Organizational Conflict Resolution & Meeting Facilitation

Facilitation provides a guided process for decision making, planning, or problem solving.  Facilitation encourages a collaborative process that is responsive to stakeholders and helpful to the process of governance, project administration, and systemic change.

A professional facilitator can be useful in the following contexts:

• To resolve work place and labor disputes
• To develop organizational plan
• Setting priorities
• Communications
• Formulate organizational policy
• To implement mergers
• To accomplish systems design or large scale systemic change
• Strategic planning or problem-solving
• To assess progress
• To exchange information
• To discuss ideologies

Our team of skilled facilitators are trained to help organize and structure the process, including:

• Agenda setting
• Review of a time frame
• Guiding the establishment of appropriate ground rules
• Ensuring that all voices are heard and ideas recorded

What Are The Potential Outcomes of a Facilitated Process?

• Recommendations
• Action plans for implementation
• Delegation
• Coalition building
• Clarification
• Information compilation
• Laying groundwork
• Creative thinking
• Written ‘Group Memory’ of meeting

Quotes from “Health Care and Mediation:  Healing the Conflicts that Divide Us”; Leonard J. Marcus & Joan E. Roover; ACResolution; Spring 2003

“We have seen repeatedly that unresolved conflict leads to losses in market share, reduced income, lost business opportunities and increased frustration among employees.  Furthermore, a highly contentious clinical environment creates an environment in which errors are more likely to occur.  When not promptly resolved, conflict can lead to compromises in patient care.”

“…the application of mediation in the health care context is creating innovative options for resolving disputes. Many health care executives are “outsourcing” this service, since outside mediators have no direct stake in the outcome, and are therefore far more likely to generate a resolution that key stakeholders consider fair and balanced.”

“…there are at least five signals that it’s time to consider calling in a mediator:

1. 1. The costs of not resolving the dispute–in dollars, lost opportunities, and legal fees–are high
2. 2. The problems are complex, and there is a desire to help key decisions-makers understand the issues, solve them, and then buy into the resulting agreements
3. 3. The consequences of the dispute going public would be negative for the organization (mediation is private and confidential).
4. 4. Old ideas are being re-circulated (a professional outside facilitator can encourage people to think about and explore new and creative options)
5. 5. No one in the organization–especially the CEO–can be or even should be truly impartial in focusing parties on the problem and likely solutions.

“Parties often come to the table seeing the problem solely from their own points of view.  A mediator can help develop new perspectives on problems they share, solutions they might be able to develop together, and mutually beneficial incentives to generate a changed set of behaviors and outcomes that meet both of their objectives.”

“Mediating Community Race-Related Conflicts”; Richard A. Salem, Heidi Burgess; ACResolution:  Spring 2003

“Valuable assistance can be provided to a community even when mediation is unable to bring about a full resolution of either the precipitating dispute or the underlying conflict that led to patterns of racial discrimination in the community.  ….even though the precipitating incident was not resolved, mediation helped change the tenor of racial relations in the city.”

“[M]ediation fosters enhanced community understanding and broad participation by various racial and ethnic groups.”  Dr. Benjamin D. Reese, Jr.