EVIN™: A Conflict Model

People in conflict tend to argue about what happened or didn’t happen. Who said what, who did what, who started it, who was right and who was wrong.

That is almost never what the conflict is about.

Underneath the argument, four things are running at once. Emotions that are hard to see and harder to name. Values that feel non-negotiable. Interests buried under stated positions. Needs that go unspoken because they are the hardest thing to say out loud.

Those same four elements kept returning in every conflict I worked. So, I built a model to teach them, because I believed it would be helpful to have a clear way to see what is happening in ourselves and in the other person when we disagree. These four are what shows up in every conflict. They are also the ingredients for finding a way through it. I call it EVIN™: a conflict model.

What Is EVIN™?

EVIN™ stands for Emotions, Values, Interests, and Needs. It is a way of understanding conflict rather than a procedure for resolving one, though seeing conflict through this model also opens space for resolution. In my experience the people in a conflict are the only ones who can find their way through it, and what helps them most is seeing clearly what they are dealing with, both in themselves and in the other person. That is what EVIN™ is for.

All four elements are always there, and they are normal.

Much of what makes conflict feel unbearable is the belief that having strong emotions, firm values, competing interests, and unmet needs means something has gone wrong, or that we are being unreasonable, or that we have lost control of ourselves. None of that is true. These four are what conflict is made of. When we stop treating them, in other people and in ourselves, as evidence of personal failure, we can start working with them.

Emotions. We have been told a story that emotions do not belong in conflict, whether it is happening at work or at home, that the mature and professional response is to keep them out of it, and that letting them show is a kind of failure. It is a story we absorb early and rarely question.

The story is wrong, and it costs us. Without emotion there would be no conflict at all, because conflict only happens where something matters, and mattering is what emotion is. It is an honest part of the conversation rather than an intrusion into it.

There is also this. Without emotion we cannot make decisions. The finding traces to the neurologist Antonio Damasio, who described patients with damage to one specific region of the prefrontal cortex, from tumors, strokes, and injuries. Their intelligence, memory, and reasoning all tested normal. What they had lost was the ability to feel their way to a choice, and their lives came apart because of it. They could lay out their options in perfect detail and then sit there unable to pick one. The pattern has been reproduced across many patients with the same kind of damage, who will keep making the disadvantageous choice in a controlled task even when they can correctly say which choice is the bad one.

Knowing is not the same as deciding. Reasoning tells us what is possible. Feeling tells us what we want. When we ask two people in conflict to set their emotions aside and be rational, we are asking them to give up the equipment they need to decide anything.

Emotion is not a lapse in composure, it is information, and it arrives carrying two things at once: how much something matters to the person feeling it, and what that person needs. Anger is the clearest example. We treat it as the problem when it is almost always the cover for something underneath, and when we get curious about what is under it, we usually find the actual conflict. The emotions quite often point to the need.

You cannot route around emotion. You can only decide whether you are willing to witness someone else's emotions without being overwhelmed by them. You also get to decide how you share yours.

Values. Values are the deeply held beliefs we carry about what is important and what is right, formed out of personality, culture, and everything we have lived through. As people, we share, to some degree, a large list of values. What differs is how we prioritize them, and that is where the trouble starts. Think of the person who keeps saying "that's not fair." Now put them across the table from someone whose highest value is generosity. Fairness and generosity are both character strengths. They are also, in that moment, in direct competition, and neither person is wrong.

A difference in priority almost never feels like a difference in priority. It feels like the other person is wrong about something that matters. When a conflict runs into our values it feels personal, because it is personal. It touches identity, it carries real emotional investment, and it comes with a sense of moral certainty that can make compromise feel like betrayal. That is why the advice to meet in the middle so often makes things worse. Values cannot be negotiated. They can be honored.

