Nonviolent communication as intervention

We were co-mediators, a former student of mine and I. We were asked to help mediate a conflict between a family and a non-profit organization. Of course the circumstances are confidential, but the lessons that emerged for me are provocative and weave the ethos of nonviolent communication into the competencies we strive toward in conflict transformation. Working with the parties, we helped enable them to transform the conflict from destructive to constructive.
Yes, the conflict is still there and it will flare up, but they all worked so hard, and pushed through so much pain, that I am impressed by the willingness to suffer the slings and arrows in the pursuit of something so elusive. They hurt each other over the period of weeks and multiple mediation sessions. They despaired. I despaired. My mediation partner despaired--somewhat.
But she and one of the family members seemed to have the most hope. I was dubious; how could people hurt one another so roughly, with such pointed words, and fix it? I had gone from overly optimistic to decidedly pessimistic, mirroring the wild swings of behavior from the most pained family members and nonprofit staff. And those of us who were the most doubtful about the chances for salvaging the relationship were the ones who spoke the most.
Charges. Counter-charges. The family v the organization. It was a conflict that involved children, so emotions erupted explosively, when hot buttons were pushed. I made too many observations, thinking they were somehow from a place of cooler professionalism, but the hottest members of both groups only used my statements as evidence of the others' bad faith.
Meanwhile, a family member, the Grandmother, who said little, and my co-mediator were doing the actually helpful communication. At one point, deep into the third of our four sessions, she told the lead of the nonprofit, "We asked for a mediation because you talked over us, you wouldn't listen."

There had been so many charges and countercharges by that time that the nonprofit leader simply treated that as yet another unfair accusation. But the seed was planted and it was done in a place of safety, which is sometimes all a mediation can provide. A place where those who don't listen can finally be told that.
The circumstances of the various episodes that had been described, all the events that led to and fed the elaborate character attacks were relegated to their proper, less relevant place, but that took some intervening time and another mediation session. The Grandmother had calmly stated the greater truth. There was no heat in that statement, only light.
My co-mediator did the heavy spade work. She pulled out the deeper information from the parties, probing, eliciting, turning to each of the aggrieved and asking them, in turn, to paraphrase each other, teaching us all better active listening. Finally, they seemed to feel, someone is actually helping us search for what is wrong.
Before the final session I had privately expressed strong doubts about chances for real progress. My mediation partner had said, well, we aren't going to show any of that--unhopeful is unhelpful. We don't want to discourage them from doing that eleventh hour miracle.
She was spot-on. We were mediating in a special room at a special time at another nonprofit organization gracious enough to host us. The staff person was sweet but clearly needed a commitment from us to vacate the room and the building by 6:30 p.m. We promised and I meant it. By this time, after this many sessions, all the parties knew I would end the session on time.
And so, at 6:26, four minutes before The End, my mediation partner asked for commitment from each party to honor the new boundaries that had emerged from her queries of the most angry and vocal parties. I started packing up the medation paraphernalis--the water pitcher, the glasses, the pens and pads of paper--and each of them flipped and made those commitments.
These people were making dates as we left. They were agreeing to regard some of the others' areas as essentially sacrosanct. The nonprofit people would not appear to be telling the family members how to parent their children or the children how to treat their parents. The family members would not second guess all the ways in which the nonprofit staffers conducted their activities.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
— Leonardo da Vinci
'Aphorisms', in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. E. MacCurdy (1938 ), Vol. 1, 98.

It was a diving catch, a beautiful thing to watch, to sweat through alongside everyone, and from which an elder like me could learn yet more lessons from his former student. The obverse of Leonardo's judgment about pupils is that it is a poor teacher whose student does not surpass him. It was my joy to be surpassed by my former student. Her emotional intelligence was far more dispositive in the end than all the cognitive case building. She and the Grandmother were the keys to breaking the logjam of destructive conflict, turning it into a knitting project for peace.

Constructive conflict v war

My students read my lugubrious litanies of conflict causes, casus belli, and they often conclude, well, we will never stop having wars.

