This approach goes beyond negotiating solutions and builds
Toward something new.
In the broadest terms, then, the transformation framework comprises three inquiries: the presenting situation, the horizon of preferred future, and the development of change processes linking the two. The movement from the present toward the desired future is not a straight line. Rather, it represents a dynamic set of initiatives that set in motion change processes and promote long-term change strategies, while providing responses to specific, immediate needs. Conflict transformation faces these challenges: What kind of changes and solutions are needed? At what levels? Around which issues? Embedded in which relationships?
Such a framework emphasizes the challenge of how to end something not desired and how to build something that is desired. Remember, this approach connects resolution practices that have often looked for ways to end a particular “iteration” or repetition of conflict with a transformation orientation that works at building ongoing change at relational and structural levels. On the one hand, this framework deals with presenting problems and the content of the conflict, seeking to find mutually acceptable solutions to both. These are often processes that reduce violence and the continued escalation of conflict. On the other hand, this approach goes beyond negotiating solutions and builds toward something new. This requires the negotiation of change processes rising from a broader understanding of relational patterns and historical context.
Transformation negotiates both solutions and social change initiatives. It requires a capacity to see through and beyond the presenting issues to the deeper patterns, while seeking creative responses that address real-life issues in real time. However, to more fully comprehend this approach we need to understand more completely how platforms for constructive change are conceptualized and developed as process-structures.
Process-Structures as Platforms for Change
With our conceptual map or diagram in mind, we must now consider how transformation actually operates. Our key challenge is this: how to develop and sustain a platform or strategic plan that has a capacity to adapt and generate ongoing desired change, while at the same responding creatively to immediate needs. We can do this by thinking about platforms as process-structures.
In the New Sciences, process-structures are described as natural phenomena that are dynamic, adaptive, and changing, while at the same time maintaining a functional and recognizable form and structure. Margaret Wheatley refers to them as “things that maintain form over time yet have no rigidity of structure.” [2] They are also, paradoxically, phenomena which are both circular and linear. By making these two terms—“process” and “structure”—into a single hyphenated word, we emphasize the reality that in a single concept we combine two interdependent characteristics: adaptability and purpose.
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Conflict transformation envisions conflict and our response to conflict as the creation of processes having these two characteristics. Change itself has the feel of a process-structure. We are reminded to explore more closely how we might understand the differences and contributions of circles and lines.
Both circular and linear
Circular means things go around. Sometimes the word circular has a negative implication, as in circular thinking. Circular also has positive implications. First, it reminds us that things are connected and in relationship. Second, it suggests that the growth of something often nourishes itself from its own process and dynamic. Third, and most critical to our inquiry, the concept of circularity reminds us that processes of change are not one-directional. This is particularly important to keep in mind as we experience the ebb and flow of our efforts to create platforms for constructive response.
Circularity suggests that we need to think carefully about how social change actually happens. Often we look at change through a rear-view mirror, observing the pattern of how something got from one place to another. But, when we are in the middle of change, and when we are looking forward toward what can be done, the process of change never seems clear or neat. The circle reminds us that change is not evenly paced, nor is it one-directional.
The circle of change
We can begin by placing the circle in chronological time (see Figure 2). To do this, I have found it useful to pay attention to what change actually feels like, especially when the persons involved care deeply about certain kinds of social change or are in the middle of a difficult conflict. Figure 2 identifies four common experiences, each very different, each wrapped up with the other, each part of the circle of change.
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Sometimes we feel as if desired change is happening, as if there is progress. Things are moving forward in a desired direction, toward the goals or aspirations we hold for ourselves and our relationships.
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