The NY Times carries a gripping account about vandalism by young whites against a mosque in Texas. One youth writes a heartfelt letter of apology and Muslim leaders are so moved that they request the judge to be lenient.
The prosecutor thinks this is a bad idea and forbids the youth from even visiting the mosque. Nevertheless, well, just read the story - you won't regret it.
In a time when alienation is widespread, the response of NY Times readers to this story is one of visceral gratitude. Many comment it is the best they have read in a long time. This is a story about restorative justice that Americans really need to hear. If we are to find our way back from the abyss of polarization, we have to stop planting seeds of alienation. This requires changes to a justice system that systematically blocks people from relationally-based responses to crime. .
The concept of justice widely known and applied in our society is court-centered punitive justice, which holds no interest in healing of relationships or individuals. The court calls all the shots. The individuals involved have only small roles in the process, and no say in what happens.
Victims often have the tiniest role and the least say in this process. They are expected to provide evidence of wrong-doing and then disappear for the court to mete out punish against an offender.
Whenever violence takes place as a result of public conflict, well-intentioned leaders face a challenging question. How should they respond? What should they say that might reduce possibility of further bloodshed?
They can learn from the tragic experience of the Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans in the 1990s where some 130,000 were killed in a decade of horrific genocidal conflict.
Most of the combatants were religious, loyal to the eastern or western branch of Christianity or to Islam. All three traditions are home to resources for peace. Each has scriptures that affirm kindness and peaceful conduct. Each has individuals deeply committed to peaceful coexistence with others.
Yet religion played a central role in the violence in the Balkans. And religious leaders often contributed to the violence rather than help end it.
One way religious leaders stoked the war was through public comments on the conflict that superficially seemed to support peace but actually stirred followers up and ultimately supported an upward spiral of violence.
Insult has become a daily aspect of life. It's hard to read the newspaper or view screens without encountering it. This is bad, not just for us, but for our future and our children's future.
Public insult damages more than its target. It erodes community by implanting destructive messages in all who witness it, eg:
When insult is allowed to have the last word, when it succeeds in silencing or humiliating people, those messages are planted like seeds. Eventually the seeds become norms and people begin acting on them on a broad scale. Then violence is just a stone's throw away.
Among the many things we can do to prevent this is learning, modeling, and teaching the art of responding constructively to insult, without using insult ourselves.
Don't fight fire with fire. Fight fire with water.
Trainers often ask: how much time to budget for a conflict styles workshop? It depends!
In traditional pencil and paper training format, you might calculate
That would be enough to cover the basics of conflict styles in 80-120 minutes. You could easily do a lot more, of course, if you have another hour or several more. See my Trainers Guide, available as a free download, for ideas.
Online tools open another scenario that many trainers like because it pushes individual activities outside of workshop time and allows the trainer to dedicate more classroom time to discussion.
Using the online version could look something like this:
I spent much of the last month writing new text for the score report of Style Matters. That’s the 10 page personalized report from the online version of my conflict style inventory, whose numbers, with my reflections thereon, go out to users after taking the inventory.
Commanders in military establishments, janitors in neighborhood associations, freshmen at Bible colleges, and pretty much everybody in between read (and I like to think, ponder) this thing; according to logs on our server, nearly 365 days a year.
As usual in our multi-religious family, I did both Pesach and Easter celebrations. Sort of. But mostly, while others congregated for holidays, I wrestled epiphanies in text on my laptop.
And got new hope and vision as I remembered why conflict resolution continues to grip me. Here my traditionalist and my modernist, my believing and my agnostic, my monastic and my populist selves meet. Conflict, or at least reflecting on human responses to it, remains holy ground to this once Mennonite farmer, now aging peace process facilitator.
“Conflict management starts with self-management,” we say on the Style Matters frontpage. The lone boatman there launches his journey to an unknown destination, symbol of the journey that peacebuilding can launch us on.
You can't do conflict resolution without doing anger management.
