Apps: the new tools in conflict resolution Guest: John Ford

IE: Hello and welcome back to another episode of We Can Find a Way. My guest in this last episode of 2024 is John Ford whose voice you have just heard with a direct quote from him. This is a podcast about conflict resolution. My name is Idil Elveris and monthly, I release a new episode. In fact, this is the 87th episode of We Can Find a Way. We Can Find a Way pioneers a culture change in handling conflict because conflict is everywhere. We Can Find a Way is also the only bilingual podcast that addresses conflict on an international scale.

In this episode I spoke with John Ford, who is a mediator originally from South Africa and he has developed a self help app called the Empathy Set. We discussed with him what it means to be “conflict competent”; how and whether an app can help to make people become conflict competent; and whether the development of various apps can go beyond self-help. Let us now move to our interview that took place on 18th of October 2024.

I will share excerpts of John's CV at the end of this episode.

Please tell us, what does it mean to be conflict competent and how does one become conflict competent?

JF: I think that's a capacity or an ability that all humans should have. Conflict competence is really talking about that capacity to address the inevitable conflicts that we encounter in our life depending on what role all we play in life. One way to frame it is to say that we should be able to recognize conflict early. We should be able to respond to it in alignment with our highest values and ultimately, to the extent that emerging conflict gets away from us and maybe escalates and gets more intense and may maybe even becomes a dispute, that we're able to resolve it. Sometimes I've heard people saying ideally we're able to prevent, manage and resolve conflict. I also like what I call the four R's that we can Recognize; Respond; Resolve; and then importantly also Reflect on how we've done in our conflict. So I think a person who's conflict competent has a reflective practice and learns from their experience.

And then in terms of how do we become conflict competent? Firstly, we allow life to guide us and to teach us to make use of the opportunity that life brings us. Beyond that, of course we have our community; our parents; our teachers that are role modeling for us. So we're learning by seeing what others do and the results of different approaches. And of course, there are opportunities to train, where we develop, you know, the skills and we can learn about conflict in a very theoretical kind of a way. But I always think of conflict resolution as a practical skill. So if we were learning the piano, you could watch someone playing the piano and you could listen to them, you could read books about it. But if you wanted to learn to play the piano, you'd actually have to play it. So I think one of the ways in which, as I say, beyond getting some training, is that we allow ourselves to engage in conflict. And that's where we actually encounter a big challenge. Because most humans tend to conflict avoidance. They're uncomfortable with conflict. So, instead of us learning from the opportunities that life is bringing us, we're often running away from it. You know, there's that myth that conflict is bad, so it's best to avoid it. They say if we can't avoid it, then fight. And so sometimes that's the script that people are using. And that's a really basic one. And it's not as sophisticated a way to go. But the way that you're going to learn is by actually engaging and being vulnerable in situations in life.

IE: On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate people around us, this kind of competence, even awareness of all these things?

JF: You know, I think that's 2024. Yes, it's true that the historians tell us that we're still in what's referred to as the long piece after the second World War. So I still do believe that the arc of humanity is moving towards a more progressive, conscious, a way of interacting with one another. And yet the truth of the matter is, as has become apparent I think, through our ability to share information with one another as quickly and as effectively as we do, so we sort of know what's going on. But I think we can tell that there's still plenty of international conflicts that are plaguing us at this time. And certainly if we just watch one another in terms of how we see people interacting in the street or when we're in public transport, when we gather together for family gatherings and things like that, I would say, sadly, I'm not even I would give humanity a passing grade at this point somewhere at a four or a five.

The researchers, they say about 50% of the time, people are going to move towards avoidance. So that's a problem. Around about 30% of the time, we're approaching our conflicts in a competitive way, like it's a fight. So that's, now we're up to 80% and only about 20% of the time people are truly being collaborative. Although if you ask people, you know how we look at our life through rose tinted lenses, people tend to see themselves as being more competent and being more collaborative. But I think if we look at the results of our relationships and the quality of our human experiences, we see that there's a lot of room for improvement. And to me, the undergritting skill of conflict resolution is emotional intelligence. And sadly, that's also an area where I'd also have to give humanity a four or a five.