Yes we will.

But we will never stop having conflict.

We will either learn to handle our increasingly difficult resource conflict with nonviolent methods or we will cease to inhabit this Earth. It is war that is unsustainable. If we cannot stop having wars, we are therefore unsustainable and this wondrous evolutionary experiment of humanity is finished.

Can we honestly face that choice and fail to learn how to manage our conflicts without violence?

There is a great deal of hope that we in fact can learn to transform our inevitable conflicts into constructive events and processes. A great deal of peace research has been done and more is underway to reveal to us how we can have that level of human agency. We may never negotiate with an earthquake, but we can learn to negotiate our way out of violence and into conflict that is waged without the tremendous ecological and economic costs that produce so much misery.

Basic conflict analysis, principled negotiation, strategic nonviolence and intercultural conflict competencies can take us the first 90 yards toward the goal line. Unique conflict iterative management and creativity will bring us the rest of the way over the line into the means-and-endzone.

Social conflict analysis is complex and required. It may take 100 professional conflict analysts, for example, to deconstruct the contextual elements of a gnarly destructive conflict, another 100 professional conflict analysts to work out a strong and positive set of steps to produce a constructive conflict management plan, and perhaps 200 professional conflict managers to put that plan into action. While these are obviously round estimate numbers, I believe they are quite generous and I believe all the rest of the players in the constructive conflict are people who would have been involved in any event. Constrast these estimated numbers with the hundreds of thousands of warriors and the rampant ecological destruction involved in war.

Principled negotiation is a basic method of managing conflict that eschews both the aggressive, violent, hard, positional strategies that have brought us war as well as the soft, yielding, appeasing tactics that bring us surrender. It is described in the simple Getting to Yes popular little book by some of the members of the Harvard Negotiating Project and remains quite valuable. It recommends a method that begins by separating the people from the problem, focusing on interests rather than positions, then brainstorming possible solutions, and adhering to fair standards. It continues to reset the conflict toward progress in the face of destructive responses, much like a self-correcting gyroscope to address the inevitable imbalances of a flying machine.

Strategic nonviolence is how civil society can take back the conflict management process from a dysfunctional government. It requires massive grassroots involvement and is how you remove power from any malfunctioning ruler, no matter how violent. You shut him down by organizing mass opposition, including defections from his armed forces and police. This has been accomplished in many cases and research is not only documenting that it has happened, but is beginning to explain the conflict dynamics and mechanics so that our constructive approach is becoming more technically proficient.

Finally, intercultural conflict management research and application is key to resolving conflicts with people who don't understand each other but who can learn that very different cultures can each work to the benefit of their respective peoples and to devise systems of interconnection that retain those benefits. It's a bit like building a series of conflict adapters that can allow a metric system of plumbing to interface with an American inches system. It's awkward but the adapters work. We can use them to make negotiation possible where it looks impossible now.

Part of our challenge is to begin to look for new leadership, for those who can approach a problem from the standpoint of the principled negotiator rather than the simple champion role. We need people who can face unreasonable opponents and discuss the conflict in blunt but openly collaborative terms. Further, those leaders need to understand the difference between compromising on what each side needs to do and compromising on principle.

If, for example, we elect a leader who, refreshingly, can appoint a true diversity of federal judges and not just mostly white men, and who can do excellent outreach to various Muslim constituencies, but who also fails to protect the average person from massive predation by war profiteers, bankers and Wall Street greedheads, that leader is failing to engage in principled negotiation because that leader is compromising basic principles. Clearly, we need to convince the leader to learn or we need to find another leader.

All peoples except the 'conflict industry'--the elite few who profit from bloody conflict--
will benefit from this approach and as complex as this approach is on the surface, it is much simpler in the long run than the simple decision to go to war, which introduces a blindingly complex welter of short and long term problems. Humanity will end war or war will end humanity. That simple fact is challenging us to work to change our norms and perspectives. The race is on the human race is at stake.