Case Study 2: The Research Behind the Framework

Ury, Brett, and Goldberg's Study of Dispute Resolution Systems: How the Interests/Rights/Power Framework Emerged from the Coal Mines

Introduction: When Theory Meets a Broken System

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the American coal mining industry had a dispute resolution problem. A serious one.

The industry was governed by a collective bargaining agreement — the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement — between the United Mine Workers of America and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association. Like most labor agreements, it included a formal grievance procedure: a multi-step process by which individual disputes between workers and management would be raised, reviewed, and resolved. In principle, this was a rational system. In practice, it had collapsed.

By the early 1980s, the grievance backlog in many mining operations had grown so large that disputes were taking years to resolve. Work stoppages — wildcat strikes, slowdowns, tactical sick-outs — were epidemic. The industry was losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to labor unrest. Individual miners were sitting with unresolved complaints for so long that new complaints had accumulated on top of old ones, creating a sediment of bitterness that poisoned day-to-day working relationships. The formal system designed to resolve conflict was generating more of it.

William Ury, then a research fellow at Harvard Law School, was invited along with Stephen Goldberg (a law professor and expert in labor arbitration) and Jeanne Brett (an organizational behavior professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management) to study the problem. Their mandate was to figure out why the system had failed and what a better one would look like.

What they discovered — and what they eventually published in Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict (1988) — was not primarily about coal mines. It was about the fundamental architecture of conflict, and about why the way human beings and organizations habitually approach disputes tends to produce worse outcomes than available alternatives. The coal mine research was the empirical anchor for a theoretical framework that would reshape negotiation and conflict resolution theory for decades.

The Empirical Foundation: What Was Actually Happening

Ury, Brett, and Goldberg spent extended time in mining operations in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. They interviewed miners, union stewards, mine managers, company lawyers, and arbitrators. They analyzed grievance records, tracking disputes from origination through resolution. They observed the day-to-day dynamics of mines where the system was working well and mines where it had broken down badly.

What they found was a system that had become almost entirely rights-based and was periodically punctuated by power-based escalation — with interests-based conversation almost entirely absent.

When a miner had a complaint — about safety conditions, work assignment, wage calculation, disciplinary action — the formal procedure required filing a written grievance. The grievance would move through a series of formal review steps, each involving documentation, advocacy, and increasingly formal adjudication. At the end of the road, unresolved grievances went to arbitration: an external arbitrator would review the evidence, apply the contract, and issue a binding ruling. Someone would win; someone would lose; and the underlying relationship would be left entirely unaddressed.

This was a rights-based system. Its operating assumption was that the relevant question in any dispute was: who is right, according to the contract? Arbitrators were experts in the contract, not in the relationship. Their job was to apply the standard, not to understand what the parties actually needed.

The result, in practice, was a system that resolved complaints and poisoned relationships simultaneously. The miner who won the grievance was still working alongside the foreman he had just forced into a formal loss. The company that upheld its contractual right had done so in a way that communicated to its workforce: your concerns will be processed by a bureaucratic machine, not addressed by a human being who cares about what you actually need.

Meanwhile, when the formal system produced outcomes that either side considered unjust, the response was frequently power-based: the wildcat strike, the coordinated slowdown, the tactical sick call. Power moves that imposed costs on the other side, produced countermoves, escalated resentments, and left the original dispute no closer to genuine resolution.

The Key Discovery: Two Mines, Very Different Outcomes

One of the most analytically useful elements of Ury, Brett, and Goldberg's field research was the contrast between specific mining operations that were managing conflict effectively and those that were not. Two operations in particular became central to their analysis.

Mine A had a grievance filing rate that was typical for the industry — several hundred per year. Its arbitration rate (the percentage of filed grievances that went all the way to formal arbitration) was below 10 percent. Work stoppages were rare. The relationship between the union local and the mine management was functional if not warm. Miners and foremen had some capacity for direct conversation about complaints.

Mine B, of similar size and operating under the same collective bargaining agreement, had a filing rate comparable to Mine A but an arbitration rate above 40 percent. Work stoppages were frequent. Informal conversation between union representatives and management was essentially nonexistent. Every dispute was immediately formalized.

What distinguished the two mines was not the legal framework — they operated under the same contract. It was not demographics or geography. The distinguishing variable was a practice at Mine A that had no formal institutional name but that Ury, Brett, and Goldberg immediately recognized as interests-based dispute resolution: regular informal conversation between the local union president and the mine superintendent.

