A 2008 CPP study of 5,000 full-time employees across nine countries found that the average employee spends 2.8 hours a week dealing with conflict — in the United States alone, roughly $359 billion in paid hours a year. The figure is usually quoted as a cost to be eliminated. Read alongside the research on team performance, it says something more useful: conflict is one of the largest standing activities in any organization, it is happening whether or not anyone manages it, and most of it is handled by people who were never taught how it works. This collection covers three connected skills. The first is diagnosis: reading what kind of conflict is in front of you and where it comes from — structure, incentives, unclear decision rights, status, values — before deciding anything about the people involved. The second is repertoire: having more than one way to respond, and choosing the response to fit the situation. The third is design: building teams, meetings and decision processes where disagreement about the work is frequent, safe and conclusive. Thirty sessions across six modules, grounded in organizational behaviour research and examined against recent cases from Boeing, Microsoft, Basecamp, Coinbase, OpenAI, Bridgewater, Netflix, Pixar, and Amazon.
