ABOUT THE THIRD-PARTY NEUTRAL (TPN) COURSES
*TPN1: Becoming a Third-Party Neutral*
Fundamental Conflict Resolution Competencies and Approach.
Move from conflict to conciliation, developing your leadership skills as a peace practitioner.
This workshop immerses you in CICR’s fundamentals to allow you to resolve conflicts of medium-level complexity. Via role plays and experiential learning, you will practice core abilities for active listening, coaching, negotiation, mediation, and facilitation.
You will also learn to identify your values, blind spots, assumptions, triggers, and reactions when faced with difficult situations and choose appropriate responses while acknowledging underlying interests and human identity needs.
This foundational training will familiarize you with a range of conflict resolution intervention options, highlight the attributes of community-based conflict resolution, and lay out the principles of being an effective facilitator and third-party neutral.
Results you can expect to get from TPN1. You will:
Gain a much more in-depth understanding of the complexities of conflict.
Be able to empower people and groups to manage their differences constructively
Have the confidence and the skills necessary to mediate or otherwise resolve individual or group conflicts
Be comfortable in facilitating dialogue among a group in conflict
Have the language and ways to navigate difficult or awkward situations
Apply core Principles of conflict-competent leaders:
Actively listen without being judgmental or reactive
Remain objective and not take on the burden of the conflict
Be flexible enough to change roles as the conflict resolution process evolves
*TPN 2: Facilitating for Groups in Conflict*
Intensive training on facilitation skills for groups in conflict to foster dialogue and prevent conflict escalation. Core facilitator skills, process design, and delivery are learned through practical exercises, such as: negotiating a mandate, effectively using a process agenda, creating and enforcing ground rules, techniques for capturing and recording ideas, assertive listening and questioning, addressing challenging behaviours, and sharing learning observations.
In addition, practical tools for inclusive dialogue and collaboration are introduced: stakeholder identification, brainstorming, consensus-building, circle processes and community dialogue.
In this workshop, you will explore:
How to ensure everyone’s voice is heard in a group process
How to best manage difficult behaviours
How to create a non-judgment and non-threatening atmosphere in the workplace and group processes
The importance and steps in meeting your mandate while managing the group’s needs
Using the art of the question to help a group move forward.
*TPN3: Developing Mediation Skills*
Develop your skills as a conflict resolver by exploring the process and techniques of mediation and coaching with a TPN approach.
Building on the learnings from TPN1, this intensive 5-day workshop explores the mediation process at a higher level of detail through key mediation skill-building such as conflict analysis, facilitating dialogue, reframing and questioning, maintaining fairness and equity, managing emotions, and stimulating creativity.
Practical and virtual experience, self-awareness, and peer feedback are ensured through role-plays addressing themes such as power imbalance, cultural differences, and motivation. Sample conflict resolution approaches, process selection, online strategies, mediation agreements, ethical standards, and affiliation paths for mediators are presented.
After this workshop, you will feel more confident and competent to:
Identify emotions in the dynamics of conflicts
Understand the role and mandate of a Third-Party Neutral in mediation
Apply TPN Principles and CICR fundamentals techniques
Develop online mediation practices
Maintain fairness and inclusivity in challenging and diverse workplaces
Manage emotions to stimulate the development of creative solutions
Experience ‘’training’’ as an intervention process and the power of a learning community.
*TPN4: Integrating Principles and Reflections*
Share your conflict resolution experiences from the field, learn from your peers, and connect with experts. The workshop reviews the key principles, processes, and techniques acquired during the first three workshops. It also goes deeper into multi-party conflicts and negotiations, co-mediation, conflict resolution styles, human identity needs, and process design for conflict interventions. Outside experts are also drawn to share their field experiences working as Third-Party Neutrals.
In this workshop, you will:
Explore the complexities of resolving multi-party conflicts
Discover your conflict style and how the different conflict styles impact conflict
Analyze human identity needs and satisfiers models
Review the process and practice of negotiation
Reflect on your mediator style and practice
Learn how to design a process for intervention
Develop, envision, and commit to your path as a peace practitioner.
Thousands of leaders, managers, and conflict resolution practitioners have gained lasting confidence and competence through this training program. Its success has been proven not only in Canada, but also in diverse settings and social mandates such as Rwanda, Bosnia, the Dominican Republic, Syria, Mali, Afghanistan, Mexico, Central African Republic, and Taiwan.
Powerful outcomes. Through your new-found skills, you will feel more confident and capable to:
- facilitate safe, inclusive, and respectful conversations and de-escalate emotions, difficult behaviours, and tense situations,
- improve fractured relationships with family, friends, neighbours or work colleagues,
- cultivate the required attributes to become a professional conflict resolution practitioner (if you wish to pursue a career in the Alternative or Informal Dispute Resolution field),
- nurture a visible shift in your own values toward greater peace and harmony, resulting in improved relationships with others,
- empower people and groups to manage their differences constructively,
- and finally, be able to call yourself a peace practitioner.
Experiential Learning and Transformative Group Process. Be prepared to:
Practice essential skills like listening, coaching, negotiation, mediation, and facilitation through role plays and experiential learning.
Identify your values, blind spots, assumptions, triggers, and reactions when faced with difficult situations and learn to choose appropriate responses while acknowledging underlying interests and human identity needs.
Use communication, negotiation and conflict-resolution techniques to facilitate conversations.
Share and harvest valuable insights from your learning community and a broad network of conflict resolution practitioners.
Once you have taken TPN1, there will likely be opportunities to join a Community of Practice, where you can hone your skills in role plays and other exercises with other graduates of the courses.
Essential conflict competencies for leaders, managers, HR, government, business, education, healthcare, legal, and union professionals and those interested in becoming mediators, coaches, facilitators and peace practitioners.