IE: So how do you think the developments of various apps that are supposed to help with handling conflict going to affect the conflict resolution field?

JF: What I would invite is really to say to think of the app as a tool. Firstly, we do need tools to support us to engage productively, effectively with conflict resolution. The way I got to develop my app was actually first by developing the physical product, the physical cards, 56 feelings, 56 needs, and then developing the app and making that tool available in a different format. To me, I'd still say what I've been trying to do with the app is stay true to that physical tool that I have experienced as being so helpful. I can honestly say that the physical cards have changed the way that I mediate.

Time will tell us to what the success of the app is truly going to be. We've already got feedback from people that they do find it helpful as a way of being prompted to get in touch with both what they're feeling and needing before they go into a difficult conversation, both in respect to themselves, but also being able to hypothesize or guess or sense what the other person may be feeling and needing. The conversation still needs to be had. But sometimes by having tools like that, it can help us to have a more productive, more focused, more respectful conflict resolution conversation and come out with a resolution.

IE: Can everyone afford this app or use this app? And I'm particularly concerned about elder people. Please tell us more.

JF: My vision is make the app available to everyone. I think it's common practice nowadays with apps, the app itself is free to download. The way it works is there's a point system, so you're initially given free points to use it. And then if at the end of your points you have a choice, you can either purchase points for… if you're not able to do that, a way in which you can continue using the app for free is by making referrals. And so each time you make a referral you will get points. And as you use the app, you'll get rewarded for using it. So, in that way, it is possible to use it for free for life.

IE: How does the app respond to the needs of different conflict partners?

JF: If I may, I'm going to share a little bit about how I've used the physical cards and then… And again, I'm also on that journey, honestly, of figuring out all the ways of using the app version. For example, just a regular member of society that encounters a conflict situation that's troubling them and they're thinking, “You know, I'd really like to sit down and have a productive conversation with this person that I'm in a relationship with. And yet when I've had these conversations in the past, they haven't gone so well. We've both maybe got a little emotionally dysregulated. We've been positional and making demands of one another, and we've parted on worse terms than when we started that conversation”. So one way that I know people have already used the cards with success, as I say, is by preparing for the conversation first, getting clear about their feelings and needs.

IE: How long is this preparation? I'm sorry to interrupt. Is it like taking half an hour to write down their feelings into the app?

JF: So if they were using the app, I would say it would be maybe take them five to ten minutes to review what's going on in their life, particular relationship. To be prompted.. is a series of prompts of saying, are you feeling angry? Are you feeling jealous? Are you feeling sad? Are you feel annoyed? Are you feeling irritated? And then as you identify the feelings that apply to you, select them. So the app really makes it easy. The physical cards takes longer, that's for sure. So the app is: does speed it up. Also, the nice thing with the app is that you can see all of the feelings through a list almost at the same time. They also, you can select to have them arranged thematically so that those like ones are clustered together. So it sort of helps you. So I wouldn't think it would take much more than somewhere between five to ten minutes for you to review a particular situation both for yourself in terms of what you're feeling and needing and what that other person person is feeling and needing. There are also additional tools in the app, for example, to create “I statements” to start practicing “I statements”. And yeah, you know, I know a lot of times people are a little resistant to “I statement” formulas. They worry that the person they're having the conversation with, they will say, “hey, don't start this therapy talk with me now”. There is real power to an “I statement” and to me, being able to express what we're feeling, what we're needing, make requests, be observational, are all important communication elements that the app is actually supporting us to get in touch with. So when we have that conversation, we're more productive. And we've maybe written out a couple of, sample “I statements” so that when we're in that conversation, we're prepared.