Anger is an emotion that everyone needs. Don’t wish it away. It provides resources essential to self-protection and survival. It helps us respond quickly, with high energy, to dangerous or unpleasant situations.
But that doesn't mean it's fine to rant when you're pissed.
Researchers in several fields find that expressing anger in an angry way feeds the problem.
The weekend brought a textbook example of under-use of conflict avoidance and its costs.
It started on Friday when Rep. John Lewis picked a quarrel with Trump. "I don't see this President-elect as a legitimate president," he announced in a press statement. Saturday Trump fired back with tweets.
In the context of the long holiday weekend honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday, the exchange echoed thunderously in the media.
Result? Lewis’ book sales skyrocketed. By Sunday leading newspapers were carrying reports that his books were in the top 20 list of booksales and Amazon had sold out all copies of his best known work.
This diagram contains important clues about an alternative to the widely held notion that religious extremism can be forcefully countered. It's from Ian White, a key strategist behind the scene in stabilizing the Northern Ireland peace process.
Religion is deeply embedded in human experience. The goal in responding to religious extremism must be to work with and constructively engage the powerful energies of religion rather than to remove or thwart them, what White calls "countering".
The latter rarely work out as expected. To the extent that strategies to counter extremism are violent, they share and strengthen the underlying assertion of extremism, that force is acceptable and effective in building a desirable future. Even when not violent, if such strategies fail to engage religious leaders, they are devoid of understanding of the world from which extremism emerges; and thus bereft of potency and sustainability.
The only option for responding to religious extremism without making things ultimately worse is a strategy of transformation.
Such a strategy works respectfully and knowledgeably in regard to the role religion holds in human functioning and it engages religious people where they are. It actively seeks out and finds common cause with those values, symbols, traditions, individuals and institutions that support non-violent responses to human diversity; responses that exist in virtually all religious milieu, even if not always apparent from a distance.
Because the only realistic goal is transformation, not transmission or domination, such an approach must be a dialogue, not a monologue.
Just re-released: my Trainers Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Workshop. Now 38 pages in the 2017 edition, it's still free.
Like earlier versions, this one gives step-by-step guidance for trainers. My aim is to make it easy for anyone with basic group leadership skills to lead successful conflict styles learning.
New in this edition are sections on training supported by online tools. With a third or more of the US workforce working from home, multi-platform environments and extensive online interaction are the norm for many. Trainers tooled only for live classrooms are obsolescing.
If you're in a hurry, just hit download and abscond with the goods!If you have a few minutes for some history, read on.
I'll always be grateful to Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann, creators of the venerable Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, for turning me on to the conflict style inventory. Though their inventory was proceeded by Jay Hall's and others, with the TKI I discovered the power of conflict styles for training. To me, if not Adam and Eve, they're the Abraham and Isaac of conflict style inventories.
If you've already spent time with relatives this holiday season perhaps you've discovered things are not all fa-la-la at family gatherings. Getting together is great, but it can also bring conflict. All that cozy togetherness gives space for old issues to appear in new forms.
In a year when politics has polarized, more rancor than usual is likely to get served along with the turkey. Here’s what you can do about it.
Start with a resolution to be nimble at conflict avoidance. You can’t stop others from being pissants, but you can decline to be baited. Avoidance is a great conflict style for situations where you don't have any real goal other than staying out of difficulty.
You probably already know which people and circumstances can handle candor and which cannot. Prepare lines for conflict harmonizing and avoiding that you can easily pull out when needed. To that annoying relative who can’t resist a verbal poke about politics or some other dicey topic, come back with responses that re-direct or de-escalate.
- “You know, I promised myself I’d stay on safe topics this year. Tell me about your new job….”
If you like the conflict styles framework and want compatible tools to build the capacity of your organization or team, check out the trove of short videos by Dr. John Scherer.
In the last two minutes Scherer lists 4 concepts and tools valuable for helping groups and team use conflict well: The Pinch Theory, Three Worlds, The Four Languages, and Polarity Thinking. He dedicates a short video to each of those concepts on the same site.
