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About Riverhouse
Riverhouse ePress was established by Ron Kraybill in 2006 to publish educational materials in conflict resolution. To date, Kraybill’s Style Matters conflict style inventory and related items continue of central focus. Like the widely-used Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, Style Matters is based on the five-styles Blake Mouton Grid, but is distinguished by its cultural flexibility and stress responsiveness.
Style Matters is available as a print or online version, the latter with a 6-8 page score report tailored to the user’s score and a trainer dashboard for easy management. It has been taken by over 100,000 individuals in North America, Canada, the US, Australia, India, and other countries. It is available in English and French, with Spanish underway.
Riverhouse is managed day-to-day by Lee Myer, based in Lititz, Pennsylvania, with active support from Kraybill and several freelancers.
About Ron Kraybill and Riverhouse
Kraybill writes: Riverhouse started as a sideline to my larger mission of educating peacebuilders. But in ways I didn’t expect when I started it, it has become intertwined with my primary mission.
I began my career in 1979 as founding director of Mennonite Conciliation Service, which played a significant role in the early US conflict resolution movement. I spent 1989-95 as Director of Training at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Capetown and Training Advisor to the National Peace Accord, a large national structure set up by South Africa’s key players to deal with conflict during the political transition. From 1995-2007 I worked with John Paul Lederach, Vern Jantzi, Howard Zehr, and others in establishing the Masters in Conflict Transformation program at Eastern Mennonite University, one of the first Masters in the field.
I served as Quaker Representative in the Middle East 2007-2008, and as Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Development for the UN in Lesotho and the Philippines 2009-2015. Now at mandatory retirement age in the UN, I reside in Silver Spring, Maryland, and continue independent consulting and training. Over the last year I’ve spent several large blocks of time in Myanmar training facilitators for regional talks.
Style Matters emerged as a conflict resolution training tool from my work in the 1980s and 1990s. In setting after setting I had experienced the need for a tool that would take people quickly into key concepts of conflict resolution in a practical way without a lot of lecture. A conflict style inventory does this brilliantly by giving people a chance to look at their own patterns in conflict, while simultaneously providing a framework for understanding the patterns of others.
I used the Thomas Kilmann inventory for several years where I learned the power of the approach. But eventually I found it wanting - deaf to cultural issues, blind to the role of stress and how it causes some people to shift their conflict style quite sharply; optimized for psychometrics rather than learning, short on practical guidance, and expensive.
Style Matters developed out of experimentation with alternatives and input from trainers who started using early versions.
Much of my work for the past 25 years has been on big processes. Style Matters in the beginning seemed to me entirely a micro-level tool. But the longer I work in big processes the more I see a connection between the micro and the macro.
An important learning for me - sometimes quite a shattering one because my own work has been directly affected in adverse ways on numerous occasions - is how woefully unprepared are the actors currently mandated to respond to the problems of our world.
In the Pyramid of Competency below I sketch a progression of competencies that practitioners need to excel as they move to higher levels of conflict. Competency at any given level makes it relatively easy to advance upward to the next level. If you’re skilled and experienced at Small Group Facilitation, for example, it’s not a big stretch to move upwards and start doing Large Group Facilitation.
By the same token, lack of skill at any given level makes it hard to function well at all levels above it. 
The truth is that skill at any of those levels is shockingly low among the vast majority of leaders of our world today, including a large number of people considered professional advisors and consultants in conflict situations. I’ve seen numerous promising peace initiatives hit a ceiling and stall, not so much because the issues were impossible but because the “peacemakers” themselves were performing poorly, often dissipating their energy and credibility on turf battles among themselves.
This is not acceptable. The problem is not that we don’t know the skills required to function well at each level or how to teach them. It is rather that we simply do not make it a priority to teach these skills nor do we expect those aspiring to leadership to demonstrate mastery of them.
Having spent a career working in progressively higher levels of this pyramid, I now see that the biggest gap among people in leadership in our world is at the lower levels of the pyramid.
I retain interest and involvement at the higher levels, but broad progress there will be difficult until institutions and nations place greater priority on building the essential foundations of work at the lower levels. I see Style Matters as one modest contribution to addressing this, helping to build the foundations at the first two levels in the pyramid above by providing a lucid, practical, low-cost learning tool that can be widely used by all kinds of people.
Riverhouse started as a sideline to my larger mission of educating peacebuilders. In ways I didn’t expect, it has become intertwined with my primary mission.
