Rosenblum: Want to resolve conflicts? Start listening to the other side

Grande Lum was unsure a few days ago whether he'd still be visiting the Twin Cities this week. The reason is almost funny.

Lum is keynote speaker for the annual Association for Conflict Resolution conference, which will bring hundreds of professionals to ­Minneapolis to share fresh ways to help people get along.

But Lum also is director of community relations at the U.S. Department of Justice. Thanks to the intractable government shutdown, Lum is ­prohibited from traveling.

As of Monday, he couldn't even come on his own dime to share fresh ways to help people get along.

"It's an interesting moment in time," said Sharon Press, a professor of law at Hamline University who didn't miss the irony. Press, a national leader in conflict resolution, will be attending the Wednesday through Friday event at the Minneapolis Hilton, along with about 600 people from 42 states and 10 countries, assuming they can get here.

On the eve of the conference, she and others offer a primer on the important and growing practice of conflict resolution, of which Minnesota is a national leader.

Mediation, a popular form of conflict resolution, is now being taught to elementary schoolchildren. Its ideals are worth considering, whether one holds public office, is passionate about an orchestra or is seated across the table from a teenager wearing earbuds.

Turns out listening is not overrated. "It's why the field of mediation has taken off," said Press, director of Hamline's Dispute Resolution Institute, who has trained others in the Middle East, Argentina and Haiti.

"When we are upset, we tend not to be very good at listening, which oftentimes leads to bigger conflicts." That means really listening, mind you, and not just preparing ­reasons for why what they're saying could never work.

"Mediation," Press said, "in its most basic terms, is about helping people to overcome that resistance and inability to hear what's really going on."

Problem-solving should start as soon as we stop ­listening to each other, but it rarely does, she said. Instead, assumptions and animosities grow and lines are drawn deep in the sand, where "it's really, really hard to back down, even if you want to."

Press' law school colleague, Bobbi McAdoo, shares a pertinent example. Last fall, ­McAdoo taught a negotiation class at Hamline, just as the Minnesota Orchestra dispute heated up. McAdoo and her students collected media reports, tracked websites and followed Facebook pages. Far from not predicting the sad finale, they saw it coming from a mile away, even then.

The two sides would have benefited, she believes, from lots of face-to-face time, a key component in successful mediation. Instead, they ended up "firing salvos through the press. I kept thinking, 'Why are they doing this?' "

And once they started doing this, it was very hard to shift to a more productive strategy.

"I don't want to make it sound like this is simple," said McAdoo, who started Hamline's dispute resolution program in 1991. "This is incredibly difficult work.

"But neither side ever acknowledged the other party," she said. "The mediator needed to ask them, 'Tell me what you believe the other side needs out of this. Let me hear it from you.' They didn't get past that basic communications impasse. You can't generate additional options without this understanding."

Options such as other ways to generate funds, or perhaps using endowments to buy time.

Sometimes, the boldest move forward means changing one's mind. Still, few leaders are willing to do that, Press said.

"Somewhere along the line, particularly as it relates to politicians, came this notion that it is somehow a bad trait to listen for new information and change your mind. Somewhere, we saw this as 'flip-flopping,' rather than that's what makes for a wise person — someone who actually listens to and makes changes based on new information.

"There are very few instances where one person is 100 percent in the wrong and the other 100 percent in the right," said Press, who has been doing conflict resolution work since 1986.

"We're complex human beings in complex situations, so solutions to conflict don't have easy answers," she said. "I'm humble enough to recognize that I don't know everything. For me, it is incredibly rewarding when people do have those moments of being able to understand the other side and figure out a way to get to that place."