The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  The examples are joined by many others:

  In working with Mediators beyond Borders in 2012, Loretta Raider and Debey Sayndee applied an adapted Future Search design to quell political violence resulting from elections in Sierra Leone.

  Harrison Owen, Avner Haramati, Carol Daniel, and Tova Averbruch have used applications of Open Space on multiple occasions to bring together Palestinians and Israelis.

  John Engle in Haiti successfully convened dire enemies in the same room in an Open Space process to preempt violence resulting from the assassination of an elder statesmen.

  We suspect there are hundreds more of these stories of using large group methods to build peace and address violent conflict.

  Admittedly the examples are often events more than an important component of an integrated peace-building process, but this does not have to be so. Building peace has been and often is an elite process that has been conducted at high levels by famous people such as Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and Kofi Annan. Indeed, many prominent people have made it their post-office mission to provide trusted mediation expertise to stakeholders of violent intergroup conflict. We applaud these efforts and believe they could be greatly strengthened with simultaneous large group engagements at multilevels in the system in question. The mediation effort could engage not just other high-level leaders, but midlevel influentials as well as the grassroots, to create a more broad-based effort to build common ground.

  Applications to Legislative Processes

  The exploration of applications of large group methods to legislation and the political process is just beginning. Here are a few examples from the field that show the promise.

  After two years of fighting over how to spend a $1.5 billion legislative entitlement to build highways on tribal and public lands and getting nowhere, federal, state, and citizen stakeholders came together in an Open Space facilitated by Harrison Owen. If the fight was not resolved, the money would go back to the US Treasury. Three stakeholder groups convened: one-third Native American, one-third from the federal government, and one-third from state and local governments. What they could not do in two years, they did in two days in Open Space and reached an agreement all could live with.

  Coleman is currently working with a parliamentary body that is interested in using these methods to make rules. Codex, a global body not unlike the UN General Assembly, is charged with reaching consensus on global standards that protect consumer health and fairness in global food trade.2 Traditionally, Codex has done this through informal negotiations prior to a parliamentary vote. In recent years, however, intense polarization around issues such as genetic modification and the use of growth hormones in meat is causing this body to seek alternative methods of dispute resolution, including large group facilitation processes to build common ground.

  A final example was the use of Open Space in 2003 by the Scottish parliament as an alternative to adversarial hearings. Kerry Napuk facilitated a successful event in Glasgow for the Social Justice Committee. It involved three committee members and seventy-four stakeholders working in the area who felt the process gave them an immersion course on the issues and allowed them to vote on priorities. Subsequently, with Kerry’s help, Fay Young created Leith Open Space (Leith is a district of Edinburgh), which regularly convenes the community of Leith in Open Space with elected officials including members of Parliament (www.leithopenspace.co.uk).

  The values of large group processes—participatory democracy, transparency, direct involvement—lend themselves to legislative environments. But politicians and political institutions are often risk averse and slow to change. Trends toward deeper democracy will ultimately bring the usefulness of these methods into clearer view. So will the recognition that, as Harrison Owen reflects, much of the work of legislation takes place informally “in the hallways” anyway. The greater use of large group methods would acknowledge this reality by providing state-of-the-art processes to support the hard work of reaching agreement.

  CONCLUSION

  Practitioners of large group methods have created processes that work at the organizational, community, and intergroup levels to manage or resolve conflicts. Here are eight principles about large group processes that account for their effectiveness:

  Focus on common ground, areas of agreement, rather than differences or competitive interests.

  Rationalize conflict. This means acknowledge and then clarify conflict rather than ignoring or denying it. Agree to disagree, and move on to areas of agreement.

  Expand individuals’ egocentric views of the situation by exposing them to many points of view in heterogeneous groups that do real tasks together collaboratively and develop group spirit. This broadens views and educates.

  Promote the development of personal relationships through structures such as small table groups that exchange information and views with each other in structured activities. (A sense of having a personal relationship helps manage differences.)

  Allow time to acknowledge the group’s history of conflict and feelings before expecting people to work together cooperatively.

  Manage the public airing of differences and conflict. Treat all views with respect. Allow minority views to be heard but not to dominate. Preserve time for the expression of views of people “in the middle,” as well as those who are more extreme.

  Manage conflict by refocusing incendiary issues on issues that can be dealt with in the time available.

  Reduce hierarchy as much as possible. Push responsibility for working together and for managing conflict down in the system so that people are responsible for their own activities.

  Large group methods tackle conflict in different ways at different points in its development—sometimes dealing with past history, sometimes putting differences aside and simply managing them, sometimes directly addressing and resolving issues that divide people and groups. These eight principles are primarily at the systems level. These processes, however, simultaneously affect the group and the individual level as reflected in principles 3 and 4. These methods also document many of the principles developed in the research on conflict and conflict resolution. We can hope that they may also stimulate new theoretical thinking about how conflict is managed and resolved.

  Notes

  1. Coleman’s work was part of a larger initiative undertaken by Andrea Bartoli at the Center for International Conflict Resolution at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.

