Communicating Through Conflict: Owning the Half You Can Reach

Who this course is for

Certified project managers who want to create sustainable mastery and build a custom PM Playbook they can use as they do their projects.

Two people on your project stopped talking to each other in March and the schedule has been paying for it ever since. Somebody committed a date you weren't in the room for. A functional manager pulled your best person and told you afterward.

None of that is a communication problem. It's a conflict problem that arrived wearing a communication problem's clothes, and the standard advice, be clearer, listen actively, use I statements, does nothing for any of it.

What this course actually says

If you're in conflict, you are the problem.

Not the villain. The problem, in the engineering sense: the part of the system you can reach. Every other variable in that conflict belongs to somebody who is not taking this course.

That includes the part nobody wants. You are responsible for having decided this person is impossible. The pinch is yours. The can't stand is yours. All of it happened inside you, and none of it arrived from somewhere else.

We wrote this course in 1995. It has sold for thirty years. This version is rebuilt from the ground up for people running projects, where you cannot wait for someone to come around because there is a delivery date, and you cannot write them off because you need them Tuesday.

What you leave able to do

Notice the moment you've been pinched, say so while it's still cheap to say, and stay steady with somebody who is already well past that point.

Three modules, one month

Your waste. Bugs, deer, and the windshield. Why the small things you're not saying are how you fail to see the large thing coming. And the flip: people judge themselves by their intent and everyone else by their behavior, and reversing that is most of the work.

Someone else's waste. Facilitating agreement between two people who are wrecking your schedule and are not going to stop because you asked. When anyone is trying to be right, everybody is stuck, because in a disagreement nobody is right.

The sewage treatment plant. The conflict you just handled was produced by a system. Fix the system and you stop generating the same fight with different people in it.

You leave with a playbook, not a certificate

The mastery exercises produce lessons learned, tied to real projects, in your own words. Three from this course. How you read people. What reliably pinches you and what you do instead of saying so. The standing mechanism you built so your team surfaces the small stuff before it costs anything.

That's your PM Playbook. It lives in your Cheetah account, you can edit any of it, download all of it, and it goes with you when you change employers.

And you keep adding. Every course in the Series puts entries in. So does anything you work out on your own projects in between, because you can write in whatever you want, whenever you want. Five years in it's a document about how you run projects that nobody else could have written.

The Custom Playbook Advisor

Once it's there, you can ask it things.

Describe a situation you're in right now, in your own words. It answers in three parts and keeps them separate: what standard practice says, what Cheetah's view is, and what your own playbook says about it.

One course in, your playbook has three entries and the Advisor will tell you so rather than pretending otherwise. Five courses in it has fifteen, and it starts handing you back conclusions you reached eighteen months ago and forgot. Which is the whole point. The version of you that wrote it down had time to think. The version of you in the meeting does not.

Who this is for

Certified project managers who need PDUs and would rather earn them doing something that changes a Tuesday.