Interests. Positions are what we say we want, interests are why wanting it matters to us, and the distance between those two is where the workable solutions are usually hiding. This distinction comes from Roger Fisher and William Ury in Getting to Yes, and I had the good fortune to train with Ury. It is a framework for negotiating well that all mediators are taught. Understanding this is also a foundation for good listening skills.

Needs. Safety, autonomy, affiliation, appreciation, acceptance, significance, and FACE. When someone is behaving in a way we would call difficult, one of these is usually threatened, and the behavior we are objecting to is what protecting it looks like from the outside. Needs are the hardest of the four to ask about, partly because saying out loud what we need makes us vulnerable, and partly because we are often not sure ourselves. That is exactly why they are the ones most often missed.

FACE carries more weight than the rest. The psychiatrist James Gilligan spent decades interviewing men who had committed violent crimes and asking them why, and the answer he kept getting was some version of "he disrespected me." Gilligan concluded that the wish to eliminate shame and humiliation and replace it with pride is the basic motive behind violent behavior, and he described shame as working the way the tubercle bacillus works for tuberculosis: necessary, though not sufficient, for the thing to develop. His own list of what shame feels like includes losing face.

The conflicts I work with never go anywhere near violence, but the mechanism underneath them is the same one running at lower intensity. Take someone's face and the conflict escalates.

Where Did EVIN™ Come From?

I developed EVIN™ out of my own practice and have been teaching it publicly since 2024, in professional trainings and to mediators, human resource managers, and healthcare audiences. I recently taught it in a graduate course in Healthcare Conflict Management at the Lipscomb University Institute for Conflict Management. One of my students, a healthcare CEO, said it was the most useful tool she had learned, and she already applies it to conflicts that show up for her.

The acronym is mine. The grouping is mine. The decision to hold all four at once, rather than treating emotion as noise and interests as the real work, is the point of the model. Emotions, Values, Interests, Needs. Every single one of them is important in understanding someone's experience in conflict and what conflict solutions might look like.

I want to acknowledge the teachers who laid the groundwork for the model.

Interests versus positions comes from Fisher and Ury, as above.

The Needs list draws on a tradition rather than a single source. Needs-based analysis has been part of conflict resolution theory for decades, running through John Burton's work on basic human needs, Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication, and Abraham Maslow before them. The closest parallel to my particular list is the five core concerns in Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro's Beyond Reason, which I read and which shaped it. What I added was FACE.

FACE comes into EVIN™ because of Carol Bloom. She works with FACE in the transformative approach, alongside Irv Foster and Bob Thompson at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation, and she is where I first understood shame and saving face as something a mediator could listen for. I use it differently than she does. In EVIN™, I identify it as one of the needs people bring with them. I appreciate Carol for recognizing how important FACE is in conflict.

FACE as a concept is older than all of us. It runs back through Erving Goffman and through Stella Ting-Toomey's work on face-negotiation. I thought it was a key ingredient for conflict management, especially when I would hear people say that shame was a great way to motivate. It's not. It's a great way to inflame. For all of us, it's a call to remember the importance of respecting the human in front of us.

Why Does the Grouping Matter?

Much of the conflict training I have seen picks one lane. Interest-based negotiation treats emotion as interference. Emotional intelligence training rarely gets as far as competing values. Needs-based work can drift away from the concrete thing people are actually fighting about.

In a live conflict all four are present at once and pulling on each other. An unmet need produces an emotion, the emotion gets read as a character flaw, and the character reading hardens into a position that hides the interest underneath it. Meanwhile the values driving the whole thing never get named, so nothing anyone proposes actually lands.

EVIN™ is a way to hold all four without collapsing them into each other. That is the whole claim.

What Does This Look Like in Practice?

I teach EVIN™ in workplace and healthcare training, in conflict coaching, and in mediation trainings, and it is built into the Best Conflict Conversation Cards and into the graduate coursework I teach.

There aren't people problems. There are skills gaps. EVIN™ is one of the tools I use to close them.

