Insights

A conversation with mediation pioneer Ken Cloke, on why conflict resolution belongs at the centre of leadership development, not on its margins.

In a wide-ranging conversation ahead of his visit to Dublin, I sat down with mediation pioneer Ken Cloke, and things turned from the personal discipline of mediation to something more structural: how conflict resolution operates, or fails to operate, inside organisations. We moved from Ken’s feedback on Resolution Intelligence — the framework co-created with Luke Monahan — through his own theory of how conflict resolution systems have evolved, and landed on a claim with real weight behind it: conflict resolution isn’t adjacent to leadership. It’s one of its core competencies.

Feedback on Resolution Intelligence

I shared the Resolve report with Ken — the diagnostic centrepiece of Resolution Intelligence, which Luke and I have built over eight years of research and development. His assessment was warm and specific. He liked how the report characterised different conflict approaches, building on the standard differentiation of styles such as accommodation and collaboration, and called the execution excellent, while noting he approaches some of the same material a little differently in his own work.

I walked him through the framework’s structure: a shine, shadow and stretch model describing how a style can be used well, underused, overused, or abused, and a formula for resolution built around self, other and context. Practically, this means inviting someone to describe the specific context they have in mind — personal or workplace — before assessing how they showed up in it. Ken’s response echoed a principle he attributes to Einstein: make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. A framework this ambitious, he told me, has to stay accessible without becoming simplistic, or people won’t credit it with the power to actually reach them. The framework achieves just that. Ken’s one substantive addition was about relationship. Ken offered a candidate question: what words would you use to describe the kind of relationship you would most like to have with each other.

Three Generations of Conflict Resolution Systems Design

Ken pointed first to his own teaching at Pepperdine, where he runs a course on resolving organisational conflicts through systems design, and to a related course, Conflict Resolution Consulting. Then he laid out a framework of his own: three generations of conflict resolution systems design.

The first generation, he explained, originates with Getting Disputes Resolved by William Ury, Steve Goldberg and Jean Brett. This generation looks at the systems already in place for resolving conflict at work, and supplements them: building in loopbacks to negotiation, structuring interest-based processes, adding rights-and power-based backups, safety nets and early warning signs.

The second generation, in Ken’s view, starts from a different premise entirely: that you can enter the system anywhere, including through leadership. Good leadership produces fewer conflicts; bad leadership produces more. If that’s true, leadership itself is already playing a conflict resolution role inside the organisation, whether or not it’s named as one. The natural next question, which Ken posed directly, is whether leaders could be deliberately trained to be better leaders using conflict resolution as the lens. That’s a different undertaking from designing a mediation system or a coaching programme. It means treating the organisation’s core systems — reward and compensation structures, feedback and evaluation processes, and leadership development itself — as systems that generate or prevent conflict by design.

Case Study: Why 360 Feedback Generates the Conflict It Is Meant to Resolve

Ken has used 360-degree feedback reports in the past, an approach he’s run inside many organisations himself, to demonstrate what second-generation systems thinking looks like in practice. His diagnosis was blunt: the 360 process typically stops at exactly the moment it should be beginning.

A person receives a summary: their boss rated their communication an 8, their subordinates a 2, their peers a 5. That’s usually where the process ends. But the real conflict-resolution work, Ken argued, starts there: can we talk about that gap, what does it mean, where does it come from, what could change it over the next year. Handled this way, 360 feedback connects directly to conflict coaching and to a measurable project of shifting the numbers over time.

He also named the failure mode on the other side. If a poor 360 result simply leads to someone being fired, people will game the system: scratching each other’s backs, covering for weaknesses, lying to protect one another. None of that serves the purpose the 360 process was designed for in the first place, which is improvement. The lesson generalises well beyond 360 feedback: any organisational system that surfaces conflict without a structured, safe way to work through it will either get gamed or generate more conflict
than it resolves. Ken noted, in passing, that this same dynamic plays out around feedback inside hierarchies more broadly — giving a boss honest negative feedback carries real risk unless the system is deliberately structured to make it survivable, a problem he addresses at length in his book The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy.

The Leader Is a Mediator

It was at this point that I named, explicitly, what Resolution Intelligence has been arguing implicitly all along: conflict resolution is a leadership competency — it’s part of organisational leadership.

Ken’s response placed that claim inside a specific intellectual lineage. He and Joan Goldsmith worked closely with Warren Bennis, widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern leadership theory and the author of Learning to Lead, who developed the first influential set of leadership competencies. As a direct result of their collaboration, Bennis added a sixth competency to his original five: the leader as mediator. That work is documented in an article Ken co-wrote with Goldsmith, The Mediator Is Leader and the Leader Is Mediator, which he shared with me on the call and which we plan to discuss when we meet in Dublin.

The significance of this is easy to understate. It means the idea Luke and I have been building toward through eight years of assessments, research and practice — that resolving conflict well is not a soft adjunct to leadership but one of its defining core competencies — already has a credentialed home in the leadership literature, traced back to one of the field’s most influential thinkers.

Resolution Intelligence as Leadership Development, in Practice

I described where this is already playing out. Resolution Intelligence is currently the basis of leadership development programmes we deliver in major organisations, structured as modules built around different conflict resolution styles. Luke and I positioned the offering explicitly as leadership development, with conflict resolution as its operating engine rather than its headline — a way of making the underlying capability something an organisation invests in through its leadership budget rather than a specialist mediation line item. We see Resolution Intelligence positioned as a leadership competency to be built rather than a service to be called in when things break down. Conflict resolution capability travels across contexts — from multinationals, academic institutions, hospitals to sporting bodies to create leadership pipelines — who can navigate conflict with confidence.

The Case for Resolution Intelligence

Taken together, Ken’s systems-design framework and his account of the Bennis collaboration give Resolution Intelligence something more than validation. Our simple and access Resolution Intelligence framework to the orientations we created People, Process and Progress can mapped onto the competencies below. The primary competencies of leadership, identified by Warren Bennis Ken Cloke and Joan Goldsmith in Learning to Lead, (number 6 was added by Ken Cloke and Joan Goldsmith) are:

1. Mastering The Context: Understanding the big picture, considering political, economic, social issues, along with science and art; and taking time to learn.
2. Knowing Ourselves: Being aware of neuro-physiological patterns and our own issues that are triggered by people in conflict; understanding our limits and skills.
3. Creating Visions and Communicating Meaningfully: Focusing on the future, having an inspiring vision and being able to communicate it so others can align and collaboratively implement it.
4. Empowering Others through Empathy, Integrity and Constancy: Building trust through empathy, empowerment, unconditional integrity, and congruence in beliefs and actions.
5. Realizing Intentions through Action: Turning visions into practical solutions, commitment, and strategy; realizing intentions through action.
6. Preventing and Resolving Conflicts through Collaboration: Preventing and re-solving conflicts through systems design, consensus, collaboration, and shared values.

They give it a theory of why it should work: leadership already functions as a conflict resolution system, whether or not organisations design it that way, and the leaders who are deliberately trained in the competency will generate measurably fewer conflicts than those who aren’t. Framing Resolution Intelligence as leadership development, rather than as conflict management bolted onto leadership, makes conflict accessible and gives people the language and tools to be equipped to navigate the every changing dynamic.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear your take — let’s connect: linkedin.com/in/williamcorless