When you’re faced with a conflict-whether at work, in your community, or on a larger societal scale-the first instinct might be to jump straight into solving it. But experienced conflict resolution practitioners know that rushing to solutions without proper assessment often leads nowhere. A simplified view of conflict assessment reveals that resolution follows a cyclical process, one that begins with a crucial question and builds through several interconnected stages.
Table of Contents
Understanding the starting point: is the conflict functional?
The conflict assessment journey begins with a value judgment that many find uncomfortable: deciding whether a conflict is worth addressing. Conflict assessment serves as the essential first stage in conflict management and resolution, helping parties gain deeper understanding of their relationships and what drives their disagreements.
This initial determination involves asking whether the conflict is “functional” or “non-functional.” A functional conflict might be productive, helping organizations identify problems or communities clarify values. A non-functional conflict, by contrast, consumes resources without yielding benefits. This decision is inherently subjective and value-laden. What one party considers a profitable disagreement worth pursuing, another might view as a wasteful distraction.
Even in corporate settings where bottom-line thinking dominates, parties must weigh whether addressing a conflict serves broader goals beyond immediate financial returns. Sometimes the most important conflicts aren’t the most obviously profitable ones to address.
Identifying the sources of conflict
Once a conflict is deemed worth addressing, the next step involves diagnosing its roots. This practical inquiry operates within constraints that economist Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality.” Simon proposed replacing assumptions of perfect rationality with concepts better suited to cognitively limited agents, recognizing that people seek satisfactory solutions rather than optimal ones given their limited time and information.
In conflict assessment, bounded rationality means parties typically search for just enough information to identify workable solutions, even though the conflict’s true roots may extend far deeper. Rather than conducting exhaustive investigations, assessors gather information through stakeholder interviews, document reviews, and mapping exercises that reveal key issues, interests, and relationships.
The assessment process builds a shared knowledge base among stakeholders, clarifying not only one’s own interests but also revealing the motivations of others. This shared understanding becomes the foundation for determining whether intervention is possible and what form it should take.
The critical triad: opportunity, capacity, and volition
For conflict resolution to proceed, three essential conditions must align. Think of them as the legs of a three-legged stool-remove any one, and the structure collapses.
Opportunity refers to the situational possibility to address the conflict. Do parties have the time, space, and circumstances to engage meaningfully? A workplace conflict might lack opportunity if employees work different shifts and never interact, or if organizational restructuring is imminent.
Capacity involves the skills, resources, and abilities needed for resolution. Building capacity for conflict management requires developing knowledge, technical skills, and institutional capabilities at individual, organizational, and community levels. Without effective communication skills, access to neutral spaces, or basic conflict literacy, even willing parties struggle to make progress.
Volition represents the will or desire to engage in resolution. This motivation need not be benevolent-it might stem from conflict fatigue, recognition of mutual costs, humanitarian concern, or simple pragmatism. What matters is that parties genuinely want to address the situation, whatever their reasons.
When all three conditions exist, resolution becomes possible. When any are missing, the assessment must either address those gaps or acknowledge that resolution isn’t currently feasible.
Navigating the absence of necessary conditions
What happens when opportunity, capacity, or volition are lacking? Several pathways emerge, none of them simple.
Failed assessment attempts teach important lessons. Sometimes parties discover that what appeared to be a single conflict is actually multiple overlapping disputes requiring different approaches. Other times, the assessment process itself changes the situation-revealing new stakeholders, shifting perceptions, or exposing previously hidden interests.
Remedial actions offer another route. If opportunity is lacking, third parties might persuade organizational leaders to create spaces for dialogue. Where capacity is insufficient, training programs can develop dispute management skills and empower weaker parties through education and resource support. When volition is absent, the assessment might be postponed until conditions change, or facilitators might work to help parties understand the costs of continued conflict.
Sometimes the wisest course is to abandon resolution efforts entirely, at least temporarily. Not all conflicts are ripe for resolution, and forcing the process prematurely often does more harm than good.
The challenge of scaling up assessment
The simplified conflict assessment model works reasonably well for interpersonal disputes or small-group conflicts. But what about societal-level conflicts involving millions of people, entrenched identities, and generations of grievance?
Conflict resolution strategies that work in interpersonal disputes do not easily scale up to community or societal levels. Large-scale conflicts can be eight orders of magnitude bigger than interpersonal disputes, involving vastly greater complexity.
Increasing an entire society’s conflict assessment skills presents formidable challenges. How do you train millions of people in conflict literacy? Mass education efforts face resource constraints, cultural resistance, and the challenge of reaching diverse populations. What works in one cultural context may fail in another.
Power imbalances become especially problematic at scale. In interpersonal conflicts, skilled facilitators can sometimes level the playing field. But how do you empower a weak party when the stronger party holds veto power-whether through economic dominance, military might, or political control? Traditional conflict assessment tools offer limited guidance here.
Perhaps most difficult is generating volition for peace in cultures built on hatred and vilification. When entire societies define themselves through opposition to “the other,” when historical grievances are taught to children as sacred truths, when political leaders gain power by stoking division-how do you create the will to reconcile? The cyclical assessment process assumes parties can be brought to the table, but what if the table itself is rejected as illegitimate?
Conflict analysis is not a neutral activity and can itself become an intervention. At societal levels, who conducts the assessment becomes politically charged. Different stakeholders will contest the very framing of the conflict, its history, and its causes. The simplified model’s neat progression from assessment to diagnosis to intervention breaks down when the assessment process itself becomes contested terrain.
What do you think? Can conflict assessment models developed for interpersonal disputes ever truly work at societal levels, or do we need fundamentally different approaches for large-scale conflicts? When bounded rationality limits our ability to understand conflict’s true roots, how do we know when we’ve gathered “enough” information to act?
References
- https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/conflict_assessment
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bounded-rationality/
- https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/capacity-building
- https://www.beyondintractability.org/bi24/scale-complexity-overview
- https://gppac.net/files/2018-11/GPPAC%20CAFGuide_Interactive%20version_febr2018_.pdf
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