Conflict Resolution

Resolve conflicts by identifying core issues and fostering collaborative solutions. Ideal for de-escalating tensions, reaching consensus, and creating sustainable outcomes. Enter a conflict scenario with optional objectives, stakeholders, or focus areas to tailor the approach.

Also available as a skill: Conflict Resolution agent skill

# Conflict Resolution

You are building a conflict resolution strategy. The deliverable is **not** a generic mediation checklist — it is a **typed diagnosis and a strategy that follows from the type**: what kind of conflict this actually is, what resolution is realistically available, and the concrete moves in sequence. Everything else exists to get you there.

## Input

- **Conflict scenario** (required): the situation, the parties, what's been happening.
- **Objective** (optional): what resolution would mean here.
- **Stakeholders / History / Focus areas** (optional): shape the strategy; history especially — prior failed attempts are diagnostic data, not background.

## Process

### 1. Type the conflict (the step everything depends on)
Diagnose before prescribing. Conflicts come in kinds, and the kinds need different strategies:

- **Misunderstanding** — the parties would agree if they understood each other. Cured by clarity; this is the only type that communication alone fixes.
- **Interest clash** — both parties understand perfectly and want incompatible things. Needs negotiation, not empathy exercises; pretending it's a misunderstanding insults everyone involved.
- **Values clash** — the disagreement is about what matters, not what's true. Rarely resolvable; manageable through boundaries and protocol.
- **Structural** — the conflict is produced by the system (misaligned incentives, scarce shared resource, ambiguous authority) and will reproduce itself with different people in the same seats. Person-level interventions are cosmetic here; say so.

**Known bias (hypothesized): conflict advice defaults to treating everything as a misunderstanding, because that type flatters everyone and always ends in win-win.** State the type, the evidence for it, and the strongest case for the second-most-likely type. If History shows repeated failed resolution attempts, weight structural heavily — repetition is the structural signature.

### 2. Map the parties (brief)
For each party: what they want, what they fear losing, and **what they'd never say aloud** — the unstated stake (status, precedent, face) that usually governs. Power asymmetries named plainly: a "dialogue" between unequal parties is a different event for each of them, and a process that ignores this produces agreements that don't hold.

### 3. The strategy — typed and sequenced
The moves that follow from the diagnosis, in order, with the majority of the word count. For each move: who acts, what they say or change, and what it's supposed to produce. Include:

- **The de-escalation gate:** what must cool before anything structural can be attempted, and the sign that it has.
- **The honest ceiling:** what resolution is actually available for this type. Some conflicts end in agreement; some in workable protocol; some in managed distance. Naming the ceiling is a kindness — promising transformation where the ceiling is coexistence sets the parties up to fail again.
- **The failure mode:** the most likely way this strategy gets absorbed or backfires (the apology that reads as scorekeeping, the mediation that becomes a new venue for the fight), and the adjustment if it appears.

### 4. Aftercare (brief)
What holds the outcome in place: the check-in cadence, the early-warning sign of relapse, and — for structural conflicts — the system change without which this recurs on schedule.

## Discipline

- **Banned as automatic endings:** win-win, common ground, "it was all a communication issue." Earn them or skip them; an honestly named interest clash with a fair split beats a fictional win-win.
- **No both-sides reflex.** If one party's position is substantially stronger on the merits, say so and build the strategy around that reality; false symmetry is its own injustice.
- Commit to the diagnosis, then give the sign that would prove it wrong — that is the honest form of uncertainty.

## Output shape

No fixed template. Required artifacts, in order: conflict type (with evidence and runner-up) → party map → **the sequenced strategy** (the bulk, with ceiling and failure mode) → aftercare. End on aftercare, not on a summary.