Constructive Conflict Guide______________________
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How to Stop Fighting: Home
A Seven-Step Interactive Tutorial for People Involved in Relationship Conflicts
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Constructive Confrontation: Handling Conflict More Constructively from an Advocacy Perspective
A strong democracy depends upon the willingness and ability of society's various interest groups to pursue their advocacy efforts in less divisive and more constructive ways that maximize persuasion and mutually beneficial trade-offs while limiting the use of force. The same is true for personal and organizational relationships and conflicts.
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Stripping Away "Overlay" Problems That Make Conflicts Appear More Intractable Than They Really Are
Intractable conflicts have core issues -- the things that the conflict is "really about" and usually a set of "overlay" or complicating factors -- problems that overlie (and often obscure) the core issues making them harder to constructively address. Identifying and correcting (or at least limiting) these problems is a first key step in efforts to handle conflict more constructively.
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Constructive Framing & Future Visioning
If we can abandon our hyper-polarized, us-vs-them way of thinking about conflict and reframe our differences as shared problems to be solved collaboratively, we can develop a vision for a more attractive future in which we would all like to live.
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Overcoming Hyper-Polarization, Escalation, and the Forces of Disintegration
Polarization and escalation tend to make conflicts increasingly intense. But there are a variety of conflict resolution strategies that can help de-polarize and de-escalate conflicts so that they at least do less damage, and at best, might be resolved.
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Limiting Communication Problems and the Resulting Misunderstandings
People often develop inaccurate (and inflammatory) images of the things that the other side (and, sometimes, their side) is saying and doing. Correcting these misunderstandings can do much to illuminate unrecognized areas of agreement and eliminate unjustified sources of friction.
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Resolving Fact-Based Sources of Conflict
Conflicts are often dramatically intensified by contradictory images of key objectively determinable facts. Limiting these disagreements with fact-finding efforts that are broadly seen as trustworthy can do much to defuse the overall conflict.
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Collaborative Problem Solving/Consensus Building
Collaborative Problem Solving (also called consensus building) is used to settle conflicts that involve many parties and complicated issues. The approach seeks to transform adversarial confrontations into a cooperative search for information and solutions that meet all parties' interests and needs.
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Overview of Third-Party Approaches
"Thid party" approaches, such as facilitation, mediation, and arbitration and even adjudication, use an outside "third" party to come in to help disputants process their conflict more constructively and, ideally, come up with a decision on how to resolve it.
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Reconciliation
Reconciliation involves constructively looking at the often unrightable wrongs of the past (and the present) and then imagining and building a more desirable future that addresses those wrongs and avoids repeating them.
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Constructively Handling Disputes That Can't Be Resolved with Mutually Acceptable Agreements
This section focuses on constructive strategies for handling the tough issues that arise in cases where win-win, agreement-based solutions don't exist, or when some groups demand more than their fair share.
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Defending Democracy from the Bad-Faith Actors Who Seek to Undermine It
Unfortunately, the ability to successfully navigate contemporary conflict also requires a sophisticated array of skills to defend those efforts from unscrupulous attacks by bad-faith actors on those who are making a good-faith effort to build a democracy that works for all.
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Find Opportunities to Get Involved
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires many of its citizens to get involved in myriad ways from PTAs and local advisory boards, city council meetings, political dialogues and deliberations, and many other ways. This section explains how to identify opportunities.
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Taking Advantage of (and Promoting) Nonpartisan Civic Education
Promoting (and getting) good civic education is an important first step. We all need to understand how our government is supposed to work, so we understand when it is doing what it is supposed to do and when it is not. And we need to know how we can respond when the government is not fulfilling its duties.
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Taking Advantage of Citizen Participation Opportunities
All political entities from school boards, planning boards, city councils, county, state, and federal agencies have means for public participation. If they are involved in issues you care about, learn what those citizen participation opportunities are, and use them to make your interests and concerns heard.
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Limited Civic Skills
As we have often said in these pages, "democracy is not a spectator sport." Strong democracies require strong civic engagement. But fewer and fewer Americans have the civic knowledge or skills to participate effectively.
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Taking Advantage of (and Promoting) Nonpartisan Civic Education
Promoting (and getting) good civic education is an important first step. We all need to understand how our government is supposed to work, so we understand when it is doing what it is supposed to do and when it is not. And we need to know how we can respond when the government is not fulfilling its duties.
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Conflict Educators / Trainers
Conflict Educators and Trainers help speed the flow of information on more constructive ways of handling conflict that show people that there are better ways of preventing and solving conflict than fighting (sometimes violently) about it
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Civic Skill Builders
Civic Skill Builders teach citizens about the advantages of democratic systems and how to use those systems to constructively handle the large number of difficult conflicts that inevitably occur in any modern society.