Team Setup · Conflict Resolution
Talk about conflict
before you're
having one.
A structured exercise that surfaces working-style tensions before the work begins — and gives your team a playbook for handling them before they need one.
The Exercise
Three phases. One team that knows itself.
Run this before any project kicks off. It takes under an hour and changes how the team handles friction for months.
Introduce yourself
Each person fills in a structured profile — how they work, how they communicate, what energises them, what frustrates them. Profiles go live the moment they're submitted. Everyone reads everyone.
See the tensions
Once all profiles are in, the tool analyses the set and surfaces the specific friction patterns likely to emerge under pressure. Not personality labels — concrete patterns, named honestly.
Simulate and agree
The team picks a conflict scenario — a realistic situation where the tension could play out. You discuss it while the stakes are low. You record how you'd handle it. That becomes your playbook.
What You Get
Three things that make the work easier.
The exercise produces three outputs — each one useful on its own, more powerful together.
Profiles
Everyone, visible.
A card per person — how they work, what they need from the team, and what gets in their way. No guessing. No assumptions that survive the first hard week.
Tension pairs
The friction, named early.
AI surfaces the specific combinations in your team that are likely to create friction. Not a diagnosis — a heads-up. Knowing it exists makes it navigable.
Playbook
Agreements that hold.
For each scenario you simulate, you record how you'd handle it. Not a policy — a shared decision made when everyone was calm. That makes it stick when things aren't.
Session Output
A playbook
written before
you needed it.
Export the full session — profiles, tension pairs, and agreed resolution patterns — as a single document the team can refer back to.
The export captures every profile summary, every tension the tool surfaced, and every resolution pattern the team agreed on. Keep it in the project folder. Link it in the team wiki. Send it to anyone who joins the team later.
Teams that have this document spend less time relitigating the same interpersonal friction — and more time doing the actual work.
Conflict Resolution Export
Tension pair
Alex — Jordan
Alex works async by default and rarely checks messages after 5pm. Jordan expects quick responses and reads silence as disengagement. Under deadline pressure this creates mismatched expectations.
Agreed pattern
If a blocker needs same-day input, flag it with 🔴 in Slack. No flag = async is fine.
For Every Role
The conversation every team needs and never has.
Conflict doesn't wait for a good moment. This exercise creates one.
Facilitator
A structured format that gets the conversation started without making it awkward. The profiles and tension pairs do the heavy lifting — you facilitate the simulation and record what the team agrees. You end with something written down.
Team Member
A chance to say how you work and what you need — before someone else has already formed the wrong impression. The profile is short. The conversation it starts is the exercise.
Team Lead
A document that tells you what to watch for before anyone is frustrated. The tension pairs give you early signals; the playbook gives the team something to point to instead of escalating to you.