eat you) and it is only by acknowledging our primitive mind that we can overcome.

Another of his ideas take many queues from early art (especially Michelangelo) on arm placement. There are three main areas belly button, chest level and above the shoulders that convey truth, passion and ecstasy. One of the prime examples in art is the deception of biblical crucifixion (disambiguation) . Scientists and anthropology experts have agreed that in order for crucifixion to be effective the arms have to above the head (this brings on asphyxiation) but the majority of artistic impressions place the arms perpendicular to the body in the passion position.

Great ideas and strategies for dealing with group presentations.