  2. The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization in 1963.

  References

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  Brown, J., and Isaacs, D. The World Café: Shaping Our Futures through Conversations That Matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005.

  Bunker, B. B., and Alban, B. T. (eds.). “Large Group Interventions.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1992, 28(4).

  Bunker, B. B., and Alban, B. T. Large Group Interventions: Engaging the Whole System for Rapid Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

  Bunker, B. B., and Alban, B. T. (eds.). “Large Group Interventions.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 2005, 41(1).

  Bunker, B. B., and Alban, B. T. The Handbook of Large Group Methods: Creating Systematic Change in Organizations and Communities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.

  Dannemiller Tyson Associates. Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2000.

  Emery, F. Participative Design for Participative Democracy. (Rev. ed.) Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, Centre for Continuing Education, 1993.

  Emery, M., and Purser, R. E. The Search Conference: A Powerful Method for Planning Organizational Change and Community Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

  Holman, P., Devane, T., and Cady, S. The Change Handbook. Berrett-Koehler, 2006.

  Kleiner, B. H.
“Open Systems Planning: Its Theory and Practice.” Behavioral Science, 1986, 31, 189–204.

  Jacobs, R. W. Real Time Strategic Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1994.

  Klein, D. “Simu-Real: A Simulation Approach to Organizational Change.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1992, 28(4), 566–578.

  Ludema, J. D., Whitney, D., Mohr, B. J., and Griffin, T. J. The Appreciative Inquiry Summit: A Practitioner’s Guide for Leading Large-Group Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003.

  Lukensmeyer, C. J., and Brigham, S. “Taking Democracy to Scale: Large Scale Interventions—For Citizens.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 2005, 41(1), 47–60.

  Owen, H. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Potomac, MD: Abbott, 1992.

  Owen, H. Tales from Open Space. Potomac, MD: Abbott, 1995.

  Spencer, L. J. Winning through Participation. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1989.

  Weisbord, M. R., and Janoff, S. Future Search. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  GROUP RELATIONS AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

  Sarah J. Brazaitis

  We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

  —Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

  Benjamin Franklin spoke these words at one of the most important moments in the history of the United States as a reminder to his colleagues that the colonies must remain united or risk death for treason against the king of England. He was calling for collaboration and unity, essential characteristics of an effective group. The founding fathers of the United States certainly needed to be an efficacious group in order to establish a new nation, but their group was not without conflict. Indeed, their opinions diverged on several critical issues, such as relations among the emerging states and themselves and between the states and foreign powers. But they also appealed to common principles and a shared vision for a new entity, free from an oppressive monarchy. In some ways, this extraordinary group was also ordinary: it was a group with immense talent as well as significant conflict.

  Groups can vary by many factors, including goals and tasks, membership, duration, and leadership structure. They may work toward something as transformative as nation building or as ordinary as choosing new office space. Yet all groups have conflict (Levi, 2011). Conflict in groups is sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive, often a nuisance, but certainly unavoidable (Deutsch, 1973).

  In over a decade of consulting to organizations on groups, I have witnessed firsthand numerous group conflicts, some constructive and some destructive. In fifteen years of teaching a graduate-level group dynamics course, I have heard about hundreds more—again, some that helped the group move forward, others that obstructed the group’s work or forced its premature disbandment. Much has been studied and written about regarding group dynamics in conflict resolution (see Tindale, Dykema-Engblade, and Wittkowski, 2005, for a review). The focus of this chapter is a discussion of a group relations framework for looking at conflict and a group relations model for conflict resolution in groups.

  The field of group relations combines theory and research from open systems and psychodynamic perspectives in studying groups, and its ideas and concepts are widely used internationally to understand group, team, and social system processes, often as part of organizational development and consulting work (Agazarian, 2005; Geller, 2005). Central to the group relations perspective is that covert and irrational processes underlie group and organizational life, and understanding these processes engenders optimal group and organizational functioning. In addition, the notion of organizations as open systems is a fundamental tenet of group relations (Rice, 1965; Rioch, 1975; Geller, 2005). This chapter delineates a taxonomy for understanding conflict in groups and offers a framework to resolve it from a group relations perspective.

  The group relations taxonomy for examining conflict in groups is the five levels of organizational processes (Wells, 1995): intrapersonal, interpersonal, group-as-a-whole or group-centered, intergroup, and interorganizational. I use a case study from my consulting practice to illustrate these concepts. I also describe a model I have developed and used in my group work toward conflict resolution from a group relations perspective. This model combines the use of BART in examining a group’s boundaries, authority, roles, and tasks (Brazaitis and Gushue, 2004; Green and Molenkamp, 2005; Hayden and Molenkamp, 2004; Noumair, 2013) across Wells’s five levels of organizational analysis (1995) as a means of resolving group conflict. This chapter therefore is an examination of conflict and conflict resolution from a specific group relations perspective.

