The model of strategic conflict in Figure 1.1 suggests that discussion of com­munication strategies and tactics should appear toward the back of the book.

We want to cover communication strategies and tactics early to show various message behaviors referred to throughout the book. This chapter emphasizes how people manage conflict through communication—communication constituting the pri­mary avenue for managing conflict (or any type of interaction, for that matter).

Paths toward achieving satisfying conflict outcomes are often blocked by the intensity and confusion that underlie many conflicts. Productive communica­tive strategies can remain oblique or solutions might occur immediately after the interaction, weeks later, or never. Still, people with excellent conflict communi­cation skills are much more likely to obtain their desired goals and simultaneously meet the other person’s objectives.

Communication entails symbols to represent objects, events, and behavior. Burgoon (1985) defined symbols as “behaviors that are typically sent with intent, used with regularity among members of a social community, and have consensu­ally recognizable interpretations” (p. 348). As Ruesch and Bateson (1951) and others have noted, the map is not the territory—nor is the thing named the thing itself.