There's a great quote that I love. It unfortunately has a militaristic sort of setting, but it was by Eisenhower and he said, “in preparing for battle, I found plans useless”. And then he hesitated a little bit and then he said, “but planning indispensable”. So to me, that's exactly what the app does. It sort of sets you up, it gives you that agility to respond to that unpredictable conversation that you're going to have, because you never really know which way it's going to turn. But if you've done your homework and you've given thought to “what am I feeling, what am I needing, what are they feeling, what are they needing?” You're just setting yourself up for success.

IE: So it's a self-help tool. I can't really imagine you and I being in dispute and then working on our app, you on your corner, me on my corner, and then spending ten minutes and then “I need you to stop. Because I feel angry or violated each time you do X, Y and Z and I need this to happen” kind of… like walk us through that.

JF: I agree with you. It's self-help and it's really a preparation tool. You know, like any app that's developmental ideas for the future. I want to look for ways of creating that opportunity where people could have that conversation together. But for example, let's imagine you and I had falling out about something and we said, let's use the app to support us in our communication. You could go off and prepare it and say: what are you feeling and needing? And I could go off and do the same thing. Now one thing you can do is you can send the results of your work that you've done on the app to yourself as a PDF file. So we could exchange those PDF files and I could see what you're feeling and needing. You could see what I'm feeling and meeting and then we could have that conversation and then with that information, with that helpful data, then they can have a more free flowing conversation about what are they going to do, what are their solutions based on that understanding of feelings and needs.

IE: We Can Find A Way is sponsored by Koc Attorneys at Law, the Istanbul and Antalya based boutique law firm. Founding partners of Koc Attorneys at Law are staunched believers of using dialogue and finding common ground to resolve conflicts. They're very happy to be supporting We Can Find a Way in the hope that it will help advance the much needed discussion on de- escalation and reduction of polarization in conflict situations within the legal practice as well as in the public discourse.

I find myself often mediating between our son and my husband. “Okay, stop accusing. Just say what you need. Just say what you need”. So I was imagining this tool being quite helpful in a family conversation, but then everybody using the tool differently and then I figured it's not really like mediation tool, it's a self-help tool.

JF: Yeah, no, I agree. And again though I'pretty confident I've heard from so many people about this is that just bringing that conversation towards feelings and needs, you know, really does help. And again, I've used these feelings and needs cards extensively. Physical version of it and I think you're right, the app currently really is that self-help version. But the physical cards, they have really revolutionized the way that I mediate and I'll just share a little bit about what I mean by that. You know, after I trained as a mediator and especially as I started doing more interpersonal relational mediations, often, and I still do like to have a pre mediation caucus, in other words, to meet privately with each of the participants. And they'd often reassure me that they were conflict competent and they would both say that and I'd say, well, we're in this conflict but don't worry, I can have a civil conversation about this conflict and I'm confident that we can work it out.

So to my mind we would have established and I would reinforce it on the day of the mediation through ground rules, a pathway for a civil and respectful conversation about the issues at hand. And a lot of the time we were able to accomplish that and we'd get to a resolution that. That would be great. But it happened too often that what we'd start off well, they'd be walking on this path of civility and then one of them would get triggered and then they would say something and then the other one would react and I'd be “hey, what about those ground rules?” And I'd be trying to coach and encourage and bring them back to that civility. Sometimes I was successful, but sometimes I wasn't and I didn't feel good as the mediator that it seemed to get out of my hands. Once I started using the cards and using them in a more structured way. So now, now when I mediate, especially as I say, for relational disputes, it's just part of the structure of my mediation.

So at the second mediation session, we have a dedicated conversation between the two participants to discover their feelings and needs. And so I give each person a short opportunity to say, share in a nutshell, how you've been impacted by this conflict. And at the end of that, we identify using the cards, what that person is feeling and needing. And I do that in partnership with the other person in that conflict. We both work to identify, say person A's feelings and needs. And then we do the same with the other person, person B, their feelings and needs. And what I've found consistently with feelings and needs cards, it enables them to talk about those difficult things without doing damage, without making the situation worse or escalating things or leading them to being even more angry with one another than they were in the past. So the physical cards, definitely they are self-help tool and I would say they are a friend of both working with classic mediation between two people. But also I've done a lot of work with teams.

