So my question is: can Circling tell you “actually, what you need is not Circling but something else [like a (metaphorical) ‘court’]”? Or, to put it another way: when should you not use Circling, but instead use some ‘court-like’ approach?
My first reaction is to pick apart the question, which suggests to me we have some sort of conceptual mismatch. But before I try to pick it apart, I’ll try to answer it.
I think Circling won’t “tell you” anything about that, except in the most metaphorical of senses. That is, suppose you’re not bought into using Circling for resolving issue X; Circling will likely bring that to conscious attention, and then you might realize “ah, what I really want to do instead is settle this another way.” But the judgment is yours, not Circling’s, because Circling isn’t trying to generate judgments. (I should note that it could be the case that the other participants either notice their own resistance to using the Circle in that way, or might notice your resistance before you do and bring that up, so I mean “yours” in the ‘final judgment’ sense as opposed to the ‘original thinking’ sense; you can end up agreeing to things you wouldn’t imagine.)
As mentioned before, if you’re not an experienced Circler, I wouldn’t use it as a conflict-resolution mechanism, and I would be suspicious of someone who was an experienced Circler trying to immediately jump to conflict-resolution with someone new to Circling. If you have a conflict where everyone thinks everyone understands the issue, and yet there’s still a conflict, I don’t think Circling will point towards a resolution.
in that case I have further questions, concerning the meaning of the comments that gave me said impression
I would be interested in seeing the things that gave you this impression.
I confess I still do not know whether you think (and/or claim) that Circling is supposed to be used for object-level conflict resolution, or not. I think that this is important; in fact, I don’t know how much more progress can be made without getting clear on this point.
I agree that settling that seems useful. I think your question attempts to be “yes xor no” but the answer to the question as written is “yes and no,” and so I responded with a question-substitution to try to identify the thing that I think divides the cases more cleanly.
That is, I claim that Circling can help people understand each other (and their way of interacting) better. Separately, I observe that many conflicts have, at their root, a misunderstanding. This generates the hypothesis that Circling would resolve many conflicts by knocking out the root misunderstanding generating them, or by transforming them from “two people trying to solve two problems” to “two people trying to solve one problem,” which may do most of the work of resolution.
Of course, not all conflicts have a misunderstanding at the root; sometimes only one of us gets to win the chess game, or decide what restaurant we go to, or whatever. For such conflicts, there’s no strong reason to think Circling would help. (There are weak reasons, like an outside-view guess that “if you think there are no misunderstandings, this is nevertheless sometimes a thing you think where there are misunderstandings,” but I wouldn’t want to make a strong case on weak reasons.)
This generates the hypothesis that Circling would resolve many conflicts by knocking out the root misunderstanding generating them …
So, wait. Have you ever used Circling to resolve conflicts? Or, seen it used this way? Or, know anyone (whose word you trust) who has used it this way?
So, wait. Have you ever used Circling to resolve conflicts? Or, seen it used this way? Or, know anyone (whose word you trust) who has used it this way?
I have seen… maybe a dozen attempts to use it this way that I can remember (at least vaguely). Some of them were successful, some weren’t; many had the flavor of “well, we haven’t resolved anything yet but we know a lot more now”. (Also I’m not counting conflicts about where the group attention should be going, which are happen pretty frequently.)
Some of the conflicts were quite serious / high-stakes; described somewhat vaguely, I remember one where a wife was trying to ‘save her marriage’ (the husband was also in the Circle), and over the course of an hour or so we got to the label of her felt sense of what was happening, figured out an “if X, then Y” belief that she had so deeply she hadn’t ever looked at it, and then when she asked the question “is that true?” it dissolved and she was able to look at the situation with fresh eyes.
I don’t remember being one of the primary parties for any of those conflicts; the closest was when I organized a Circle focused on me to work through my stance towards someone in my life that I was having a conflict with who wasn’t present. (I thought that was helpful, but it’s only sort of related.)
Also, I noticed a day or two ago that maybe I should back up a bit: when I’m talking about “resolving conflicts,” I mean something closer to “do work towards a resolution” than “conflict goes in, result comes out.” Like, if we think about democracy, there’s a way in which candidate debates help resolve an election, but they aren’t the election itself.
There’s not an arbitration thing going on, where you take a conflict to the Circle, talk about it for a while, and then the facilitator or the group as a whole or whatever says “well, this is what I think” and then that’s the ruling. Instead it’s much closer to Alice and Bob relating to each other in a way that conflicts, and that getting explored, and then sometimes Alice and Bob end up relating to each other in a way they agree on, and sometimes they don’t.
