An enterprise does not choose its conflict style in a values workshop. It chooses it through escalation paths that stall, incentives that punish disagreement, and forums that have no one empowered to decide.
A commercial decision has been on the executive agenda for four months. Two functions disagree about it. Nobody is fighting, nobody has escalated, and every meeting ends with a further piece of analysis commissioned. Read the minutes and the organisation looks collaborative. Read the calendar and it has avoided the same decision sixteen times.
That is not a set of difficult personalities. It is a modal conflict style, and it was produced by the way the enterprise is built rather than by who happens to work in it. Most organisations have one, most are unaware of it, and almost none chose it deliberately.
The Strategic Context
Conflict handling is treated as a behavioural matter — something individuals do well or badly, addressed through coaching. That framing makes it invisible at enterprise level, which is where its cost is largest.
The cost is not the argument. It is the elapsed time between a disagreement arising and a decision being made, multiplied by everything that waits on that decision. In a portfolio, unresolved disagreement is indistinguishable from unallocated capacity: the work is neither funded nor stopped, the people notionally assigned to it are unavailable for anything else, and the opportunity cost never appears in any report because no decision was recorded.
Two organisations with identical strategies and comparable people can differ by an order of magnitude in how quickly contested decisions are made. The difference is structural, and it is one of the few sources of advantage that cannot be bought.
Not a Personality Problem
Three mechanisms set the default, and none of them is about temperament.
Escalation paths that stall. In most enterprises escalation is a discretionary act performed by a subordinate, who must decide the disagreement is important enough to take upward and be willing to be seen doing it. Where escalation depends on appetite for that exposure, the issues that reach the top are selected for the confidence of whoever raises them rather than for their materiality.
Incentives that punish disagreement. If two function heads are measured on their own budgets and delivery dates, a dispute between them is a negative-sum game for both: whoever concedes carries the cost in a number they are personally assessed on. Accommodation and avoidance are the rational responses to that structure, and no amount of encouragement to challenge one another will change the arithmetic.
Forums with no adjudicator. Many standing meetings have nobody present with authority to settle the matter under discussion; they are designed to align, inform or coordinate. Bring a genuine disagreement into one and it cannot be resolved there, so it is deferred — usually with a request for more information, which is the socially acceptable form of avoidance because it looks like rigour.
Reframing the Issue
Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann described five modes of handling conflict, positioned by how assertive and how cooperative the response is: competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating and avoiding [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED]. Their instrument is proprietary and assesses individuals; the framework is the useful part here, and the attribution matters because the model circulates widely with its authorship stripped off.
The move worth making is to apply it one level up. Ask not which mode a manager prefers, but which mode this enterprise produces when two capable people disagree and both are acting reasonably.
Most large organisations produce avoidance or accommodation. Avoidance shows up as decisions that recur on agendas without resolution; accommodation as the function that always concedes — often the one whose measures are softest, or whose leader is most conscious of appearing difficult. Younger or founder-led organisations often produce competing instead: disputes are settled by whoever escalates hardest to the principal, which works until the principal becomes the constraint on everything [Related article: The Business That Cannot Run Without You Is Not an Asset].
None of the five modes is wrong. A default is wrong when it is applied to situations it does not fit, and a default that nobody selected will be applied to everything.
Escalation as a Decision-Rights Instrument
The single most effective structural intervention is to redesign escalation so that it advances automatically rather than by request.
Customer-facing organisations understand this: a complaint that cannot be resolved at first contact moves up a defined chain on a clock and keeps moving until somebody resolves it. The mechanism is unremarkable there and almost entirely absent from internal decision-making, where the same problem — an unresolved matter sitting at a level that cannot settle it — is left to the discretion of whoever is most uncomfortable.
Four properties make an internal escalation path work.
It must advance on elapsed time, not on request. If a decision has not been made within a stated period it moves to the next level automatically, and the movement is a normal event rather than a complaint about a colleague.
Every level must have a named adjudicator with authority to decide, including against a more senior peer. A forum without one cannot conclude.
