Jennifer sat with her cloud. The assumptions were visible. The C→D' arrow — the one holding her current behaviour in place — had been named and examined. She knew, now, that the belief locking her pattern in was not iron. It was an old story about who she was and what she was for.
Knowing that had not yet changed her diary. Monday was coming, and nothing on her calendar looked different.
"I can see the assumption," she said. "But I still don't know what to do."
That is what this chapter answers.
From insight to action
The work now turns to tactics — specific, practical actions that break the conflict rather than manage it. This is where the cloud stops being a diagram and starts becoming a week.
A tactic is not a compromise. It is not a better balance between D and D'. A tactic, properly understood, is an action that does four things at once.
The four tests of a sound tactic:
- Breaks an assumption — most often the one on the C→D' arrow.
- Satisfies both B and C fully — not one at the other's expense.
- Survives honest negative-branch thinking — you have imagined what could go wrong and the answer is liveable.
- Is implementable and testable — you can run it this fortnight and tell whether it worked.
A move that meets only one or two of these is not yet a tactic. It is an idea that still needs work.
Generate ten
One of the quiet disciplines of the method is this: generate ten tactics, not two or three.
The number is not arbitrary. The first three tactics you think of are usually extensions of how you already think. The breakthrough moves tend to arrive between the seventh and the tenth. If you stop at three, you have almost certainly missed them.
Here is the sequence that works.
- Pause first. Before you write anything, sit with the cloud and the assumption you surfaced in the last chapter. Let your own thinking go first. The method depends on your discovery, not your compliance.
- Generate without editing. Write down every move that might meet C while moving you toward B. Keep going past the point where it feels useful.
- Ask one prompting question when you stall. How might getting what B requires automatically provide what C protects? The best tactics are hiding at the intersection of B and C, not in a trade between them.
- Push to ten. If you stop at five, push to seven. If you stop at seven, push to ten. The tenth tactic is where the interesting ones tend to live.
This looks inefficient and turns out to be the opposite. Two hours generating ten tactics saves months of implementing the wrong one.
Working with RIC. If you do not have a human thinking partner to hand, RIC — our AI Rapid Improvement Coach — is built for exactly this part of the work. RIC is particularly good at surfacing tactical options you have not yet considered, especially the moves that sit at the intersection of B and C rather than in a trade between them. Treat RIC as a thinking partner, not a generator to outsource to. The discovery still has to be yours, and the four tests below still apply to anything RIC offers.
RIC is available to all Conflict Club members — see the link at the bottom of this page to join.
Testing each tactic
Once you have your ten, test each one against the four criteria above. Most will fail at least one test. That is useful information.
- A tactic that fails the assumption-breaking test reinforces D' even when it looks like change.
- A tactic that fails the both-sides test is a compromise, and compromises generate their own UDEs.
- A tactic that fails the negative-branch test carries a cost you have not yet seen.
- A tactic that fails the implementable-and-testable test is a wish.
Keep the ones that pass all four. In most clouds, two or three of the ten earn their place.
One further note, and it matters. The method takes seriously that some arrows in the cloud are meant to be the weak ones. The C→D' connection in particular — the belief that your current behaviour is the only way to secure your current benefits — is expected to buckle under honest scrutiny. That is not a flaw in the cloud. That is the insight. A tactic that leaves C→D' standing has almost certainly left the conflict standing with it.
Jennifer's ten
Jennifer's D' was reviewing everything personally. Her C was quality control and feeling valuable. Her B was a team that did not need her constant oversight. Here are the ten tactics she generated, after she pushed past her first three.
- Weekly team quality reviews in place of daily personal reviews — maintains standards, develops judgement, frees strategic time.
- Decision frameworks in place of making every decision herself — secures good decisions, builds capability, shows strategic value.
- Coaching sessions in place of solving the problem — the problem still gets solved, and the team grows through it.
- Shared quality checklists and systems — scalable and consistent where her personal judgement was neither.
- Scheduled quality audits in place of constant oversight — strategic rather than reactive.
- Teaching the standards explicitly — makes tacit quality judgement transferable.
- Developing a second-in-command — a structural answer to "what if I'm not there?".