  GROUP DYNAMICS AND GROUP RELATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

  One of the most influential contributors to the study of group dynamics was Kurt Lewin, who is said to be the field’s founder (Forsyth and Burnette, 2005). Lewin fled Nazi Germany in 1932 and settled in the United States, first at the University of Iowa and eventually at MIT, where he started the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) in 1945. Lewin was strongly influenced by his experiences of living under fascism in Europe and of having to flee Nazi Germany for the United States prior to World War II. As a result of these experiences, he was deeply concerned with social change and social action through action research (Deutsch, 1992). For Lewin, it was imperative to link basic and applied research with the goal of developing theories that can be applied to important social problems (Deutsch, 1954).

  Lewin’s research produced groundbreaking ideas about groups, including his famous psychological model of human behavior, field theory. Field theory is the idea that individuals and groups interact with their environment in a dynamic interplay of psychological and social forces (Lewin, 1951). Studying groups, then, necessitates studying the social and psychological forces in which those groups and their individual members are embedded. Lewin summarized this view of interactionism with his formula B = f {P, E}: behavior (B) is a function of the interaction of personality (P) and environment (E), a premise that remains at the core of group process research today. At the RCGD, Lewin assembled a network of graduate students, researchers, and practitioners who proceeded to produce some of the most influential theoretical and empirical work in the field of group dynamics and social psychology (Deutsch, 1999; Forsyth and Burnette, 2005), including social comparison and dissonance theory (Festinger, 1954, 1957), communication and cohesion in groups (Schachter, 1951, 1959), exchange theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), groups as change agents (Back, 1972), power in groups (French, 1956), motives and goals in groups (Zander, 1996), group cohesion (Cartwright, 1968), and conflict and cooperation (Deutsch, 1949a, 1949b), which is especially relevant to this chapter.

  Lewin was also responsible for the first T-group (training group), which led to creation of the National Training Laboratory in Group Development (NTL), an organization that continues to offer workshops and training to improve interpersonal and group skills. This first T-group sprang from a meeting at the Connecticut Workshop on Intergroup Relations in 1946 where Lewin had assembled a staff of scholars and practitioners from RCGD, including Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, Lee Bradford, Murray Horowitz, Mef Seeman, and Morton Deutsch, to help train leaders to manage intergroup tensions in their communities (Deutsch, 1999; Highhouse, 2002). One evening, after a long workshop day, the training and research staff members were discussing their impressions of the interaction patterns and other process observations of the group meetings that day. Workshop participants who were present at this discussion asked to join in. Lewin agreed it might be productive. Indeed, it was. The lively, rich conversation that followed was later hallmarked as the genesis of the T-group as the staff and participants openly discussed the group members’ behavior and its impact. NTL began offering sensitivity training in earnest in 1947 with a focus on learning in real time about the effect of one’s behavior in groups through open and honest communication and feedback (Highhouse, 2002).

  At the same time that scholars and practitioners were pro
ducing seminal work on group dynamics at the RCGD and NTL, Lewin’s theories and research were also strongly influencing group scholar practitioners at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. The Tavistock Institute brought together psychoanalysts and social scientists to apply psychoanalytical and open systems concepts to groups and organizations (Fraher, 2004; Geller, 2005). Under the auspices of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the institute spun off from the Tavistock Clinic, a mental health clinic providing treatment to patients and families affected by World War I, particularly returning soldiers suffering from shell shock. The institute was charged with addressing wider societal issues than solely mental health, including “the study of human relations in conditions of well-being, conflict and change, in the community, the work group, and the larger organization, and the promotion of the effectiveness of individuals and organizations” (Neumann, 2005, p. 120). Like Lewin and his team at RCGD, scholar-practitioners at the Tavistock Institute were concerned with social action for social change through action research. Social scientists at the institute developed an approach to understanding and improving organizational processes; they stressed the interconnectedness of psychological, technical, economic, and other needs for work, role, and task flow in organizational systems, which they named sociotechnical systems. A fundamental part of their studies was an experiential, living laboratory, called a group relations conference, where participants examined their lived experience of small, large, intergroup, and organizational dynamics with the goal of learning about social systems as these dynamics unfolded (Rice, 1965).

  These ideas were reminiscent of Lewin’s field theory, and, indeed, Neumann (2005) noted that Kurt Lewin was a “shadow founder” of the institute (p. 119). Neumann continued, “For the first 25 years [of the institute’s life], scientific staff explicitly experimented with and applied Lewinian ideas. In the subsequent two decades, approaches from the earlier period became institutionalised into a house style” (p. 120). Shortly before Lewin’s untimely death in 1947, the founders of the Tavistock Institute invited him into a publishing partnership between Tavistock and RCGD to establish the journal Human Relations, an invitation Lewin accepted (Neumann, 2005). The first eight volumes of the journal published work from researchers associated with both institutions, demonstrating their continued collaboration even after Lewin’s death. In 1951, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues awarded the Tavistock Institute the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award for recognition of its practical theories of sociotechnical systems and group relations.