Longtime colleague William Kaplan called out of the blue yesterday and I joined him at the mostly air-conditioned Lansdowne’s local Regency Cafe. Sipped a vanilla Italian soda for a wide ranging leisurely chat about our work. Ah summer!
I promised to send him the rewritten “understanding conflict” pages and will post the conflict section here so all of you can comment.
Ideally, we’ll condense these to just three pithy pages of text, three of illustration. At the moment it spills over. A few pages on negotiation theory basics will follow this section. Most other info about conflict and resolution belongs either on a more extensive web page, or in another book.
The question is, what do we absolutely need to say about conflict in order to help *mediators* think clearly — their attitude towards the parties, the way they assess the situation?
Note that I haven’t yet created the new handwritten layer for the spiral graphic. As in the previous edition, it will show the “mess”, starting with the self, a escalating outward to interpersonal, group, organization, society.
I have relied upon and learned from the understanding conflict section of the handbook. I hope my suggestions are useful and add something new to the conversation. I have always found the conflict part more exciting than the resolution part. What do mediators absolutely need to know about conflict…let’s begin with it’s fun, living, and natural.
I think the opening sentence is great – how a mediator conceptualizes conflict does guide the way he/she will mediate. A mediator must at least be aware of basic conflict theories and ought to be able to see the relationship between theory / framework and the mediation process. The conflict triangle illustrates this relationship well. The manual is not the place for theory presentation on mediation and conflict – though websites and other books are.
I would like to explore these things
1) The “sense of threat” at the core of most conflicts and the corollary that mediation can alleviate that sense of threat
2) The relationship between mediation process and the conflict core
3) The conflict core as experienced during the conflict and the conflict core during the mediation process
4) The conflict spiral in terms of what is happening during the mediation process (how the “discouragement disputants feel by the time they get to mediation” effect the mediation)
How does that sound?