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Using CQ in Mediation And Community Dialogues
In its journey from family therapy to classroom settings, Circular Questioning also has been used as a technique for group deliberation in community dialogues and for mediation. Working with a group of facilitators of community dialogues, I have used CQ to help participants express their views about others and understand each other's perspectives on a conflict and its role within their relationships. Facilitators typically ask participants to describe a problem from their own viewpoints and to explain how and why the problem began. Prompted by these questions, participants describe how the problem affects their behavior and their relationships. Here the technique shows its transformative potential: participants describe what their relationships were like before and during the problem and begin speculating about what their lives will be like after the problem is resolved. They prioritize, compare, rank, and speculate about the future. (See Littlejohn and Domenici's and Spano's applications.)
In mediation, I have used CQ in three stages. In the opening remarks, I ask disputants to share about what brings them to the mediation session, what they hope to accomplish, and what they're prepared to do about the situation. During the session, I might ask the disputants to speculate what their lives would be like if the problem continued unresolved and to consider what it might take for them to move toward a resolution. If they reach an agreement, I ask them to imagine any reason the settlement might not work and to think how they would handle it in that case. These seemingly simple questions facilitate the person-shifts necessary for circularity, lay the ground for hypothesizing about a settlement, and establish my neutrality and my commitment to helping them transform their issue. (See Gadlin and Ouelette in the list of suggested readings for their succinct application of the Milan approach to mediation).
In sum, using CQ in community dialogue and mediation allows us to search for a different story, helping participants move away from blaming and negatively characterizing others, toward new ways of thinking about problems and new ways of acting in the face of such problems.
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