Trainers often ask: how much time to budget for a conflict styles workshop? It depends!
In traditional pencil and paper training format, you might calculate
That would be enough to cover the basics of conflict styles in 80-120 minutes. You could easily do a lot more, of course, if you have another hour or several more. See my Trainers Guide, available as a free download, for ideas.
Online tools open another scenario that many trainers like because it pushes individual activities outside of workshop time and allows the trainer to dedicate more classroom time to discussion.
Using the online version could look something like this:
When voices rise and conflict escalates, do you step forward and engage? Or step back and assess? This post is for people who favor the latter, and for those who live and work with them. I’ll give you another two-step for conflict resolution, a practical strategy when engagement is difficult.
Let’s start by honoring “step back and assess” as a response to conflict. Life brings endless friction. We are confronted, goaded, and obstructed from every corner. It’s hard to get through even a day without someone or something in our face.
In chronically contested space, engaging all challengers is impossible. When someone gives you the finger for your unexpected shift of lanes while driving, do you pull over to talk things through? Hardly. What would be the point? You shrug, mutter to yourself, ignore the jackal, and drive on.
So the arts of skillful avoidance are essential to survival: Silence, distance, non-involvement, non-responsiveness, impassiveness, circumspection, studied neutrality, inaccessibility, biding your time. All have a place as strategies to avoid battles not worth the cost of fighting or for which we are poorly prepared.
