Theme → Conflict management
Behavioural Design for conflict resolution

Conflict is a design problem, not a communication problem.

Most workplace conflict is about interests, context and behavioural patterns, not the surface issue it looks like, and once you understand what's actually driving them, you can learn to break them. Influencing behaviour in a conflict is a skill you build with Behavioural Design, and it gives you influence on the pattern itself.

View the training → Individually or with your team
10,000+
trained
9.3/10
rating
EQAC
accredited
€1,190
from, ex VAT
Team working on a conflict case during the Behavioural Design training at SUE Amsterdam
Familiar in conflict situations

"We keep having the same argument. Nothing changes."

10,000+ professionals trained, including people from

Heineken KPN Eneco ANWB Randstad Amnesty International Roche Adyen European Commission Centraal Beheer Achmea DPG Media Gemeente Amsterdam Rijkswaterstaat Sony eBay CZ
The forces behind stuck conflict

Seven forces that keep a conflict in place

They are documented by Fisher, Kahneman and Cialdini. They apply to your team, your stakeholders and yourself. And they are all designable. As long as they stay invisible, every difficult conversation ends where it started.

01 - The positions trap

What people demand is rarely what they need

Positions are loud and visible. The interest underneath rarely gets named. Camp David stalled for a decade over land, until someone asked what Egypt and Israel actually needed: sovereignty, security. That's where the deal happened.

02 - Avoidance costs

Avoiding conflict feels safe, and costs more than it seems

Naming tension is uncomfortable. Staying quiet is not, so people rewrite emails, skip meetings and route around the real conversation instead of having it. Cheap today, expensive every week after.

03 - Sunk cost momentum

A bad decision survives because reversing it feels like losing

Everyone half-knows the project isn't working. The team keeps investing anyway, because admitting the mistake feels worse than continuing to lose. That's loss aversion, not stubbornness.

04 - Social norms

If nobody names it, nobody names it

Stay quiet in enough meetings and quiet becomes the norm. People calibrate to what colleagues do, not to what the situation actually needs.

05 - Context, not character

The same people clash more, or less, depending on the room

Change the setting, the format or the order people speak in, and the friction changes with it. Conflict is shaped by the conditions you put people in, not fixed by personality.

06 - Resistance

Resistance is not unwillingness, but information

People who dig in are rarely being difficult on purpose. Their resistance tells you what makes the old position feel safe. Push past it, and you push against the same wall again.

07 - System 1

Escalation happens before you decide to escalate

The sharp reply, the raised voice, the door that closes a conversation: automatic reactions, not considered ones. A conversation designed only for the rational mind never reaches the part doing the damage.

Read the full article: how to break a deadlocked conflict → Reducing resistance to change →
Behavioural Design is the missing layer.

Conflict is behaviour. And behaviour is designable.

Conflict management is the process of understanding why a disagreement escalates, and designing the context so it doesn't have to. It takes the interests underneath the positions, the norms that keep people silent and the sunk decisions nobody wants to reverse, not mediation skills alone. Behavioural Design for conflict helps you diagnose what's really driving the friction, and redesign the context so a difficult conversation becomes a productive one.

1
Diagnose the interest, not the position. You map what's really at stake for each side: the interests, the sunk costs and the norms keeping the current position in place.
2
Design the context. With the SUE Influence Framework you design the conversation, the format and the sequence so the real interests can surface.
3
Prove the effect. You test the approach and check whether the conflict actually resolves, so progress is a measurable outcome, not a feeling.
Read more about the Behavioural Design Method →
What professionals say after the training

From financial services to central government: they look at conflict differently afterwards.

The team leads and change managers among our 10,000+ alumni have one thing in common.

SUE teaches you to see conflict as a design question. Not who's right, but which context produces this behaviour and how you design that differently. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking, and I applied it in my team immediately.

M
Course participant, The Art of Influence©
Manager · Financial services
★★★★★

The Deep Dive on building support taught me to treat resistance as information, not an obstacle. What does this resistance tell me about what people actually need? I have completely different conversations now.