There’s also a clear way in which Circles are a conflict-generating mechanism, in that Alice and Bob can be unaware that they disagree on a topic until it comes up, and now they can see their disagreement clearly.
My first reaction is to pick apart the question, which suggests to me we have some sort of conceptual mismatch. But before I try to pick it apart, I’ll try to answer it.
I think Circling won’t “tell you” anything about that, except in the most metaphorical of senses. That is, suppose you’re not bought into using Circling for resolving issue X; Circling will likely bring that to conscious attention, and then you might realize “ah, what I really want to do instead is settle this another way.” But the judgment is yours, not Circling’s, because Circling isn’t trying to generate judgments. (I should note that it could be the case that the other participants either notice their own resistance to using the Circle in that way, or might notice your resistance before you do and bring that up, so I mean “yours” in the ‘final judgment’ sense as opposed to the ‘original thinking’ sense; you can end up agreeing to things you wouldn’t imagine.)
As mentioned before, if you’re not an experienced Circler, I wouldn’t use it as a conflict-resolution mechanism, and I would be suspicious of someone who was an experienced Circler trying to immediately jump to conflict-resolution with someone new to Circling. If you have a conflict where everyone thinks everyone understands the issue, and yet there’s still a conflict, I don’t think Circling will point towards a resolution.
I would be interested in seeing the things that gave you this impression.
I agree that settling that seems useful. I think your question attempts to be “yes xor no” but the answer to the question as written is “yes and no,” and so I responded with a question-substitution to try to identify the thing that I think divides the cases more cleanly.
That is, I claim that Circling can help people understand each other (and their way of interacting) better. Separately, I observe that many conflicts have, at their root, a misunderstanding. This generates the hypothesis that Circling would resolve many conflicts by knocking out the root misunderstanding generating them, or by transforming them from “two people trying to solve two problems” to “two people trying to solve one problem,” which may do most of the work of resolution.
Of course, not all conflicts have a misunderstanding at the root; sometimes only one of us gets to win the chess game, or decide what restaurant we go to, or whatever. For such conflicts, there’s no strong reason to think Circling would help. (There are weak reasons, like an outside-view guess that “if you think there are no misunderstandings, this is nevertheless sometimes a thing you think where there are misunderstandings,” but I wouldn’t want to make a strong case on weak reasons.)
So, wait. Have you ever used Circling to resolve conflicts? Or, seen it used this way? Or, know anyone (whose word you trust) who has used it this way?
I have seen… maybe a dozen attempts to use it this way that I can remember (at least vaguely). Some of them were successful, some weren’t; many had the flavor of “well, we haven’t resolved anything yet but we know a lot more now”. (Also I’m not counting conflicts about where the group attention should be going, which are happen pretty frequently.)
Some of the conflicts were quite serious / high-stakes; described somewhat vaguely, I remember one where a wife was trying to ‘save her marriage’ (the husband was also in the Circle), and over the course of an hour or so we got to the label of her felt sense of what was happening, figured out an “if X, then Y” belief that she had so deeply she hadn’t ever looked at it, and then when she asked the question “is that true?” it dissolved and she was able to look at the situation with fresh eyes.
I don’t remember being one of the primary parties for any of those conflicts; the closest was when I organized a Circle focused on me to work through my stance towards someone in my life that I was having a conflict with who wasn’t present. (I thought that was helpful, but it’s only sort of related.)
Also, I noticed a day or two ago that maybe I should back up a bit: when I’m talking about “resolving conflicts,” I mean something closer to “do work towards a resolution” than “conflict goes in, result comes out.” Like, if we think about democracy, there’s a way in which candidate debates help resolve an election, but they aren’t the election itself.
There’s not an arbitration thing going on, where you take a conflict to the Circle, talk about it for a while, and then the facilitator or the group as a whole or whatever says “well, this is what I think” and then that’s the ruling. Instead it’s much closer to Alice and Bob relating to each other in a way that conflicts, and that getting explored, and then sometimes Alice and Bob end up relating to each other in a way they agree on, and sometimes they don’t.
There’s also a clear way in which Circles are a conflict-generating mechanism, in that Alice and Bob can be unaware that they disagree on a topic until it comes up, and now they can see their disagreement clearly.