{"id":871,"date":"2011-07-23T16:01:08","date_gmt":"2011-07-23T20:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/?p=871"},"modified":"2011-07-23T16:01:08","modified_gmt":"2011-07-23T20:01:08","slug":"conflict-resolution-and-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/conflict-resolution-and-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Conflict Resolution and Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been an uncharacteristic spate of impasses lately in my practice.\u00a0 Sitting back and examining why, the conclusion might be that one or more of the parties didn’t come to the mediation to move ahead to the next stage in their business.\u00a0 They came to it to re-affirm\u00a0the past,\u00a0to find a way back to the “good old days” when they didn’t have this problem.\u00a0 And problem-solving processes aren’t the best tools for vindicating past behavior.<\/p>\n

\"Janus\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here is where law and problem-solving have different strengths.\u00a0 The law looks backwards.\u00a0 It determines what happened in the past, it determines how folks in the past have dealt with similar events, and it tells the parties who is at fault, by this standard, for what they did in the past and what they have to do to ameliorate that fault.<\/p>\n

Problem-solving, by contrast, starts with now and looks ahead.\u00a0 The past is seldom a critical factor, except of course to understand the cause of\u00a0people’s emotions and indignations.\u00a0 But at\u00a0its core the process consists of assessing where we are, articulating where we want to go, and figuring out how to get there in\u00a0the most\u00a0reasonable way.<\/p>\n

That just won’t do for some folks.\u00a0 Especially when it comes to conflict within groups like clubs or churches, one senses an overpowering desire to punish the “bad guy.”\u00a0 “If only So-and-So would\u00a0leave, everything would be fine.”\u00a0 “If only X would happen, then everything would be the way it used to be.”\u00a0 Sometime public discourse falls into this rut: “If only politician X would stop saying stuff like this, everything would be fine.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a facilitator, convincing somebody that their feelings are wrong is a loser’s game.\u00a0 Someone entering a conflict resolution process hoping to get back to the good times presents a real challenge to a facilitator, and the tools that are appropriate to such situations are not (in my experience) varied.\u00a0 I’m sympathetic to folks who want back the comfort that they sense someone else took from them.\u00a0 No one is wrong who subjectively remembers their earlier life as nicer than their present one.\u00a0 And who can deny the desire that rises in all of us, now and then,\u00a0that the world at large should recognize that someone did\u00a0them harm?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Genuine resolution of conflict, surely, entails a willingness to step over all of this frustration and resentment, and to fashion and accept\u00a0a New Day.\u00a0 The organization, the church, the club, the commercial relationship, is dysfunctional now and needs to change in order to regain its creative and productive state.\u00a0 Going back to the way things were is like swimming again\u00a0in yesterdays’ river — impossible.\u00a0 And for parties who really need that outcome, then conflict resolution processes that don’t include determinative findings and vindication of rights probably just won’t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When parties want the conflict to end, but want to go back, not forward<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[8,15],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conflict-resolution","category-mediation","tag-adr","tag-mediation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}