That said, in my experience, groups like those who labor on social justice issues, spiral into chaos because leaders do not pay attention to organizational culture and are inconsistent. My point here is that staff or volunteers are expected to perform according to unclear standards. Almost everyone agrees on some aspect of the organization (this usually focuses on the social justice issue at hand, pick one). The raison d’être is what motivated them to join or work for the organization. Yet when it comes to managing them and improving their work performance, leaders have a hard time. I believe the main reason is that leaders spend a lot of time talking about the issues, full of energy and emotion, and less time about how a person should be doing things in the organization, ahem, the work.

Coaching is a way to improve performance. I believe it is congruent with the values of helping people learn and grow. Organizational leaders need to translate how things are done, culture, to new people and be flexible enough to know when the-way-thing-are-done needs to change. Coaching shares the same values as mentoring, being connected to another person and helping them improve.

Do you expect people to just know how things should be done? Or can you explain to people how to do it?

How did you learn to work in a team?

Are you involved in an organization that is experiencing conflict?

My mother was a young woman during the war in the Korean peninsula. She said “good  American soldiers” and they protected her and gave her food. She shouted “yes” to the communists so that crops were saved and rice was provided. Ideology? Survival? She was a smart woman, smarter than politicians, soldiers, and historians.

The Arab spring has more in common with making a decent living, dignity, and youthful hope then with ideologies and even democratic ideas.

How do you understand other people’s point of view?

Do you design dialogue based interventions?  If you facilitate large groups in conflict, then you probably have encountered situations where people are distressed and express themselves in loud tones and angry comments.  Maybe the participants don’t really want to be there or, more likely, there are people in the group who you don’t want to be there, like institutional authority figures, police, and the like.  There is a possibility that you were trained as a facilitator to expect mainstream modes of communication – be brief and polite, be clear and get to the point quickly.  Did you really expect everyone in the group to follow one way way of talking?  For participants who are members of the mainstream, did they express SHOCK at how other people talk?  How did you hold this “GROAN ZONE”?  How do you accommodate diverse communication styles while teaching mainstream modes of dialogue?

Coordinate and facilitate medical and social services for clients who receive medical assistance. Encourage client participation in medical treatment and promote the well-being of the individual. Evaluate medical and social needs to develop and implement service care plan. Link client to support services and act as resource to resolve access problems. Monitor quality and effectiveness of services. Maintain and update client files and database. Perform crisis intervention as needed.

While doing all that, I naturally approached most of my responsibilities through the lens of my main profession and passion, conflict.  Negotiating with institutions and problem-solving to gain better services for clients became my daily routine.  Coaching client to learn and use skills to resolve their issues was a priority.  Beyond interpersonal interactions and relationships, I began looking at how HIV outreach/education and medical care were not working in terms of reducing the incidence rate of new infections.  How and why this is happening is beyond my knowledge and expertise.  What I do know is that the programs purporting to stop the spread of HIV were lacking in an understanding of the environment in which they are situated.  I asked around for certain information about HIV/AIDS in Delaware County and Upper Darby and was told that I either could not have access to the data or I discovered that it simply did not exist.  (More on this later, perhaps.)

This is one of the reasons I am designing a conflict analysis framework (CAF) that I can use in my own back yard.  I want to understand what is happening in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania in a way that makes sense to me.  Politically.  Economically.  Geographically.

What tools or other instruments have you designed to find data that otherwise wasn’t available to you?

There are basically two approaches to assessing conflict.  One is situational.  This kind of conflict assessment tool can be useful to people, groups, and institutions that are experiencing on-going disputes or overwhelming violent patterns of behavior.  To understand the life of an on-going conflict, insights are needed to see how the conflict spirals from its core to touch almost everyone and everything around it and to see how it unravels. An understanding of the dynamics of a conflict can expose windows of opportunity for assessing possible strategic interventions.  I have found some very interesting work being done in this area, for example Dr. Cathryn Q. Thurston’s SSAGE framework (Rand Corporation and George Mason University).

Another kind of conflict analysis tool understands conflict as the context where an intervention project happens. 

The word ‘context’ is used rather than ‘conflict’ to make the point that all socio-economic and political tensions,root causes and structural factors are relevant to conflict sensitivity because they all have the potential to become violent. ‘Conflict’ is sometimes erroneously confused with macro-political violence between two warring parties (as with a civil war between a national government and a non-state actor) (conflictsensitivity.org).

Framing conflict as context is the basis for conflict sensitivity.  Conflict sensitivity must be incorporated in all stages of an intervention project from the planning stage to the implementation stage and all the way through to the evaluation and monitoring stages.  I have been looking at many international conflict analysis frameworks:  Conflict Sensitivity Consortium (www.conflictsensitivity.org); SIDA (Swedish development cooperation) and various World Bank and USAID manuels.

My challenge is to design a conflict analysis framework that is relevant to cities and inner-ring suburbs in the United States.  I am developing a framework that I can use to examine the context of decaying and changing suburban neighborhoods bordering urban communities lined with dilapidated housing, domestic structural and protracted violence in small cities and municipalities, and first suburban school systems that are seeing street culture becoming the norm.

The framework I am designing will measure conflict sensitivity in the following areas:

Construction of identity

• People shift roles and try out multiple identities throughout their daily living; they desire to have the freedom to express their own meanings and identities without obstructions imposed upon them by external systems or communities.

Allocation of resources

• People allocate resources (wealth, knowledge, experience) according to membership in systems and communities, punishments and rewards, and perceived threats and promises of gain.

Order of things

• People make sense of the world and their part in it according to frames of references defined within a social context which involves controlling processes and discursive and institutional continuities.