- Peer quality review inside the team — distributes responsibility rather than escalating it.
- A rotating quality-ownership role — shares the weight without diluting the standard.
- Post-incident learning sessions — turns each quality slip into capability.
Tactics 1, 2 and 3 carried her through the strongest versions of all four tests. They broke the assumption that quality required her personal gaze. They served both C and B. Their negative branches were liveable. They could be implemented inside a month. Several of the others — particularly 6, 7 and 10 — earned their place in the sequence as prerequisites or reinforcers.
Ordering for speed
Tactics are not a list. They are a sequence.
Once you have the ones that pass, put them in the order that lets the objective be reached as quickly as possible. Some will be prerequisites — capability that must exist before later tactics can work. Others will compound — their value multiplies once earlier ones are in place.
Jennifer's sequence looked like this: teach the standards explicitly (6) → build shared checklists and systems (4) → introduce weekly reviews (1) and decision frameworks (2) in parallel → move into coaching as the primary mode (3) → layer in audits, peer review and rotation as the team matured.
The point is not the specific order. The point is that tactics without sequence become parallel experiments competing for attention. Sequence turns them into an objective.
The wall
Jennifer had her ten tactics, her three strongest, and her sequence. She started on Monday.
The weekly reviews began well — and then she found herself intervening between them, unable to leave the quality alone for a full week. The decision frameworks were built, published, and quietly overridden whenever a decision felt important enough. The coaching sessions happened on schedule and drifted into her doing the work while the coachee watched.
A fortnight in, she was frustrated.
"These tactics are sound," she said. "So why can't I stick with them?"
This is the wall. It arrives almost on schedule, and it is one of the most useful moments in the method. The tactics are not wrong. Her three passed all four tests honestly. The diagram is not wrong. The cloud is clean. Something else is going on.
Why tactics alone are not enough
The tactics are technically correct. The benefits are being met. The direction is right. And yet the old behaviour keeps reasserting itself.
That is the gap between the technical and the adaptive.
Underneath the C→D' arrow, beneath the assumption you surfaced in the last chapter, there is a deeper belief. A belief about who you are, what you are for, what you are permitted to let go of. Jennifer's tactics did not ask her to change that belief. They asked her to behave as if it had already changed.
When tactics run ahead of belief, they meet invisible resistance. The mind finds reasons to make exceptions. The body finds urgency in the old pattern. The calendar finds room for the intervention that was supposed to stop. Nothing in the cloud is wrong. The cloud has simply reached its limit.
The technical half dissolves the conflict on paper. The adaptive half dissolves it in life.
That is why the method does not end at tactics.
Practice: Building your tactics
Before you move on, give this chapter real time. Two hours, ideally, with your cloud in front of you.
- Re-read the cloud aloud. Include the assumption you surfaced in the last chapter.
- Generate ten tactics. Pause and think first. Push past three. Push past seven.
- Test each against the four criteria: breaks an assumption, serves both B and C, survives honest negative-branch thinking, is implementable and testable.
- Keep the ones that pass all four — usually two or three.
- Sequence them so the objective can be reached as quickly as possible. Note the prerequisites.
- Name the synergy across the three Cs — Commercial Responsibility, Customer Value, Culture. That is how you know the tactics belong in the wider system, not just in your diary.
If you can, do this with a thinking partner. The tenth tactic is easier to find when someone else is asking.
Closing
You now have tactics. You have tested them. You have sequenced them. That is the full technical half of the work, and it is real.
If your tactics hold, the cloud dissolves and the method has done its job.
If your tactics meet the wall — if the old behaviour keeps finding its way back even when the moves are sound — you have not failed. You have arrived at the point where the method becomes most useful. The point where the work stops being about what you do and starts being about what you believe.
That is where we turn next.
Practise This With Others — The Conflict Club
The Conflict Club is Level 1 of YourThinkingCoach pathway — weekly live sessions where you work a real conflict with fellow practitioners. The book gives you the method. The Club is where you learn to use it.
The Conflict Club is Level 1 of YourThinkingCoach pathway — the entry point for anyone who wants to make this methodology part of how they think, lead, and work with conflict.
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