Your approach to facilitation can help or hinder any attempt at conflict resolution.
Having planned the meeting and helped to set the tone and style of the ensuing discussions, your key tasks are to manage the debate and use a suitable questioning approach to probe, test and challenge others to get to the nub of the issues in dispute. In this respect, questioning is a powerful and essential tool, enabling you to:
- get to the ‘heart of the matter’
- gather evidence and clarify and expand on initial views or early information
- elicit information without making respondents feel intimidated or prejudged
- facilitate inclusion, buy-in and ownership of problems and build rapport with people.
Other workbooks in this series can provide you with more detailed information on effective questioning techniques.
The process of conflict resolution will also require you to manage the personalities involved. People respond in different, sometimes unpredictable, ways when trying to convince others of their point of view. This is true enough in one to one situations, but is particularly so in group meetings.
Effective questioning
Hints and tips
To resolve a conflict you should use a range of questioning techniques:
- Closed questions – direct questions that require a one word answer, eg ‘yes’ or ‘no’
- Open questions – the ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘what’ type of questions that require a more expansive response.
- Leading/limiting questions – questions designed to limit the range of possible answers, eg ‘Is it true that…?’
- Soft commands – prompts which sound like questions to elicit information, eg ‘Perhaps you could explain…’
- Paraphrasing/summarising – repeating what you have heard and asking for a confirmation of accuracy.
Recognising that people often behave differently in groups can help you, tactically, to be more effective in resolving disputes. Much of this is about watching and listening to group behaviour and exercising your own judgement about when to intervene and when to sit back as discussions unfold and people exchange views or come into conflict.
For example:
- Who contributes the most and least to the discussion – are they aware of it and could you challenge them?
- Who are the silent people – is their silence about dissent or fear and could your intervention encourage them to be more vocal?
- What is the atmosphere in the group – could you mediate to create more congenial conditions?
- Have the discussions reached a sticking point – could you broker some negotiation or compromise to move things forward?
- Does anybody impose their views on others – could you ask for others’ opinions to challenge this?
- Who are the rebels, bullies, critics and scapegoats – can you employ different tactics to deal with each?
In dispute situations, people will often adopt a preferred style or approach to get what they want. These are sometimes referred to as the ‘street fighter’, ‘expressive creator’, ‘amiable pacifier’ and ‘analytical thinker’ styles.
A guide to dispute styles
- Street fighter – their goal is clear – they want to win. Their approach can be intimidating and they will scare people into agreement by emphasising that only their solution will work. They may come across as hard and domineering and may tend to dig themselves into a position. Determined to get what they want, they may find it hard to budge – even when this is the sensible thing to do.
- Expressive creator – their goal is to influence other people. In approach, they will try to inspire others and will enjoy trying to sway others. They may come across as excitable and in their enthusiasm to change other people’s minds may not be sensitive to what is really going on in the meeting.
- Amiable pacifier – their goal is agreement and they will generally believe that if they can get everyone to agree on something, everything else will fall into place. In approach they will focus on developing relationships with others but may be seen as being soft and giving in too easily.
- Analytical thinker – their goal is to have order at the meeting and they are likely to believe that adhering to formal procedures will produce a result. In approach they will ignore relationships and focus on facts. They may be perceived as detached from the human dimensions of the conflict and too process-driven.
While each may have its merits, and enable a degree of success to be achieved in community conflicts, all have their disadvantages.
Recognising these different styles can help you as a facilitator to challenge the tactics employed by people. Your objective should be to achieve a ‘win-win’ situation, i.e. where any resolution is, in effect, a good outcome for all involved. In practice you will learn to separate the people involved from the problems faced and will be soft on people but hard on the issues under dispute. While you will be easy going, friendly, likeable and courteous to all, you will be resolute in continuing to work away on the problem.
Tactically you will seek to create options where nobody appears to lose. This can be done by working to get people away from positions taken because of their personality styles, so that they can concentrate on interests.
Other facilitation tactics will help in achieving a ‘win-win’ resolution.
For example:
- questioning rather than talking
- listening instead of interrupting
- summarising rather than diluting arguments
- identifying and building on common ground as opposed to point-scoring, attacking or blaming
- emphasising areas of agreement instead of areas of dispute
- building on ideas rather than continuous counter proposals
- describing your feelings in preference to the use of irritators, eg ‘with respect’ and ‘frankly’ etc.
Having achieved an outcome that is agreed by all parties, the final key step is to summarise what has been resolved. This ensures that everyone is made aware of what has been discussed and what is being proposed. At this stage it may be appropriate to ‘park’ certain issues that the meeting has failed to agree on, so that these do not scupper an agreement on the more substantive points under discussion.
Some further action should be identified, however, to revisit these matters at a future date, eg possibly at a subsequent meeting. Wherever possible you should follow up the meeting with a written summary of the resolved matters so that everyone remains clear about the way forward. In some cases this maybe best done by drawing up a formal ‘resolution agreement’.
Challenge 4: Dealing with the personalities
Imagine you are facilitating a public meeting to discuss why there have been problems in community relations between the settled community in your ward and a newly-arriving community of refugees from another country. The following characters are at the meeting. What tactics could you employ to deal with each?
- A noisy and aggressive resident of the settled community who insists on challenging anything said by the refugee community?
- An elder from the newly-arriving community who has been extremely helpful in calming tensions between different community groups, but who appears reluctant to speak up at a public meeting?
- A member of an extremist political group who appears to have arrived at the meeting with the sole intention of chanting racist abuse?