The Toolbox presented in this book consists of nine models that are highly effective in diagnosing and assessing conflict. It has presented them on the basis that practitioners of all types—managers, leaders, mediators, negotiators, and facilitators—will benefit greatly from learning and applying a range of conflict analysis models in their work. The two new models in this book, the Law of Reciprocity and the Loss Aversion Bias, add important understandings about psychology, behavior, and cognitive biases to the Toolbox as well.

Many practitioners are skilled and effective at conflict management by working intuitively, by doing what seems to make sense at the time, often with good results. So why should anyone bother learning and developing models for conflict analysis in their practice or work?

The reason is simply this: working with models like these lead the practitioner from a level of competence to a level of mastery. Competence allows us to help people resolve conflict; mastery gives us the ability to work with far more complex and deeply rooted issues. As we look more broadly toward growing and developing in the field of conflict resolution, these models are essential for conflict practitioners if they wish to become more than simply competent. The path from a journey level to a level of mastery in the field of conflict resolution is well described by Michael Lang and Alison Taylor in their book, The Making of a Mediator.¹ In this book, the authors define journey-level practitioners as competent but rarely reaching the status of exceptional. For Lang and Taylor, we all strive toward exceptional skill in the field, a level of work they define as “artistry.”

One reason practitioners rarely become exceptional, according to Lang and Taylor, is that journey-level mediators believe that the path to becoming an artist is to learn more and more skills, constantly adding more communication tools such as reframing, active listening, and the like to their toolbox. What journey-level practitioners lack is not more skills but rather the art of self-reflection—the ability to diagnose a conflict, intervene based on that diagnosis, and then learn from the outcome of that intervention. Without this ability for self-reflection, which begins with the ability to consciously diagnose the situation, the journey-level practitioner will not be able to advance past basic competence in the field.

Mediators may seek to fill tool their toolboxes, believing that competency in the use of many tools is the way to achieve effective practice. Although proficiency in the use of a wide array of tools is one of the essential elements of professional practice, the mediator who does not understand the situations in which such tools are most useful will inevitably be a tinkerer—trying out a succession of tools, unaware of the reasons for using them, and unaware of why those tools have either achieved a desired result or failed to assist the parties in reaching resolution.²

The Conflict Resolution Toolbox is intended as a guide for practitioners to learn, apply, test, and practice with models that lead the reflective practitioner toward ever-greater levels of competence and through to true artistry.

This book, therefore, urges practitioners to take these models, use them, work with them, adapt them and modify them if necessary, and make them a core part of their conflict diagnosis and intervention practice. By doing so, we can all become reflective practitioners, and as reflective practitioners, we will continue to consolidate and build the conflict resolution field as an important profession in human society.