Not All Conflicts Are the Same

Position is what someone says they want. Interest is why they want it. Underlying need is what they actually require to feel heard, respected, and secure. The Understanding in Conflict model, developed from mediation practice, moves through these three levels deliberately. Most organizational conflict stays at the position level, and when it does, it produces agreements that do not hold, because they never addressed what the conflict was about.

The V model is named for its shape. At the top and wide end are positions, what each party says they want. Moving down and inward, you reach interests, why they want it. At the bottom point, where the two sides converge, are underlying needs, what they require. Mediation happens primarily at the bottom of the V. Most organizational conversations never get out of the top.

This month’s move: Name the level, name the type. Once a day, when a disagreement shows up, pause and diagnose before responding. Is this happening at the level of positions, interests, or underlying needs? And is it a technical problem or an adaptive one? When a decision is involved, name the decision type out loud before discussing it.

Recognition cue: Your team has the same argument again, a solution you agreed on did not hold, or a decision conversation gets strangely charged for reasons no one is naming.

Write one line on your log each day you run it.

Run the rep on conflicts in any domain. Replace the live session with a 45-minute solo session mapping one real conflict on the V Model worksheet and the Conflict Diagnosis Matrix.

Meeting hook for this month: Before a significant decision or disagreement, name the level out loud: are we disagreeing about positions, interests, or underlying needs? Then check whether you are treating it as technical when it might be adaptive.

A map of where conflict lives, from surface to depth:

• Positions (top of the V, widest, most visible). What each party says they want. “I want to use Vendor A.” “I think we should expand the team.” This is where most conflict conversations happen. Also where they get stuck.

• Interests (middle of the V). Why they want it. What outcome they are protecting. “I need stability.” “I need to feel heard in decisions.”

• Underlying Needs (bottom of the V, where resolution lives). What they require to feel respected, secure, and heard. Often about identity, belonging, fairness, or recognition.

Most conflicts resolve when the conversation reaches underlying needs. Most stay stuck at positions.

Technical problem: a known solution exists. Expertise and process can solve it.

Adaptive problem: the solution requires people to change values, beliefs, or behaviors.

TECHNICAL: “Our reporting process is broken.” Fix the process.

ADAPTIVE: “We disagree about whose priorities get protected.” Involves power, values, and identity.

The most expensive mistake is applying a technical solution to an adaptive problem. Signs you have an adaptive problem: the same issue returns after you solved it, the fix does not hold, people agree in the meeting and revert, the conflict seems irrational.

Diagnostic question: if this were purely technical, would we have solved it by now?

Before any decision conversation, name the type:

• COMMAND: One person decides. Others execute.
• CONSULT: One person decides, but input is genuinely sought first.
• CONSENSUS: The group decides together. Everyone must be able to live with it.
• VOTE: The majority decides. Fast. Best for lower-stakes choices.
• NO DECISION: Not making a decision is itself a decision.

Many conflicts happen because the type is never named:

• Person A thinks they are being consulted; Person B has already decided. Betrayal.
• The team thinks it is consensus; the leader thinks it is consult. Resentment.

Practice: name the decision type before the conversation starts.

SCENARIO 1
A recurring conflict about a process, resource, or priority. Map it on the V: each side’s positions, interests, underlying needs. What changes about how you would approach the conversation if you focused on underlying needs?

SCENARIO 2
Apply the adaptive/technical diagnostic to that same conflict. Is it technical, or are people being asked to change how they see their role or value? What changes if you treat it as adaptive?

SCENARIO 3
Your team is about to discuss a decision. Before it starts: what type is this, command, consult, consensus, vote, or no decision? What happens to the conversation if the type is not named?

Power in the Room

The V model and the conflict-type diagnosis are useful tools. But they’re “neutral” tools, and neutral tools can obscure something important: not all conflicts are equally shared. Role, race, gender, seniority, disability, class, and organizational status shape who gets to define what the conflict is about, whose underlying needs get named, and whose do not. An adaptive problem looks different from the top of the hierarchy than from the bottom.