The path must terminate at a level where the answer is given rather than deferred, and everyone should know where that level is before they need it.
And the decision must be recorded with its rationale and its owner, or the same disagreement returns in three months as a new issue.
This is decision-rights design rather than conflict management. It converts a behavioural question — who is willing to press the point — into a procedural one, and it removes the personal cost that makes avoidance rational.
Where the Default Shows Up Commercially
An accommodating default is expensive in a specific and traceable way: it concedes at the boundary with customers. The account that always receives the exception, the scope that expands without a variation, the payment terms nobody will renegotiate — each is a local decision to avoid a difficult conversation, and in aggregate they are a pricing strategy that no one approved.
An avoidant default is expensive differently. Its signature is a portfolio containing work that has neither been stopped nor properly funded, held in a state of permanent review because stopping it requires someone to tell a sponsor their initiative is over.
Both defaults are usually invisible to measurement, because the measures an organisation keeps record output rather than the decisions that produced it [Related article: How Many of Your Workforce Metrics Have Ever Changed a Decision?].
Decision Framework
Diagnose the current default first. For the last five contested decisions, record how long each took from first disagreement to resolution, who decided, whether the path was used or bypassed, and whether the outcome was recorded.
| Enterprise default | Where it is appropriate | Failure signature |
|---|---|---|
| Competing | Safety, legal or ethical limits; genuine emergencies | Disputes settled by who escalates hardest |
| Collaborating | High-stakes, low-reversibility decisions with time available | Everything treated as consensus work; nothing concludes |
| Compromising | Deadline-bound trade-offs where a workable split exists | Split-the-difference outcomes that satisfy no requirement |
| Accommodating | The matter genuinely belongs to the other party | One function concedes structurally; margin erodes at the edges |
| Avoiding | Trivial matters; issues that will resolve themselves | Recurring agenda items; more analysis commissioned |
Then apply three tests to any forum that handles disagreement. Who here can decide this today? What happens if we do not decide by a stated date? And where is the decision written down afterwards? A forum failing any of the three will produce avoidance regardless of who sits in it.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediately, publish the escalation path for commercial and delivery decisions with named adjudicators, time limits and a terminating level. This costs nothing and can be done in a fortnight.
Over the medium term, attend to the incentives, because structure alone will not hold. Where two functions are measured only on their own outcomes, give both a shared measure that only resolution improves. And ensure the people appointed to roles requiring adjudication are willing to do it, which is a role-design question rather than a training one [Related article: Which Anchor Does This Role Actually Require?].
The long-term position is that decision velocity on contested matters becomes an explicit governance metric, reviewed like any other. Organisations that can settle disagreements quickly and record why can take on more complexity than their competitors, because complexity is only expensive when it generates disputes that no one can close.
Signals to Monitor
Watch the number of agenda items appearing at three or more consecutive meetings without resolution. Watch how often escalation is used at all — near-zero usage indicates a path that people have judged unsafe, not an absence of disagreement. Watch which function concedes most often at the boundary with customers. Watch the interval between a decision and its reopening. And watch what happens to the first person who uses a new escalation path, because everyone else is watching that too.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- What is our default mode when two capable people disagree, and can we name the last three decisions that demonstrate it?
- For our most contested current decision, who is the named adjudicator, and what happens if they do not decide?
- When did someone last escalate a disagreement here, and what happened to them afterwards?
- Which of our standing forums have someone present who can actually settle what they discuss?
- Where are our function heads' incentives arranged so that conceding a dispute damages a number they are personally measured on?
Closing Perspective
The organisations that handle conflict well are rarely the ones with the most agreeable people. They are the ones where disagreement has somewhere to go: a path that moves on its own, a person at each level who can say yes or no, and a record that stops the same argument returning under a new name.
An executive team that has never specified this has still chosen a default — whichever mode the incentives and the meeting structure produce, usually avoidance, which is cheapest in the short term and most expensive across a portfolio. The choice is not whether to have a conflict style. It is whether the one you have is the one you would select if anybody had asked.
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