Personal Empowerment & Leadership Skills

Celebrating Life:
Art & Creativity

Local, Bioregional & Global Outreach

2b. Facilitation Skills: Decision Making and Conflict Resolution
The Art of Facilitation	How to Make Good Decisions	Understanding and Learning from Conflict

Types of Conflict

In the end, all conflicts refer to people. As Mindell says, “behind the world’s most difficult problems are people – groups of people who don’t get along together”. But interpersonal conflict is in many cases the external manifestation of something that goes on underneath: We can be projecting our own inner conflicts as if others were causing them, we can be unconsciously reacting to the tense dynamic of the group field, or we can be suffering from oppressive structures we are not aware of.

The first step to deal with conflict is to know what really causes it, instead of falling quickly to blame the first person we come across. The following table, based on Integral Theory, gives us a general overview of the different types of conflicts and what causes them.

Interior

Exterior

Individual

Intention
Inner conflict

Strong feelings of guilt, or resentment with ourselves
Anxiety, fear and other negative feelings when exploring our own limits
Little clarity about what we really value or need

Behaviour
Interpersonal conflict

Perceiving differences as a threat to our needs
Poor communication skills
High combustibility: showing strong emotions of anger, rage or annoyance

Collective

Culture
Cultural conflict

Communication style reflecting cultural aggressiveness and violence
Unconscious use of prejudices, stereotypes and other violent cultural values
Binary thinking coupled to a competitive attitude: “I am right, you are wrong”
Power abuses due to rank differences

Systems
Structural conflict (in groups)

Lack of a common vision
Exhausting, divisive or unproductive meetings
Lack of crucial information
Different interpretation of verbal agreements
No processes for accountability
No membership criteria or new-member screening process
No processes to handle emotions