The most common of these is facilitated conversation, often called mediation. It’s a structured process to help people communicate better. It works towards achieving consensus and helps to reduce tension between people in conflict. Mediation meetings are confidential and without prejudice.
There are three stages in the process:
1) The commissioning stage: the process is initiated, the participants identify themselves or (in an organisation) are offered mediation, and terms are agreed.
2) I offer an individual meeting to each participant. This is an unstructured meeting, where you can talk confidentially about the situation and plan what you’d like to discuss with others involve, and how you’d like to present it. I advise leaving time for reflection between individual and facilitated meetings.
3) If participants agree that they’d like a facilitated meeting, I can arrange a this. It is structured by me, to allow participants discuss all the issues. One facilitated meeting may be enough to improve communication, but sometimes people ask for more than one session, especially in cases where they’d like to write an agreement.
Other conflict reduction techniques involve working with communication techniques, including using ‘clean language’ and introducing a set of principles to enable better communication