Intercultural Conflict Styles Lab

Explore how your team handles tension—and learn to do it with more clarity, care, and confidence.

Disagreements are inevitable. But across cultures, conflict looks—and feels—very different. This session gives your team the tools to recognize and navigate those differences with skill.

Intercultural Conflict Styles Lab

A game-based session to surface hidden tensions and build your team’s capacity for cultural understanding in conflict.

What This Session Helps With

Use this session when:

  • Your team avoids conflict or lets it simmer beneath the surface

  • Differences in communication styles are causing friction or confusion

  • You’ve experienced misunderstandings around assertiveness or tone

  • You want your team to move from reaction to reflection during tension

  • You're working in a culturally diverse environment where norms around emotion, feedback, and disagreement differ

What Happens

This session uses a strategic, in-person board game designed to simulate collaboration under pressure—with built-in moments of misalignment, competition, and emerging conflict.

As the game progresses, participants naturally reveal their conflict styles: whether they confront, withdraw, challenge, adapt, or manage tension indirectly. These moments become the basis for guided reflection using the Intercultural Conflict Style (ICS) model.

Between rounds, we pause to unpack:

  • What just happened?

  • What did it trigger in each person?

  • How might different cultures interpret those behaviors?

Participants create a shared action plan for navigating disagreement more constructively—and test those strategies in subsequent rounds of gameplay.

The session includes multiple experiential cycles of conflict → reflection → planning → application → refinement.

Cultural Model Used

Intercultural Conflict Style (ICS) Model – Mitchell Hammer
Two dimensions are explored:

  • Emotional expressiveness (how directly emotion is shown)

  • Communication directness (how overt the message is)

Together, these define four conflict styles, helping participants recognize both their own tendencies and their impact on others.

Practical Info

  • Format: In-person

  • Duration: Half day (approx. 3.5 hours) or full day (6–7 hours)

  • Group size: Ideal for 15–25 participants (other sizes possible with adjustments)

  • Language: Available in English or Dutch

  • Customization: The gameplay and reflection focus are tailored to your team’s challenges, cultural context, and level of psychological safety

Typical Investment

  • Facilitation fee: €1,800 to €2,400

  • Game license: €900 per session (flat rate, regardless of group size)

  • Optional preparation or customization (e.g. adapting for known conflict patterns): approx. €600 if needed

The board game license provides your team access to a professionally developed, field-tested experience that reliably surfaces key team dynamics. The facilitation process supports safe exploration, structured insight, and real behavioral experimentation.

You’ll always receive a clear, comprehensive quote — no surprises.

How It’s Adapted

Conflict is cultural, emotional, and situational. That’s why this session is always tailored to the kinds of tension your team faces—whether overt or subtle.

We carefully design the experience to match your team’s readiness and energy. The ICS model offers a respectful, neutral framework to talk about difference. The game lets people try new responses without real-world consequences—until they’re ready to use them outside the room.

Outcomes

By the end of the session, your team will have:

  • Awareness of personal and team conflict styles

  • A shared framework and vocabulary for navigating tension

  • A tested, team-designed plan for handling disagreement more constructively

  • Greater confidence and cultural sensitivity in moments of challenge

Ready to explore this session?

Let’s find out whether this could be the right space for your team to grow through disagreement.