Dealing With Conflict

No doubt, you have noticed a bit of conflict here recently. Whether it is over a performance hall, sports fields, rumble strips, the community council, the K2 plant or you name it, we have our plate full. When you add in deep-seated disagreement on ways to address ever increasing and more serious global and national crises, we should be considering the possibility that our negotiating skills might be a bit deficient. Let’s face it, most of us look at conflict like a pile the dog left in our path, much easier to walk around it than to scoop it up and move it out of the way. It makes us angry or uncomfortable, so we try to ignore it and hope it goes away.

We all want a cohesive, well functioning community, but, for transition, it is key. In the future we will need to depend on each other much more than now. Negotiating conflict will be a necessity. Already, our failure to deal with conflict at the national level is a serious threat to us all. The election has done very little to change the deep-seated fear and mistrust that has paralyzed action on very important and pressing issues. Most of what we have to deal with in our community is child’s play compared to that: all the more reason to hone our skills now on less threatening conflicts.

From its inception a few years ago, the All Island Forum has had the goal of providing skills and being a venue for islanders to find common ground, address conflicts as they occur, and ascertain the will of the community. With our first forum on the question of water supply on our Islands, we realized that we needed to do some "capacity building," that is, develop some methods and procedures that might lead to a more productive discussion.

The next two fora, one on sharing our personal vision for Vashon, and the next on exploring why we volunteer in the community, were capacity building events. We learned more about our neighbors, discovered that we have a lot in common, and, hopefully increased our commitment to work together.

Our last forum in October started to address conflict. We considered our personal reactions to conflict and how we were different from each other. I think that gave us some appreciation for the emotional element of interaction with another person. We also discussed two very powerful concepts that open the door to resolution of conflict: acknowledgement and justice. Acknowledging another person and their right to their opinion is so easy yet so powerful in its ability to open participants to really considering the merits of the other’s position. Justice we found to be a much more slippery concept, but suffice it to say that some sense of justice or fairness must be in place for resolution to occur.

In our upcoming forum, we will introduce and begin to work with strategies for conflict resolution. Acknowledgement and justice will be touched on again for those that didn’t attend last month’s forum. The greater part of the evening will involve small groups reflecting on aspects of generic community conflict or discussing an actual island conflict if you are comfortable doing that. The purpose, though, is not to explore the validity of opposing positions so much as to understand the general environment of the conflict and how the behavior and actions of one side affect the same from the other. We will then come together to discuss what we learned.

We hope that those of you that are actively engaged in one of our current conflicts on the island, or feel put upon by some other element in our community will consider coming to this forum. You will have an opportunity to express your feelings to respectful listeners, and will have the opportunity to understand better where the other side might be coming from. We need to admit that we really don’t have many opportunities to do this and the exchange could be transformative. You will at least gain some insight, and have nothing to lose other than an evening at home (no small matter, but we hope you can see the value of this opportunity!).

The next forum, Navigating Conflict: Personal Strategies for Building Community Resilience, will be on Wednesday, November 28, from 7-9 pm, at the Open Space. Hope you can make it!

I also hope you all get the opportunity to share food with friends and family on Thanksgiving!

Comments? terry@vashonloop.com