Transforming Conflict Through Insight Innovative Skills and Approaches for Conflict Professionals

In conflict resolution, collaborative professionals, mediators and conciliators promise a client-centred process that will meet parties’ needs, address their concerns and give them the best chance to achieve what they hope for. Paying attention to parties’ interests and values is vital to finding creative and workable solutions. We know this, and yet many of us have experienced the frustration of watching parties – and even the professionals - lose focus on what matters and return to positions when conflict escalates.

In this workshop, we will learn innovative and productive tools to address conflict behaviours so we can make an early and enduring shift from “positions” to “what matters”.  Working with the "Insight Approach" to conflict, we will learn to notice and respond to conflict behaviours. We will learn how to ask questions to unearth the threats that escalate and sustain conflict, without provoking it, and to use what is learned to promote an authentic shift from conflict to collaboration, without forcing or faking it.

Participants will learn:

1. New ways of thinking about conflict that will enhance communication, collaboration and decision-making.
    
2. Skills to help parties talk about what matters to them, the cares and values behind their actions, and their interpretations of each other’s actions.

3. How to avoid debates about “right and wrong” but to instead discover threats, produce curiosity, and stimulate dialogue that will generate insights and reduce conflict.

4. How to make sure what is learned does not “fall off the table’ when the process moves to option generation and decision-making.