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New Card Games Reinforce Conflict Management Understanding and Skills

CPP Releases Let's Deal with Conflict! as TKI Companion Product

May 19, 2003

Palo Alto, CA -- CPP, Inc., today introduced Let's Deal with Conflict!, a set of ten card games played with a special deck designed to reinforce the concepts of the company's best-selling Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI). CPP, Inc., is the leading provider of assessments and training tools for professionals focused on meeting individual and organizational development needs.

The new games, developed by world-renowned game developer Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan, Ph.D., convert familiar card games such as gin rummy, poker, and solitaire into new ones that teach and reinforce the five TKI conflict-handling modes: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Each game enhances learning and comprehension of these five modes to increase understanding of how to work with people in conflict situations.

"This is the second set of card games created for CPP by Thiagi. We have found that learning-based games such as those in Let's Deal with Conflict! greatly advance people's ability to understand themselves and to interact appropriately with others," says David Krantz, president and CEO of CPP. "Since most people are already familiar with card games, they learn these very easily and quickly become fluent in the five conflict-handling styles."

The new games are well suited to use in conflict workshops since most involve multiple players. In fact, several games are played by larger groups. For example, in Action Rummy, the players must collect sets of four cards that belong to the same conflict mode. In another game, Card Sets, players compete to compile a hand comprising a full house or four of a kind.

"People working in conflict management can take as long as twenty years to acquire a solid level of fluency because they come across different types of behaviors and interactions infrequently," says Thiagi. "The card games accelerate this process by presenting people with all of the kinds of behaviors in a short period of time. This requires participants to classify the conflict mode correctly and quickly. People actually get addicted to the games and play them again and again, learning even more in the process."

Let's Deal with Conflict! comes with reproducible instruction sheets to help participants learn each game quickly as well as reproducible masters for presentation overheads and, a deck of playing cards. The package also includes materials to help facilitators introduce and explain each game.

Further information about Let's Deal with Conflict! is available at CPP's web site at www.cpp.com or by calling CPP Customer Relations at (800) 624-1765.

About CPP, Inc.

CPP, Inc. is the leading provider of assessments and training tools for professionals focused on meeting individual and organizational development needs. In addition to the Myers-Briggs® and Spectrum CPI 260® assessments, its world-renowned brands include the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, the FIRO-B® assessment, and the California Psychological Inventory® assessment. Davies Black® Publishing, an imprint of CPP, also offers high-quality books in the fields of career management, leadership, organization development, and professional improvement.

CPP's mission is to help people understand themselves, how they relate to others, and how they can succeed together. The company publishes assessments and training tools for a variety of applications, such as leadership development, coaching, team building, career management, and communication. CPP's assessments are among the most widely used in the world; for more than 45 years they have benefited millions of people in more than 50 countries.

CPP's assessments, training tools, and publications are available directly from CPP and through thousands of professional counselors and consultants worldwide. Some assessments, such as the MBTI instrument, must be administered only by qualified practitioners.

For more information about CPP, visit www.cpp.com or call 800-624-1765.

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MBTI, Myers-Briggs and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are registered trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust. Strong Interest Inventory is a registered trademark of Stanford University Press. Davies-Black and FIRO-B are registered trademarks of CPP, Inc. The CPP logo, Spectrum CPI 260 and California Psychological Inventory are trademarks of CPP, Inc.