Things in this Newsletter 🗞️

• 🌟 Continuous Improvement ideas

• 💬 Conflict in Retrospectives – Part 3: Understand …

  • 🧭 Conflict Styles: The Thomas-Kilmann Model

  • 🪞 So What’s Your Style?

  • 🧩 Bringing It All Together

  • 🧠 Final Thought: Conflict Styles Aren’t Personali …

• 🧐 Facilitate or Plan with Jo

  • Jo

🌟 Editor's Note

"Every conflict we face in life is rich with positive and negative potential." - Anonymous 

Welcome to another Retro Newsletter. If this is your first time here, I highly recommend reading this newsletter first it will give you the basics.

This is part 3 of a 3-part series. If you would like to find parts 1 and 2, you can go here. Today, we are going to discuss conflict styles from the work of Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann and how to work with them to enable constructive conflict.

🌟  Continuous Improvement ideas

If everyone in the team had to draw your process, how different would it be, and where would the bottlenecks and queues be?

Sometimes doing this as a group activity can give you an easy and quick look at where to improve first or what's costing the most time or frustration.

💬 Conflict in Retrospectives – Part 3: Understanding Conflict Styles

Welcome to the final part of our 3-part series on conflict in retrospectives. If you missed the first two, they’re worth circling back to. We covered why conflict isn’t inherently bad, how it escalates, and the five dimensions that can help us understand what a conflict is really about.

Today, we’re going inward. We’re talking about how we each respond to conflict, and how understanding these patterns can help us hold space for more productive retrospectives.

Because here’s the truth: you can have all the models in the world, but if you’re not aware of your own default responses in a tough moment, you’ll fall back on habit, and habit isn’t always helpful.

🧭 Conflict Styles: The Thomas-Kilmann Model

The Thomas-Kilmann model gives us five styles or postures we tend to adopt in conflict, depending on two dimensions:

• Assertiveness: How much we care about getting our own needs met

• Cooperativeness: How much we care about meeting others’ needs

The five styles are:

1. Competing – High assertiveness, low cooperation
   “I’ll win this.”
   Useful in emergencies, but risky in team dynamics.

2. Avoiding – Low assertiveness, low cooperation
   “If I ignore it, it might go away.”
   Sometimes this buys time. But left unchecked, things fester.

3. Accommodating – Low assertiveness, high cooperation
   “I’ll let them have this one.”
   Great for relationships, but can lead to resentment if overused.

4. Collaborating – High assertiveness, high cooperation
   “Let’s find a win-win.”
   Ideal, but time-consuming, not always realistic in fast-paced teams.

5. Compromising – Moderate on both axes
   “Let’s split the difference.”
   Often practical but not always satisfying, and not always the best solution to a problem.

🪞 So What’s Your Style?

Here’s the fun part, and the uncomfortable part: we all have defaults.

Perhaps you notice that you get more competitive when you’re under pressure. Maybe you tend to avoid tension in the name of harmony. Or maybe you go into peacemaker mode, accommodating to smooth things over.

The point isn’t to judge your style. It’s to notice it, and decide if it’s serving you.

As a facilitator, the more aware you are of your own conflict style, the better equipped you are to stay steady when the room heats up. You can notice, “Ah, I’m starting to withdraw; maybe that’s my Avoiding showing up,” or “I really want to push this; is that me competing or am I standing for something important?”

And beyond your own patterns, this model helps you spot what others might need. If someone always goes quiet in tense moments, maybe they’re an Avoider. If someone insists on their solution no matter what, maybe they lean on Competing. You’re not labelling them, you’re gaining insight.

🧩 Bringing It All Together

Over the last three editions, we’ve covered:

• What conflict is, and how it escalates

• Where conflict lives, across five dimensions

• How we respond, based on our styles

And when you put those together, you get a powerful lens for retrospectives.

Let’s say a team retro gets tense:

• Someone is upset about process, which could be instrumental

• They feel unheard — maybe it’s personal

• A few people withdraw — you’re seeing avoiding

• One person dominates the conversation — could be competing

• The real issue? A misalignment in values and no shared decision-making structure, it’s also structural

That’s a lot, right? But if you have these lenses, you don’t panic. You get curious. You slow things down. You hold space for the team to move from reaction to reflection.

And now you have some tools too., You take a breath and notice what is going on. You remember this newsletter, and you look for an option that will work.

• Let me see where everyone sits on this decision or this opinion, and then make space for conversation. (creating ways for people to visualise their opinion)

• Let me ask the team for new possibilities (creating options beyond yours and mine to decrease competition and find better solutions)

• Let me get everyone to add their ideas on sticky notes before we decide (creating space for all voices, encouraging people who are avoiding to step in in a quiet and safe way)

And I’m sure you can think of many other ideas. Sometimes it’s difficult in the moment because so much is happening. Sometimes, we forget about all these options and default to what we know. That is definitely going to happen. The trick is to appreciate yourself, and not judge yourself, and then use these lenses as a way to reflect on what happened, how the conflict escalated, what the dimensions were, and what stances were at play, both yours and others. That gives you a learning loop that you can use, and that’s where real improvement lives.

🧠 Final Thought: Conflict Styles Aren’t Personality Tests

They’re patterns; patterns you can notice, learn from, and flex when needed.
The goal isn’t to be a “collaborator” all the time. It’s to be more aware, more intentional, and more compassionate with yourself and your team.

So, as you close this series, I’ll leave you with a question for your next retro:

🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

For any session longer than 90 minutes, make sure you build in real breaks — not just 5 minutes for bio runs, but time to reset. Especially in conflict-heavy sessions, having space to decompress can be the difference between making progress and shutting down.

🔥 Things you might like

Skribbl is a hilariously fun drawing game, where people draw and guess what is being drawn together. My favourite part is letting go of trying to be an artist and leaning into the fun of deciphering what kind of creature that is supposed to be. 🙂 

Beehive is a fantastic newsletter platform that is easy to use, making it fun and straightforward to engage an audience with your message. Why not think about starting your newsletter: https://www.beehiiv.com?via=Joanne-Perold

🧐 Facilitate or Plan with Jo

Did you know I can help plan your next retro or facilitate it for you? I have packages available for facilitation, planning, or being a sounding board. [email protected] is the email address to use for contact.

Did You Know? The Emoji That Broke Coding

• The 2024 "🫨" (dizzy face) emoji crashed apps worldwide because its Unicode metadata accidentally included an invisible control character.

• Lesson for Retros: Even tiny oversights can cascade! (Bonus: Ask your team, “What’s your ‘🫨 emoji moment’ this sprint?”)

Till next time,

Jo