Session 1: Conflict, Liberation, and Preparing the Field

Monday, December 18th

In this session, we aim to focus on our internal orientation to facilitating a conflict and on what we can do, before we bring people together and as we begin a process. These moments of engaging with conflict tend to be fraught, especially when an explicit conflict engagement system does not exist and the default setting of punitive responses predominates, often in the form of an insistence on "fairness." What we can do within this context is to prepare both ourselves and those whose conflict we are facilitating for an experience rooted in care for all, including those whose actions may have resulted in significant harm, so that we can restore as much trust as is possible to restore, repair as much harm as is possible to repair, and learn as much as possible within what led to the conflict.

Here are some of the elements that, together, support us in this delicate phase of the process:  

• Grounding ourselves in the deeper assumptions of NVC: that all actions are attempts to meet needs that are shared by all humans, and we always choose the least impactful pathway that we are able to see as meeting our needs  
• Discerning how much content we actually need to know in order to support a process and how much to find out when working with people
• Approaching any conversation that precedes a conflict process with reverence – with parties to the conflict and with others – as an opportunity to build trust with each person we speak with while collecting information about needs, impacts, and resources that are relevant to the conflict
• Offering framing about conflict, about systemic considerations, about learning, about togetherness, and about the significance of trust for increasing creativity and goodwill