What Has Peace Got To Do With Conflict Management?

Last week I had the real pleasure of attending a course run by Forrest (Woody) Mosten on developing a collaborative law practice – I am a consultant collaborative divorce lawyer as well as a writer and trainer.

Forrest suggested that we should strive to make “Peacemaking” our full time occupation.  Now, Forrest is savvy enough to know that us Brits bristle at that kind of language.  He’s been round the block a few too many times to be surprised by the barely muted sharp intake of breath.

But he raises a fair point.  Are we, within conflict management, peacemakers?

My gut feeling is that we are not.  In all the years I have worked in conflict resolution and law, I have very rarely, if ever, used the word “Peace.”

That is partly my English reserve, after all, peace is such a big word, it feels like an unattainable ideal.

Secondly, I am still scarred by sharing the same name as the hippy in “The Young Ones.”

picture courtesy of BBC

You say the word “Peace” and I regress to the corridors of my secondary comprehensive school and the inevitable teasing I had to endure every week.

My more considered response is that I do not see that the making of peace is the goal of conflict management.  To me conflict management is having an awareness, and a toolset, to enable us to manage those disagremeents that arise from time to time.

The disagreements themselves are not to be negated, or eliminated.  Indeed, one of the biggest problems with conflict is that we don’t spend enough time to understand what is driving it.

If we strive to “make the peace”  or “keep the peace” then we risk shutting down those valuable conversations which can otherwise arise out of difficult situations.

Very often the problem is not that we have too much conflict, rather we have too much peace.  We need to permit conflict to rise to the surface but we also need to have the conflict resolution skills to respond to it when it does.

From Collaborative Law to Conversational Riffs

My training as a collaborative lawyer in 2006 led me to write Conversational Riffs.

I saw lawyers attending long courses but expecting their clients to go into collaborative law meetings with very little preparation.  How could I equip my collaborative law clients with skills to enable them to keep communicating within the collaborative four way meeting?

I needed a model that would be memorable and easy to implement, something practical and supported by but not steeped in theory.

At the same time I recalled Forrest Mosten, a leading pioneer in family law dispute resolution, talking about providing your clients with a client library.  I set about reading a whole library of conflict resolution books and discerned that there were common themes.  I grouped and distilled those themes down into Conversational Riffs, and the rest is, as they say, history.

By the time that it came to writing the book, Conversational Riffs had grown out of its collaborative law origins.  Now it was being sought after for business and management presentations with organisations that wanted to understand workplace relationship and the impact of conflict.  It was natural therefore that the book should reflect that broader application.

However the book still applies to collaborative law.  It shows us ways out of perceiving comments as attacks and provides us with alternative responses to difficult conversations, responses which develop meaning and understanding, rather than driving us down a conflict cul-de-sac.

I certainly hope that the book will help families going through separation to collaborate and communciate even as they part from one another.  Of course, I also hope that families will embrace conversational  riffs to help them keep communicating through the day to day challenges we all must face.