What strategies apply to resolving conflict? Kenny's Thomas and Ralph killman created what are known as five conflict handling modes. In fact, their model has an easy assessment that you can use to assess your preferred conflict handling mode. But for us what's really valuable are the five modes and when to apply them. And they derive the five modes by looking at two characteristics of how we handle conflict, and the first is our assertiveness, and they charted this on the vertical axis, the level to which we express our desire to achieve our end goal. And on the other axis, they looked at our cooperativeness.

This is the degree to which we work hard to build an strengthen the relationship with the other person. Now, often, we'd expect this to create a four box model with high and low cooperativeness and high and low assertiveness. In fact, they give us five conflict handling modes. There's one in the middle as well. It's important to note the Thomas killman model is protected by copyrights and trademarks. So if you want to use it properly, then you'll need to buy the assessment tools.

But for our purpose, we're just going to talk you through the principles that they put out which have been published vary widely. In the next video, we'll look at these five conflict modes and how they combine their desire to get what you want with your desire to cooperate and extend your relationship