From many victims’ perspectives, disputes look huge, complicated and unmanageable, with no obvious resolution trajectory. Think: “how can I eat this elephant?”
From an outsider’s perspective, the same dispute may look very different. Without the strong emotions, it’s easier to perform a rational analysis that calmly evaluates complexity, urgency and solution entry points. If the analyst has also dealt with many disputes in the past, the scale and complexity of the current problem will look much more manageable.
After dealing with thousands of dispute resolution activities, it’s clear to us that many disputes are more effectively resolved through “deconstruction”, than by traditional dispute resolution processes.
So, how do you eat your elephant? “One mouthful at a time” (warning: ensure your elephant doesn’t mind being eaten before trying this!).
Deconstruction steps: (1) dismantle the dispute factors into bite-sized pieces and spread them out; (2) cluster individual pieces into appropriate groupings; (3) eliminate duplicates and obvious irrelevants; (4) explore and evaluate what’s left; (5) eliminate anything that no longer looks significant; (6) resolve remaining issues (if any); (7) rebuild the scenario / contract / relationship with whatever’s left; (8) get on with your life.
In many cases, if the dismantling process has kept everyone engaged, the parties will respond with a version of: “cherchez la problème?” (find the problem?).
This suggests that many disputes are more emotion than actual substance. And, because emotions tend to overwhelm rational thinking, and are personal, self-sustaining, and not easily detected or understood by others, they are often hard to identify, define, manage and resolve, through a direct approach. Deconstruction can “evaporate” the problem altogether, or at least make its component parts more concrete.
Deconstruction in Dispute Resolution is usually very anti-climactic. In normal dispute resolution processes, parties expect some sort of painful big bang resolution and/or a blinding enlightenment. Deconstruction just moves people from being in dispute to not being in dispute, with a bit of learning about how it all came about thrown in, for good measure.
For parties that need to be able to live with each other afterwards, especially in families, businesses or organisations, it’s a much less painful process.
Commencing a Dispute Resolution process: quickly achieved by phone or written application to The Solutionist Group.