The TKI is fast and accessible, delivering insight, empowerment and resolution to anyone involved in conflict. By identifying alternative conflict styles, it helps people reframe and defuse conflict, creating more productive results.
Conflict itself isn’t the problem — most workplace conflict is a natural result of people caring about different things, or the same thing in different ways. What determines whether it damages a team or strengthens it is how people respond to it. The TKI gives people a clear, practical language for recognising their own default response, understanding why it isn’t always the right one, and consciously choosing a better approach next time.
The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was developed in 1974 by Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann, building on earlier work by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. Over 50 years and millions of completions later, it remains one of the most widely used conflict-management assessments in the world, now published by The Myers-Briggs Company.
It works through 30 short, forced-choice questions — for each one, you choose between two statements that best reflect how you’d actually respond in a disagreement. There’s no right or wrong answer, and it only takes a few minutes to complete. What comes out the other end is a clear picture of which of five conflict-handling modes you default to, and how strongly.
Every response to conflict can be mapped against two underlying questions:
Assertiveness — how much you push for your own concerns and outcomes.
Cooperativeness — how much you consider and accommodate the other person’s concerns.
Where someone sits on these two scales, combined, produces one of five distinct conflict-handling modes. None of them is inherently right or wrong — each is the correct choice in some situations, and a liability in others. The problem isn’t that someone has a default mode; it’s not recognising when that default isn’t serving them.
Competing — high assertiveness, low cooperativeness. Pursuing your own position at the other person’s expense. Useful when a decision needs to be made quickly, or when you’re confident you’re right and the stakes are high. Overused, it damages trust and shuts down input from others.
Collaborating — high assertiveness, high cooperativeness. Working with the other person to find a solution that fully satisfies both sets of concerns. The most constructive mode when the relationship matters and there’s time to explore it properly — but it takes more effort and isn’t always necessary for smaller issues.
Compromising — moderate assertiveness, moderate cooperativeness. Finding a middle ground both sides can accept. Efficient and often practical under time pressure, but it can leave both parties only partially satisfied if used as a default rather than a deliberate choice.
Avoiding — low assertiveness, low cooperativeness. Sidestepping the conflict altogether. Sometimes the right call — when an issue is trivial, or emotions need time to cool — but as a habitual response it lets problems fester and unresolved tension build.
Accommodating — low assertiveness, high cooperativeness. Setting your own concerns aside to satisfy the other person’s. Valuable when preserving the relationship matters more than the issue at hand, but overused, it means your own legitimate concerns never get heard.
We build the TKI into our conflict resolution and team development work as a starting point, not an end point. Once someone can see their own default mode in black and white, the real work begins: recognising which situations call for a different approach, and practising the modes that don’t come naturally. Delivered one-to-one or across a whole team, it turns an abstract idea — “we handle conflict differently” — into something concrete people can actually act on.
Anyone whose role involves navigating disagreement — which, in practice, is almost everyone. It’s particularly valuable for managers and leaders who need to resolve conflict within their teams, for teams going through change or friction, and for anyone who’s noticed the same conflict pattern playing out again and again without knowing why.
[Talk to us about running the TKI with your team →]