IE: You're raising the conflict competence levels of these parties. And once they realize it works, they will also seek to apply them in other spheres of their lives. You are actually trying to help them handle disputes also in other spheres.

JF: When I first got the cards, I started using them in a training setting and that was when I started observing. I could see that there was something transformational that it was hard to quite to bottle what it was going on, but I could see something was going on. And then I was doing a mediation for a school district with a team. I was speaking to the director of HR and I said to her, I said, “you know, I've got these feelings and needs cards and I think they may be helpful”. But I was a little nervous about using them. She was a therapist in earlier life and she said to me: “you know, in therapy when we're talking with children, we will sometimes give them -what she called- an object of distraction”. So she said, like, “if you're talking to a little child, you may give them the teddy bear. And while they're playing with the teddy bear, you ask them the question”. So she encouraged me, I used them and I again, I witnessed that transformational effect. It was really, really helpful.

The next sort of assignment that I was working on involved the general counsel. The general counsel had a team of eight attorneys, and there were 170 attorneys in the legal department that reported into them. And I studied law. So I've practiced law. So I'm not per se intimidated by the legal profession like I think, sometimes folks are. But I still remember walking to that meeting thinking: “I'm not sure how this is going to play out”. But we sat around the table, the general counsel and his attorney leaders. And the focus… it was how they were getting along as a team. They had had difficulties, and each person around that table was given an opportunity of sharing the nutshell of how they were impacted by being on that team. Balance of the team, me included work to help them identify what they were feeling and needing. So sometimes there was a person's nemesis saying, “I sensed that you were disappointed” or whatever it was. But it enabled everyone to have their experience validated, not judged, you know, not debated, not questioned, just to have that validated. It was a game changer.

I've worked with in hospital departments, emergency rooms with 100 people. But I've been able to use them successfully as a say in helping people to get out and express the truth of their experience without having to rely on their not as well developed communication skills or their lower levels of emotional intelligence. So it's really like an armband when you're learning to swim that helps you.

IE: Where does the name come from, this “empathy set?” Why isn't it, for instance, Conflict Competence App or Self Help Conflict App?

JF: So that's a great question. There's always a little bit of a story behind these arbitrary things. But I'm a fan of Marshall Rosenberg and his work,

IE: Non violent communication?

JF: ..and his book Nonviolent Communication. And so he really helped articulate, least in my mind, that distinction between feelings and needs. Just really understanding those two elements has been so important in the conflict resolution conversation. So having the feelings and needs cards that were inspired by Marshall and I was thinking like, what am I going to call them? And then I remembered there are any number of times where Marshall Rosenberg would say, when we demonstrate an understanding of another human being’s feelings and needs, we were being empathic. So I like that simplicity. If I can just be present to the other person's experience and put my attention on understanding what they'feeling and needing, thats a practical, simple little thing that I can focus on that can help me. Popped into my head and I think I’m going to run with it. And Ive actually been happy because to my mind, empathy is a key element that we as mediators foster in our mediations. In other words, we want the participants to be able to see things from the other person's perspective because as you know, when people come into conflict, they're really sort of often inwardly focused. It's all about me, me, me. So the more we can get them to, as the transformative mediators would say, recognize the other person's experience and be empathic, the better but...

IE: I'm assuming from all these things, this is just the beginning for you. I think there might be other apps, tools that may develop in the future according to the needs of the community that you're dealing with, people that you're working with or people that you're coaching or helping with.