Key Takeaways

• All four elements are present in every conflict, and they are normal. They are not evidence that something has gone wrong or that anyone is being unreasonable.

• Emotions carry two pieces of information at once: how much something matters to a person, and what that person needs.

• Values cannot be negotiated. They can be honored.

• Positions are what people say they want. Interests are why they want it.

• FACE carries more weight than the other needs and taking someone's face escalates a conflict faster than almost anything else.

• Holding all four at once, rather than picking one lane and calling it the real work, is the whole point of the model.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does EVIN™ stand for? Emotions, Values, Interests, and Needs. It is a model for understanding what is driving a conflict, developed by Kimberly Best and taught publicly since 2024.

Is EVIN™ a process for resolving conflict? No, and that distinction matters. It is a way of seeing what is happening, though seeing clearly tends to open space for resolution on its own. The people in a conflict are the ones who find their way through it.

Why include emotions in a conflict model? Because they are already there, and because they carry information nothing else in the conflict will give you. Emotion tells you how much something matters to a person and points toward what that person needs. Working around it means working without that information.

What is FACE and why does it matter in conflict? FACE is a person's sense of how they are seen, both by themselves and by the people around them. It is the need most often threatened in a conflict and the one least often named out loud. Research on shame and violence, particularly James Gilligan's, suggests humiliation is a necessary condition for escalation, and the same mechanism runs underneath ordinary workplace conflict at much lower intensity.

How is EVIN™ different from interest-based negotiation? Interest-based negotiation is one of the four, it is a good tool, and I use it. What EVIN™ adds is that emotions, values, and needs are running at the same time as interests, and that treating them as background noise is often what makes a conflict stall.

Who is EVIN™ for? Anyone in or near a conflict. I teach it to healthcare teams, HR professionals, leaders, families, and graduate students in conflict management, and it is built into the Best Conflict Conversation Cards.

References

Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition.

Burton, J. W. (1990). Conflict: Resolution and Provention. St. Martin's Press.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.

Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.

Fisher, R., & Shapiro, D. (2005). Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. Viking.

Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Houghton Mifflin.

Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Vintage.

Gilligan, J. (2003). Shame, guilt, and violence. Social Research.

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Pantheon.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review.

Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. PuddleDancer Press.

Simon, D. (2021, June 11). Face and mediation. Mediate.com. A discussion with Irv Foster, Bob Thompson, and Carol Bloom of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation.

Ting-Toomey, S. (1988). Intercultural conflict styles: A face-negotiation theory. In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories in Intercultural Communication. Sage.

Velotti, P., Elison, J., & Garofalo, C. (2014). Shame and aggression: Different trajectories and implications. Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Want to See What Is Actually Driving Your Conflict?

The conversations you're avoiding may be costing you more than you realize, and not knowing what is underneath them is part of that cost. Best Conflict Solutions, based in St. Louis and serving clients nationwide, helps families, healthcare teams, and organizations find their best way forward through mediation, conflict coaching, and training.

There aren't people problems. There are skills gaps. Reading emotions, values, interests, and needs is a skill, and it can be learned.

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About Kimberly Best

Kimberly Best, RN, MA, is the founder of Best Conflict Solutions, LLC, based in St. Louis and serving clients nationwide. She is a Missouri and Tennessee Supreme Court listed civil and family mediator, a FINRA arbitrator, and an adjunct professor at the Lipscomb University Institute for Conflict Management. Drawing on decades as a critical care nurse, graduate school in clinical/community psychology, and a master's in conflict management, Kimberly helps families, healthcare organizations, and businesses find their best way forward through mediation, conflict coaching, and training. She is the author of How to Live Forever: A Guide to Writing the Final Chapter of Your Life Story and the creator of the Best Conflict Conversation Cards. Her research on conflict coaching in healthcare was published in the 2025 Australasian Dispute Resolution Journal.

EVIN™ is a trademark of Best Conflict Solutions, LLC. © 2024, 2026 Best Conflict Solutions, LLC.