I especially recommend the video on polarity management. That's a powerful tool that I've found dramatically effective in certain conflicts. It should be in the toolkit of all who resource organizations and their leaders.
John Scherer is an esteemed elder in the field of organizational management and change who brings wonderful clarity and humanity to everything he does. He has posted 100+ free short videos over the last two years on organizational management and change management, many with valuable tools for making conflict a positive experience.
Columbia's peace process includes a problem that recurs in many national peace processes: What to do with groups whose tactics or ideology makes them unacceptable? My life experience has taught me to move towards, not away from such groups.
In Columbia, an agreement was announced on September 26, 2016, between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), ending 52 years of fighting. Left out of this agreement is the National Liberation Army (ELN), a more radical and smaller insurgency whose practices have included kidnapping civilians. The ELN has refused to renounce this practice as a precondition to talks.
I have no knowledge of the details of the Columbian peace process, but I recognize this as an old problem. In South Africa, the Philippines, Israel/Palestine, and other large peace processes I've been close to, there is almost always at least one group like this.
Kristin Herbolzheimer of Conciliation Resources writes insightfully about how to respond in a recent post that I recommend. There are no simple answers to such situations and Herbolzheimer clearly recognizes that. But he explores reasons why ELN has been reluctant to enter fully into talks and offers useful ideas in response.
Personal experience in several big peace processes taught me that some of the most important insights essential to sustaining peace on the long-term can be had by studying the "fringe" groups. I recall here the Pan-Africanist groups at the fringes of the South African talks whose epithets were often blood-curling. Pondering their slogan "One settler, one bullet", it felt pretty weird to be going off for a 3 day workshop with regional leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress in a township of Port Elizabeth in 1990.
Injustice is a big problem. But it's always a symptom of a deeper cause.
You can't build lasting peace and you won't get justice if people feel excluded from decisions they care about. That works sometimes for a little while but in the end things fall apart.
[Written three years before the pandemic, this post is more relevant than ever now that most training is online.]
A challenge conflict styles trainers often face is limited time in workshops or little face-to-face access to people needing training. What then?
Here are options that can still bring good results, sometimes even better than a relaxed face-to-face workshop:
- "Key Insights about my conflict styles that I learned from taking Style Matters" - "Three things I want to try to do differently with others in my group (and why) as a result of learnings from Style Matters" - "Reflections on a week/month of effort to apply insights from Style Matters in relationships to others"- "My strengths and weaknesses in conflict styles - reflections following taking the Style Matters inventory".- "Two successes and two challenges I faced this week in applying insights from the Style Matters inventory."- "A personal response to Principles of Wise Response to Conflict
In all cases where you are working with reports or reflections sent to you, if your purpose is to facilitate learning, make at least some reply to journals, even if only a few sentences. If you fail to do this, the writers are more likely to experience your presence as that of an authority figure to whom they are reporting rather than as a coach. The coaching role, of course, is generally more likely to facilitate reflection and learning role than an authority figure role.
Conflict style awareness is truly useful in day-to-day management of differences. It's easy to learn.
But not so easy to do!
Easy: Learning the basics of conflict styles. Do this in a few minutes with this free "Intro to Conflict Styles". You can figure out your own conflict style almost as quickly by taking a conflict style quiz (such as my Style Matters; the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, or even a cross-cultural one).
Challenging: remembering, in the heat of conflict, to use those great conflict resolution strategies. We are hardwired by nature with a tiny set of responses when we are frightened or angry: flight, fight, or freeze. Those three simple responses enabled survival in the jungle and you can witness them any time you want in the animal world. But they have limited use for human beings today.
To build partnerships and solve problems in a complex world we need additional options for responding, and the ability to choose rather than merely react. We acquire these capacities, not by relying on instinct, but by thought, practice, and reflection.
