Dispute Facilitation
Overview
Dispute Facilitation is a unique service that uses highly experienced, highly qualified Solutionist dispute resolvers to advise parties in dispute, and their advisers, about the best possible ways of resolving their dispute. If required, the Facilitator will also set up and run, or manage, the recommended dispute resolution process.
(Note: We also say this at the opening of our section on: Creative and Strategic Problem Solving):
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail".
(Abraham Maslow)
When people are in dispute, there aren't many places they go for advice. After friends and family, lawyers are usually the first port of call, although in recent years they are as likely to go to their accountant or financial planner. After that it could be an institute or trade association, government department or other information service.
Depending on the quality of who they go to, they may get excellent advice, or they may not. The problem with traditional professionals is that they often "only have a hammer", meaning that they see "every problem as a nail". So the lawyer sees a problem as legal, the accountant as financial, and so on.
Until now, you couldn't go anywhere to find a professional problem solver. Incredibly, there has never been such thing a thing as a professional Solutionist (we had to invent the word!).
Solutionists focus on solving problems. In this context they focus on resolving disputes by treating them as problems with unique features and needs, rather than as just another input into a highly standardised system. This is generally very effective at clearing blockages, unsticking stuck procedures, implementing more efficient and more appropriate processes etc.
Solutionists usually have normal professional qualifications in law, accountancy, engineering etc. They build on these qualifications while avoiding the silo-limitations of tram-line thinking and risk aversion that most professions impose on their members.
Whether it's a new dispute that needs to progress into an efficient and appropriate dispute resolution process, or an established dispute that's either going nowhere or has come off the rails, we should be able to inject sanity and momentum into what may otherwise be a slow, expensive and highly destructive process.
Dispute Facilitation Process
Our dispute facilitation process is designed to ensure that the most efficient process possible is used to get a dispute resolved. There are a number of steps:
- Establish who and what the parties are, what their legal relationship is, and the state of their interpersonal relationship.
- Establish what the dispute is about, and how it affects each of the parties, including timing obligations.
- Identify what, if any, professional advisers are involved.
- Identify additional information requirements, including expert opinions.
- Consider and then discuss available dispute resolution options with the parties - advisory, facilitative or decisional processes required? Single or composite process? Staging and timing issues? Cost issues etc.
- Recommend appropriate dispute resolver(s).
- Develop and obtain parties' commitment to dispute resolution plan - includes signing up to appropriate dispute resolution agreement.
- Obtain security deposits and implement plan.
- Monitor and facilitate, as required, the progress of the dispute resolution process through to completion.
Wherever possible, we nominate dispute resolvers from our own, or from Dispute Solutions' stable, to give us confidence about quality issues. If some special expertise is required that we cannot supply ourselves, we can access other lists of suitable people. On the rare occasions we do this, we vet the potential nominees carefully as part of the recommendation process.
Benefits of Dispute Facilitation
This facilitation process provides parties with a level of independent process management that is simply not available elsewhere (other than in the courts).
Because we are effectively engaged by the dispute, rather than by any particular party, we have no bias to or against any party and we can simply focus on delivering the best possible process for the situation.
When matters get hopelessly mired in commercial or legal wrangling, the time and/or costs blow out, or parties simply come to their senses and say "let's see what else we can do to get this resolved", independent dispute facilitation provides another view, another logic and a bunch of alternative ideas that can be used to spark up a serious process negotiation that could save huge amounts of time, money and angst.
