By Mary Rowe, Tim Hedeen, and Ellen Miller,

"The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishments than anything else. ……..Our ability as adults to collaborate in service of the complex needs of the …. youth that we serve requires us to change our individual and collective relationship to conflict and learn to leverage our diversity in service of this work…." Gregory Abell

Many Organizational Ombuds (OOs) are asking how they can help serve their constituents and their organizational mission in times of high conflict. One of the options being pursued by some OOs, this summer of 2024, is to help all the conflict management personnel of their organization to work together in strategic planning—and to share their diverse skills, lived experience, values and wisdom, in service of the organizational mission. 

Some OOs might think of this as helping their CMS become a truly integrated CMS, a real ICMS. Some will think of this simply as helping all the conflict management personnel of their organization to collaborate in a time of high stress and high conflict. OOs have many different ways to help colleagues in different silos to work together or at least meet together. If only by visiting each of those colleagues personally to discuss various issues coming down the pike. Follow this link to access a chart for identifying roles in your organization: https://journals.law.harvard.edu/hnlr/wp-content/uploads/sites/91/2008/12/hnlr-chart.pdf. 

Efforts that may help you consider how to work with the stakeholders within your organization may include Leading a Divided Campus: Ideas and Illustrations. This is a work product from Ohio State's Divided Communities Project. As a colleague Sarah Cole wrote about this project:

Our field has a great deal to offer campus leaders, who involuntarily joined us as dispute resolution practitioners as they dealt with campus conflicts related to the Middle East violence. Many campus leaders are now engaged in contingent planning for a variety of potential fall scenarios. The Divided Community Project will be grateful if you share with your campus colleagues the updated, planning focused, Third Edition of Leading a Divided Campus: Ideas and Illustrations. They might also want to attend the 90-minute virtual “office hours” that the Project will schedule when new conflict-related issues arise. If they would like to be on the email list for these, have access to the videos on conversations during periods of conflict, or obtain copies of campus conflict simulations, they can contact Bill Froehlich at [email protected]. The Project provides all of these resources free, thanks to grants from the AAA-ICDR and JAMS Foundations.

For those in the Higher Ed sector, it may interest you to attend a featured panel sponsored by the IOA In September during the Clery Center’s  2024 Virtual Summit. The title and summary for this session is:

As ombuds there are many ways we can contribute to this effort and emphasize the importance of collaboration within our organizations to ensure the health and effectiveness of a truly integrated conflict management system. A way to get started could entail OOs drawing up their own list of who is in their conflict management systems, identify the roles of those embedded in the system, and then talk individually with each person this summer. If it works, the OO can bring people together, use as entrée the idea of drawing up a list of what each person in the CMS does, and use that conversation to make a Venn Diagram of all resources. This would be a great opportunity to talk about “how we work together.” As this discussion takes place, using the mission of the organization as a guide post can allow us to establish a deeper understanding of how our individual and collaborative work allows the organization to achieve that mission.