JF: Well, you're right. So at this point I'm happy with the card. So there's a version with just the feeling on it. There's another version that has definitions. I have a little dictionary of 108 feelings and needs. As I say, the app is actually the exciting one for me because it's still, you know, we are at version three but I know there future versions that are waiting down the line and I'm hoping people will engage and give feedback and help sort of co-create that as the future unfolds. But something I already have developed and making available and I sell are talking sticks. And the talking stick is also another simple little tool that helps.

IE: I didn't see that in the app?

JF: You're right. It’s not in the app.

IE: I signed up, I get emails. They are helpful. They can be sometimes too many. If I didn't open one the day before, there is a today and then there's another day and I couldn't touch them. But then when you sit down and read them, one after the other, they make sense. So talking stick was like: “Is this something I missed? Oh my God”.

JF: No, no, no. So sorry about that. But what you’are Idil are referring to is saying when folks download the app, it sets in motion a series of emails. And that first week, you're right, is intense. There are a lot of emails. My hope is that you put it into a little folder somewhere so if you need to go back. But it's almost like your user manual and there are videos you can watch. And then after that first and intense week, it should go to once a week. Just an insightful email that gets you thinking about some other aspect of empathy.

But in terms of the talking stick, one thing I've always been aware of is, as a mediator, one of my functions is bringing what I’d call structural balance to the conversation. We don't want there to be a lopsided conversation where someone's dominating the airwaves and doing all of the talking, or even, you know, how important it sometimes is who gets to frame what the conflict's about. One person may frame it one way and the other person may frame it another way. So as mediators, we bring that structural balance. We make sure each person has an opportunity of sharing their perspective and being heard. So to my mind, the talking stick is a simple tool that just helps to clarify who's the speaker, and who's the listener, and the simple way in which I encourage people to use it to say, if you're the speaker, you get a hold on to that and you pass it when you feel that the listener has demonstrated that they've understood what you wanted to say. And at that point, when you say, “I feel you've understood me” and I'll just quickly hasten to add, saying, I feel like you've understood me doesn't mean that you've agreed with me, but I get that you've understood me and now pass it to you. And then that second person has their opportunity of expressing, and then the person who was the first speaker becomes the listener, and then they have that obligation of reciprocating and demonstrating understanding to that other person. So to me, that's again, just like a simple little tool that can help people to be more productive in their inevitable conflict that they will encounter. So in my mind, if you have a talking stick and you can address and acknowledge feelings that have bothered you from the past, you can identify needs, solutions are waiting for you, you're well on your way to addressing nipping the conflict in the bud, getting the learning and the growth opportunities that are embedded in that conflict for your mutual benefit.

IE: Thank you very much. Anything you would like to add?

JF: I appreciate the opportunity, Idil. If folks want to find any of these tools, I’d encourage them to go to my website, empathyset.com and then they'll be able to sort of check them out and decide if there, there's something of use for them. Thank you for this opportunity.

IE: You're welcome.

John Ford studied law at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa before moving to Namibia, where he focused on representing survivors of human rights abuses. After the Namibian independence in 1990, his focus shifted to labor and employment law. He then moved to California and trained as a mediator. He has since successfully mediated hundreds of workplace disputes and has worked with numerous teams to help them successfully deal with conflict.

His workshops focus on the development of soft skills such as communication; negotiation; facilitation; conflict resolution; emotional intelligence; customer service and mediation. He teaches negotiation and mediation and was the managing editor of www.mediate.com for  ten years. He has a book called “Peace at Work, the HR Manager's Guide to Workplace Mediation”.

So that's it for 2024. If you like this episode, please follow this podcast in Spotify, Apple or Soundcloud. It's website that usually has a transcription of the episode which is called www.Wecanfindaway.com. Like it, share it and also please like the excerpts I share in my YouTube channel or in the Instagram account of We Can Find a Way. In concluding 2024, I wish everybody a happy 2025.

I like to close by thanking my sponsor Koc Attorneys at Law, my marketing manager Julian Nelson and musician Imre Hadi, and artist Zeren Goktan who allowed me to use their music and photograph in the podcast. Thank you and hope to meet you in 2025.