This pair met informally — sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly — to talk. Not about specific grievances in the formal sense, but about what was happening on the ground. What was working. What was producing friction. What workers were frustrated about, and what management was worried about. These conversations were not recorded. They were not contractually required. They had no binding outcome. But they produced something that the formal grievance system could never produce: a shared, human-level understanding of what each side actually needed.

When disputes arose at Mine A, they were frequently resolved through direct conversation before they became formal grievances. When they did become formal grievances, the parties involved had an existing relationship in which some degree of mutual understanding was possible. The formal system was used as a backstop, not as the primary mechanism.

At Mine B, there was no such relationship. Every complaint went immediately to the formal system, which processed it in the only way formal systems know how: through rights adjudication. Every resolution was a win-loss. Every resolution left the relationship more damaged.

The Framework That Emerged: Three Levels, Three Costs

From this empirical foundation, Ury, Brett, and Goldberg developed the interests/rights/power framework — not as an abstract philosophical construct but as a descriptive account of what was actually happening in conflict systems, and a prescriptive account of what worked best.

Interests are what parties actually want and why — their underlying needs, concerns, values, and goals. Interest-based approaches ask: "What does each party need, and how can we find an arrangement that meets those needs?" The primary tool is conversation. The primary process is problem-solving. The outcome is typically a joint solution that neither party could have arrived at alone.

The research finding about interests-based resolution was clear: where it was possible to achieve, it produced outcomes that were more durable, more satisfying to both parties, and less costly in time, money, and relationship damage than either rights or power-based approaches. The Mine A informal conversations were interest-based. They produced durable working relationships in an industry notorious for adversarialism.

Rights are the external standards that parties invoke to adjudicate disputes — contracts, laws, professional codes, established precedents, shared norms of fairness. Rights-based approaches ask: "Who is right, according to the applicable standard?" The primary tool is evidence and argument. The primary process is adjudication by a neutral third party. The outcome is a determination that may or may not satisfy the underlying interests of either party.

Rights-based resolution is more expensive than interest-based, but it is sometimes necessary. It provides a form of accountability that pure interest-based conversation cannot guarantee: it can force an outcome when one party is unwilling to engage collaboratively. And it applies standards that are external to the relationship, which can be valuable when power imbalances make unstructured conversation unsafe for the lower-power party.

The research finding about rights-based resolution was that it was vastly overused relative to the circumstances that genuinely called for it. Mine B was resolving interest-level disputes through rights-based adjudication, at enormous cost, with no corresponding improvement in outcomes or relationships. The contract was being applied to problems that the contract was not designed to solve.

Power is the ability to impose costs on the other party or to take unilateral action that forces a change in their position or behavior. Power-based approaches ask: "Who can force whom to do what?" The primary tool is coercion — strikes, sanctions, ultimatums, public pressure campaigns, unilateral action. The outcome is compliance, not agreement.

The research finding about power-based resolution was that it was the most costly approach in terms of both direct expense (lost productivity, damaged infrastructure, legal costs) and relationship destruction, and produced the least durable outcomes. Wildcat strikes ended the immediate dispute but generated resentment that produced the next one. Power moves beget counter-moves. The cycle is self-reinforcing.

The Cost Hierarchy and Its Implications

Ury, Brett, and Goldberg developed what they called a "cost hierarchy" — the observation that interests, rights, and power-based resolution exist on a spectrum of increasing cost and decreasing durability.

The policy implication is straightforward: dispute resolution systems — whether in organizations, labor relations, or personal relationships — should be designed to push conflicts toward interest-based resolution whenever possible. Rights and power mechanisms should be available as backstops, but the system should create strong incentives and low barriers for interest-based approaches.

In the coal mining context, this translated into a specific set of design recommendations: create formal structures for interest-based conversation (not just ad hoc informality), train union representatives and management in interest-based negotiation skills, reduce the barriers to raising concerns before they become formal grievances, and restructure the grievance system so that early-stage resolution is actively incentivized rather than bypassed.

Several mining operations implemented these recommendations. The outcomes were measurable: grievance filing rates fell, arbitration rates fell, work stoppage rates fell, and — most significantly — survey measures of workplace relationship quality improved. Interest-based approaches worked not because they were soft or conflict-averse, but because they addressed what the parties actually needed rather than simply processing their stated positions.

The Research Applied: What This Means for Individual Conflict Diagnosis

The coal mining research has implications well beyond collective bargaining. Its core finding — that most conflicts capable of interest-based resolution are instead fought at the rights or power level, at greater cost and with worse outcomes — applies to interpersonal conflicts, organizational disputes, family disagreements, and community tensions with equal force.