Before diagnosing a conflict this month, try these questions. They come from organizing and restorative traditions rather than management frameworks:

• Who benefits from things staying the way they are?
• Whose perspective is missing from how this conflict is being defined?
• Who carries the most risk in naming this conflict honestly?
• What would it look like to address this conflict in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than just resolving the issue?

These are not accusatory questions. They are diagnostic ones. They sit alongside the V model rather than replacing it, and they often reveal what the V model alone cannot.

Media for this Month
Required before the live session: the Getting to Yes overview. The rest is optional.

1. WATCH Liz Lerman: A Shared Vocabulary for Dance A framework for feedback across power differentials that applies far beyond the arts
2. LISTEN How's Work? with Esther Perel — The Co-founders Psychotherapist Esther Perel's own podcast, in which she facilitates real therapy sessions with actual workplace colleagues: co-founders, managers and direct reports, colleagues in conflict. Listen to any episode; each one demonstrates what it looks like to surface the invisible dynamics in a working relationship.
3. LISTEN Emergence Magazine Podcast: Practical Reverence — Robin Wall Kimmerer Botanist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer on on the serviceberry as a living model for a gift economy. Pairs directly with the Serviceberry essay from Month 4. Free transcript.
4. ARTICLE Radical Imagination: adrienne maree brown on Emergent Strategy (YES! Magazine) Interview with adrienne maree brown on how small patterns replicate at scale and why the quality of our relationships is inseparable from our outcomes
5. ARTICLE Collaborating with the Enemy: Interview with Adam Kahane (Journal of Wild Culture) Long-form interview with Kahane on his work in Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa: what collaboration across deep difference looks like in practice
6. REQUIRED · ARTICLE Introduction to Collaborating with the Enemy (Berrett-Koehler) Covers the core framework and why conventional collaboration fails. Read before the session.
7. OPTIONAL | BUY THE BOOK Collaborating with the Enemy (Adam Kahane)
8. READ Good Arguments (Bo Seo) Two-time world debate champion Bo Seo on disagreement as a craft: how to find the real point of clash, argue it cleanly, and keep the relationship intact. A strong companion to this month's diagnosis work.

Total time for required media this month: approximately 2 hours 45 minutes. The Kimmerer and Perel episodes are each around 50 minutes and are best listened to rather than consumed as background.

Week 1: Think of a recurring conflict. Map it on the V: is the conversation at the position level, interest level, or underlying need level? What would change if you went one level deeper?

Week 2: Is there a conflict that keeps coming back? Is it possible it is an adaptive problem you have been addressing with technical solutions?

Week 3: How does power show up in conflict on your team? Who tends to be heard? Who tends to go quiet?

Week 4: What assumptions have you been carrying about someone’s position or motivation that you have never tested by going deeper on the V?

Discussion questions for pairs or the full group:

• What happened when you tried to identify the level of a conflict on the V?
• Where did the conversation naturally want to stay?
• Can you identify a conflict you have been treating as technical when it might be adaptive?
• What would the adaptive version of addressing it look like?
• How does power show up in this team’s conflicts?
• Who gets to define what the conflict is about?
• adrienne maree brown proposes the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our outcomes. Do you believe that?
• What evidence do you see for it here?

Before the next session, check in with yourself:

• Did I identify at least one conflict at a level deeper than positions this month?
• Did I name the decision type before at least one significant team discussion?
• Can I distinguish between a technical problem and an adaptive one?

• Draw the V on a whiteboard and use it visually throughout.
• For the case analysis, use situations from the past 90 days that at least two people experienced.
• Ask: what level were we at?
• What level should we have been at?
• The power conversation requires careful setup.
• You are asking people to name patterns, not individuals.
• Keep that distinction clear.
• If time runs short, protect the power conversation.
• It is the part teams most need and most often skip.
• Watch for people who want to resolve the case studies rather than diagnose them (“we are practicing diagnosis, not resolution”), the power conversation stalling out of fear (“this is exactly what the lint filter is for”), and people who say all their conflicts are technical (“if it were fully technical, would you have solved it by now?”).
• Month 5 is often where teams realize that some of their recurring conflicts are adaptive problems they have been treating as technical ones for years.
• That realization is uncomfortable and important.
• Give it room.