Confrontation Manager™ - Applications

Opportunities for using the Confrontation Manager™ software are likely to fall into one (or more) of the following categories:

Understanding and predicting

One use for Confrontation Manager™ is to understand what is going on in a set of interactions and make limited predictions. Prediction is limited because predicting specific courses of action requires looking "outside the box" at the real-world environment and empathizing with the parties to see how they will exploit this environment. Specific courses of action cannot be predicted from the model alone.

Implementing a strategy

If you are a participant in a confrontation, you can use Confrontation Manager™ to form, implement and update a strategy.

By eliminating your dilemmas, you achieve trustworthy compliance with your position. Eliminating your dilemmas is, however, easier said than done. Several things are involved:

You may need to thwart attempts by others with incompatible positions to eliminate their dilemmas.
You may have to help allies to eliminate their dilemmas.
Eliminating your own dilemmas may require you to modify your position to a greater or lesser extent.
If there are more than two parties, you may need a plan for bringing them to agree with your position one by one.
Having achieved an agreement, your plan may need to go into a second phase of achieving mutual trust.

Throughout, you will need to think "outside the box".

Confrontation Manager™ helps by telling you, at each stage, what your strategy must achieve.

Briefing

If individuals need to take over responsibilities for ongoing interactions, Confrontation Manager™ can be used to brief them, so that they understand the current position and the strategy for trying to achieve it.

Rehearsing

Confrontation Manager™ can be used to rehearse your plan. Rehearsing is necessary in order to make good predictions because, as said, prediction requires empathizing with the parties to understand how they are likely to make use of factors present in the environment, but not so far taken into account. In the same way, rehearsing a plan at an early stage can lead to important improvements.

First, construct a view for each party, modeling the interactions as they see them. The interactions must have the same structure in each view, since positions, intentions, preferences and doubts are communicated between parties, and must be the same for all parties involved. However, different names may be used, reflecting different attitudes. For example, what one calls a "terrorist" another may call a "freedom fighter" and a third, a "drug runner". When you have constructed a number of views, each role-player briefs itself using the view of its party. Then the role-players interact.

Enterprise Confrontation Management™

An enterprise - civil or military, governmental or private - can use Confrontation Manager™ to run an Enterprise Confrontation Management System™. This is like an accounting system for conducting relationships with others. It enables the enterprise to achieve its objectives with others by sending messages coordinated at every level.

An Enterprise Confrontation Management System™ is a system for linking and coordinating the views held by different parts of the organization.

Sharing tasks

Some of the uses for Confrontation Manager™ require moving missions between different work-stations or computer systems. Others can be done individually, but can also be shared between a number of contributing individuals.

Confrontation Manager™ supports two ways of sharing mission files between workstations or computer systems. One - exporting and importing - requires nothing more than e-mail. The other - using a workgroup - requires setting up a central server on which missions are published in order to be shared.