Several specific findings from the research are directly applicable to the diagnostic process this chapter describes.

Finding 1: Level mismatch is extraordinarily common.

Ury, Brett, and Goldberg found that in a majority of the disputes they observed, the level at which the conflict was being fought did not match the level at which it was actually operating. An interests-level conflict — workers needed clearer safety procedures, managers needed operational flexibility — was being processed through a rights-level system that could only produce a ruling about whether the contract had been violated. The mismatch was not a result of bad faith; it was a result of systemic design and habitual practice. The grievance system existed; complaints went into it; that was what happened.

The implication for individual conflict diagnosis: before engaging in a difficult conversation, accurately identifying what level the conflict is actually at — rather than defaulting to the level that is most habitual or most visible — can change the entire character of what follows.

Finding 2: The costs of level mismatch accumulate.

In the mines with high arbitration rates, the problem was not just that individual disputes were being handled inefficiently. The accumulated cost of mismatched resolution — the resentment, the damaged relationships, the normalized adversarialism — was itself a major driver of new disputes. The way conflicts were being handled was producing more conflicts.

This finding has a personal-scale equivalent. When individuals consistently respond to interests-level conflicts with rights-level or power-level approaches — when they escalate to HR for a conversation that could have been a direct discussion, when they issue ultimatums rather than exploring what each person needs — they train their relationships for adversarialism. Over time, the relationship itself becomes more fragile, more easily triggered, more likely to generate new conflicts.

Finding 3: Interest-based resolution requires skill, not just goodwill.

One of the most important and frequently overlooked findings from the research was that effective interest-based resolution did not simply happen when parties were willing to be collaborative. It required specific skills: the ability to identify and articulate underlying needs, the ability to listen generatively (to actually update one's understanding based on what the other party says), the ability to generate options that satisfy multiple interests simultaneously, and the ability to manage emotional activation enough to remain problem-oriented.

The Mine A union president and mine superintendent were not naturally gifted conversationalists. They had developed, over time, a practice — regular informal meetings, a certain quality of attention, a norm of not making everything official — that supported interest-based problem-solving. The practice was the skill. The skill produced the outcomes.

This is the research foundation for the diagnostic framework in this chapter. Structured preparation — working through what the conflict is actually about, what each party actually needs, what a good outcome would actually look like — builds the cognitive and emotional conditions for interest-based conversation. The framework is not bureaucratic overhead. It is skill development.

A Note on Generalizability

It is worth acknowledging, as Ury, Brett, and Goldberg themselves did, the limitations of their research foundation. Coal mining in the 1980s was a specific industrial context with specific dynamics: a highly adversarial history, a unionized workforce, a formal collective bargaining structure, a culture of masculine toughness that made vulnerability costly. Not every organizational or interpersonal context mirrors these features.

The generalizability of their findings has been supported by subsequent research in fields ranging from family mediation to international diplomatic negotiation. The interests/rights/power framework has been validated across a remarkable range of dispute types and cultural contexts. But generalizability is never absolute. There are conflicts in which an interests-based approach is not viable — where power imbalances are too severe, where safety concerns are too acute, where one party is not willing or able to engage at the interests level. The framework is a diagnostic tool and a design principle, not a universal algorithm.

The most important thing the research provides is an empirically grounded corrective to the default human tendency to fight conflicts at the rights or power level when interests-level resolution is available and preferable. That corrective applies broadly — to organizations, to relationships, to the individual sitting at a desk on a Thursday evening, trying to figure out what kind of conversation they actually need to have.

Discussion Questions

1. The Mine A informal conversations between the union president and superintendent had no binding outcome and no formal institutional status. Why, then, were they so effective? What does this suggest about the relationship between formal and informal dispute resolution mechanisms in any organization or relationship system?

2. Ury, Brett, and Goldberg found that interest-based resolution required specific skills, not just goodwill. What does this imply for how individuals and organizations should invest in conflict resolution capacity?

3. The coal mining research was conducted in a specific industrial context in the 1980s. What aspects of the findings do you find most applicable to contemporary conflicts — in workplaces, in families, in communities? What aspects seem most context-specific?

4. The cost hierarchy table shows that power-based resolution produces the least durable outcomes. And yet power-based approaches remain common in political, organizational, and personal conflicts. What explains this persistence, given the evidence about their costs?

5. The research found that level mismatch — fighting an interests-level conflict at the rights or power level — was "extraordinarily common." What systemic and psychological factors contribute to this mismatch? What would need to change to reduce it?