HR
Course participant, Deep Dive on building support
HR Business Partner · Healthcare
★★★★★

I've worked in change management for twenty years and thought I'd seen it all. SUE's method gave me a precision instrument for situations where I used to rely purely on instinct. That's a different level altogether.

CM
Course participant, The Art of Influence©
Change manager · Government
★★★★★
The training for this challenge

Start with the behavioural science behind resistance.

A conflict only turns once you understand why people defend their position. In The Art of Influence© you learn how choices and behaviour come about, and how to design the situation in which people do move.

Participants during The Art of Influence© training at SUE in Amsterdam
Most chosen
9.3/10
rating
33
lessons
Self-paced
online
Online, at your own pace

The Art of Influence©

You learn why people do what they do, and how to influence choices and behaviour. You learn the method, apply it straight away and leave with the tools you keep using afterwards.

What you get
33 online lessons at your own pace
Or live: two days in Amsterdam, max 16 participants
€1,190 online or €1,490 live, excl. VAT
View The Art of Influence© →

Want to tackle it with your whole team or organisation? See the in-company training →

Why the SUE Behavioural Design Method

Behavioural science made applicable for people who lead difficult conversations.

Most behavioural science knowledge sits locked in academic papers. SUE built the Influence Framework, a practical step-by-step method that any team lead, HR professional or manager can apply without a scientific background.

SUE Influence Framework: the forces that shape behaviour in a conflict
No academic theory, you work on your own conflict case during the training and go home with a worked-out plan
Built on Kahneman, Cialdini and Fisher, scientifically grounded but accessible for practitioners
A method of our own, the Influence Framework can't be learned anywhere else, described in the #1 management bestseller
16 years of experience, from ING and KPN to central government: the method is proven on the toughest resistance and conflict cases

“ SUE Behavioural Design was a real experience that led me to look differently at behaviour. They take you along a very pragmatic way under challenging themes. I think the Influence Framework will solve many problems in the world. It is more than just a method, it is a fundamentally different way of thinking.

Eline Grouwels
Eline Grouwels
Founding partner - Umital
★★★★★
Springest
9.3/10
★★★★★
Google Reviews
4.8/5
★★★★★
accredited
EQAC accredited
Trusted by
Eneco Heineken KPN Randstad Achmea
In-depth articles

Conflict management explained

In-depth articles on the behavioural science behind conflict and resistance, written from SUE's practice.

Conflict management

How to break a deadlocked conflict

Jobs to be Done thinking helps you find the real interest behind a position, the way the 1978 Camp David Accords did.

Read article →
Resistance

Building support for change: what actually works

Support doesn't come from a stronger business case. It comes from understanding why people cling to the familiar.

Read article →
Decision-making

Sunk cost fallacy at work: why we keep dead projects alive

Why teams keep defending a decision that isn't working, and five interventions that help them stop.

Read article →
Resistance

Reducing resistance to change

Resistance is not an obstacle but information. How you turn it into commitment by designing the context.

Read article →
See all articles on change →
Frequently asked questions

One more thing

Conflict at work is rarely about what it looks like it's about. It's about interests, context and behavioural patterns that have become entrenched. Behavioural Design gives you the tools to analyse those patterns and redesign the context so people can move differently.

Traditional conflict management focuses on the relationship or the content of the dispute. Behavioural Design focuses on the context that feeds the conflict. The people involved are rarely the problem. The circumstances that put them on a collision course are, and those circumstances can be changed.

Team leads, HR professionals, change managers and anyone who regularly has difficult conversations or works in organisations with a lot of resistance or internal tension. You need no prior knowledge of behavioural science to start.

It depends on the format. An individual Deep Dive starts from €690 and the two-day course The Art of Influence© from €1,190. For teams, SUE designs in-company training or a Learning Journey. In a no-obligation call we look together at which format fits your situation.

Ready to start?

Designing the context is the skill that actually defuses conflict.

From the position people defend to the interest underneath it. The Behavioural Design Method gives you the framework to work with that difference.

View The Art of Influence© →