What you've seen with Michael is not exactly the type of conflict resolution approach I would advocate for, although he does exhibit some nuggets of wisdom in his behaviors. Now first of all, what type of conflict are we seeing here? If you watch the video carefully, you'll see signs of emerging relationship conflict. These interpersonal tensions and animosities. When Michael asks Oscar, what is the problem? Oscar's immediate response is, it's Angela. So it's down to personalities now. Now to Michael’s credit, he does a very good job of folding this conflict into a very specific task issue. When we approach conflicts there are multiple ways we can resolve them. One broad way of resolving conflicts is by using power, formal or informal. Sometimes, however, we can find ourselves in a situation when we're at a power disadvantage. In this particular case, resolving conflicts using power is not the best way to go, clearly. Even if you hold the power advantage, using power to resolve conflicts can inflict irreparable damage on the relationships. So my advice would be, use power-based strategies as an absolute last resort. When you value the issue in the dispute so much more highly than the relationship at stake that you can put that relationship at risk. We can also resolve conflicts by using standards and rules, such as a standard of fairness. Keep in mind, however, that our interpretations of those standards can become egocentrically biased. And so that approach can fail too. By far, the most effective approach to resolving conflicts would involve your attending to your interests and the interests of the other party. This way we can transform a dispute, an episode of conflict, into a negotiation. And the typical trap we'll fall into in resolving conflicts this way is that we get stuck on a single issue. We butt heads for a long time and we end up meeting each other in the middle. That's the well known compromising strategy, the Tuesday, Thursday example in the video. This is not an effective way to resolve conflicts. The most effective way to resolve conflicts is to recognize, that in most situations, we can add other issues to a negotiation and begin to make trade-offs across those issues. So practically, I will do this for you, if you do such-and-such for me, is the most effective way to approach the resolution of any conflictual episode. What you do here, is you recognize that you can add other issues to this negotiation. You also recognize that people can value these issues differently. And we can begin to made trade-offs across those issues. Let me give you an example. Two business units of a small high tech firm were in a fierce dispute with each other about who gets the chance to hire a talented senior engineer, who would also be expensive for the firm, as a one-time exception to a hiring freeze. Now both business units had good candidates. So power-based resolution strategy would entail one of the business units getting all their senior managers and lobbying the CEO to make sure that they get a chance to hire this engineer and not the other group. A compromising strategy would be we each get half a person. So each group gets a part time engineer. Not the most effective approach in this particular case. Now a truly collaborative approach, this proverbial win-win strategy, entail recognizing that one of the business units was in a desperate need of a larger R&D budget for the next fiscal cycle. So that information helped transform this single issue negotiation, single issue dispute, that was focused exclusively on hiring, to a two issue negotiation, focused on hiring and R&D funds allocation. And in the end, these groups were able to make trade-offs across issues. So one group got a chance to hire the senior engineer, and the second group got a one time infusion in its R&D budget for the next year, at the expense of reallocation from another group.