Conflict resolution and human development people could learn a lot from business marketers. We have a message and tools that address critical challenges for human beings.We should learn from the best practices of those who are successfully using modern tools of communication to influence others. At this time, those are online business marketers.True, online marketing is often shallow and manipulative. Yet, for better or for worse, its success in influencing people means we have to understand it. Amidst all the hype, we can learn valuable insights about how to communicate.I follow a small number of online marketers who meet all of the following criteria:1) They have a track record of success in reaching others in their business efforts;2) They are in the school of marketing thought and practice known as inbound marketing, which says that the best way to be a successful marketer is to truly meet genuine needs of your clients. If you do this, and use effective strategies to become visible and interact with them, clients will come, say the inbound marketers.3) They demonstrate a commitment not just to making money but also to actively doing what they can to make the world a better place. I especially respect those personally involved in philanthropic efforts.Among these is Neil Patel, who blogs at www.quicksprout.com. He's wonderfully strategic, pays great attention to detail, and he works hard at communication. His writing is simple, clear, and accessible, with that odd blend of humility and self-confidence that characterizes many successful agents of change. I have no relationship to him, financial or otherwise.Here's a recent blog post:https://www.quicksprout.com/2016/06/06/be-a-better-teacher-and-writer-6-teaching-techniques-you-should-know/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=emailIf you are involved in any kind of effort to educate or bring change to human beings, read it! It's one of the better summaries I've seen on communicating for impact. I immediately changed the title of a recent blog post after reading his second point.If you are thinking of using the web to reach people, you might sign up for Patel's site and pay attention to the stuff he sends. He has studied every step of the journey of interaction with people and refined what he does to increase the odds that in the end you will decide that he's got what you need and will buy from him. You can learn a lot by observing how he seeks to win your trust.OK, he's selling services, to income-generating businesses. His strategies are designed to reach people deeply motivated by desire. That's different than communicating for social change or peace.Peace, we know, is not a commodity. It can't be marketed. It's a gift that follows good choices and habits of mindful living.But. Desire is certainly at the heart of most human choices, and that is not all bad. And there is no denying that misdirected desire is a great enemy of peace. So we better learn how to work in the presence of this powerful drive and, when we can, harness its energy for good.I get useful ideas every time I read Patel or other web marketers like Perry Marshall, Michael Stelzner, and Pat Flynn and I think change agents everywhere can learn from people like them. But there is an overwhelming amount of stuff out there. We need to help each other separate the wheat from the chaff.I'd love to hear your thoughts about:
By adopting practices of interaction largely stripped of symbols and moments to engage Depth, we cut ourselves off from the most powerful source of energy for creativity, connection, and change available to us.
When voices rise and conflict escalates, do you step forward and engage? Or step back and assess? This post is for people who favor the latter, and for those who live and work with them. I’ll give you another two-step for conflict resolution, a practical strategy when engagement is difficult.
Let’s start by honoring “step back and assess” as a response to conflict. Life brings endless friction. We are confronted, goaded, and obstructed from every corner. It’s hard to get through even a day without someone or something in our face.
In chronically contested space, engaging all challengers is impossible. When someone gives you the finger for your unexpected shift of lanes while driving, do you pull over to talk things through? Hardly. What would be the point? You shrug, mutter to yourself, ignore the jackal, and drive on.
So the arts of skillful avoidance are essential to survival: Silence, distance, non-involvement, non-responsiveness, impassiveness, circumspection, studied neutrality, inaccessibility, biding your time. All have a place as strategies to avoid battles not worth the cost of fighting or for which we are poorly prepared.
Organizational psychologist and podcaster Meisha Rouser has posted an interview, "Exploring Conflict Styles with Ron Kraybill". In a 25 minute conversation you get an overview of key concepts of conflict styles and why it's important to pay attention to them.
Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I’ve met people who feel a deep inner echo to the idea of making peace. I’m a bit mystical about such things. The inner echo is one mark of a calling and I have a lot of time for people hearing it.But then it gets complicated. How to get from inner echo to outer action? Sustaining my own call over 37 years and observing others, I’ve learned a few things:
