A healthy conflict management system helps to resolve problems at the interest level, before it escalates to the rights and the power level. This is true for several reasons. First, negotiating interests is less expensive than escalated options. Second, negotiating interests results in win-win outcomes, while other options result in a winner and a loser. Third, power-based approaches often results in the losing side becoming angry, and risking the chance of future retributive escalation. Fourth, an interest based approach is less time consuming than other options.
There are six principles for a new dispute resolution system. The six principles are as follows: 1) Focus on interests. Parties to a dispute should first focus on interest-based negotiation. This is the most effective, low-cost method for satisfying interested parties. If that doesn’t work, only then, the effort can be moved on to rights-based or power-based processes;
2) Provide low-cost rights and power alternatives. This involves keeping intensity of either to the lowest level possible. Think arbitration versus adjudication; online publicity versus demonstrations; 3) Process feedback loops. Negotiators should be constantly looking for opportunities to settle when enough information about how the conflict will play out is foreseeable to both parties; 4) Frequent and reliable information exchange between parties; 5) If and when escalating, it should be gradual, always beginning with all reasonable lower-cost steps, before moving to higher-cost procedures; 6) Reinforce the system with spreading proper skills, knowledge, and habits to facilitate greater adherence to the system.
Four stages of a dispute resolution system: 1) diagnosis, 2) design, 3) implementation, and 4) evaluation.
Stages of Dispute Resolution System
Dispute resolution systems should be customized for the specific structure, conditions, and groups involved. While the general steps and framework can be the same, the details must be fine tuned, and the system must be self-sustaining, in operation and evolution.
There are challenges facing designers of dispute systems, mainly arising out of system design based on past or ongoing disputes, instead of focusing on the underlying systemic problems. Should patterns of conflict recur within a system, then the design of the system must be improved.
The various actions triggered within a system each carry different costs. In an inefficient system, lower costs may be attached to inefficient outcomes, in effect accentuating an action which has a low qualitative outcome only because it carried a low cost. Dispute system design should compensate for this by assigning different costs to actions in order to encourage actors toward efficient behaviors. For example, rapid execution of process steps in relation to alternatives available to a conflict party.
Conversely, inefficiencies in the system which lead to inefficient outcomes should be identified and resolved. Well functioning dispute systems should have processes which encourage mediation, conciliation, and other interest-based methods.
Information for this writing, “Part 1”, has been gathered from Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict, 1988, by William Ury, Jeanne Bret, and Stephen Goldberg.
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