Conflict Management in Fish Camp

            "Conflict arises due to a variety of factors. Individual differences in goals, expectations, values, proposed courses of action, and suggestions about how to best handle a situation are unavoidable” (Darling). For successful conflict management, two stages must be completed; the differentiation stage and the integration stage. By the end of a successful differentiation stage, everyone would have been able to freely express their opinions with everyone and being successful in understanding each others opinions. By the end of a successful integration stage, everyone will be able to reach solutions that meet the needs of all. But to ensure success through these two stages, everyone must prevent uncontrolled avoidance and escalation cycles which involves balancing disagreements and interactions (Folger). In Fish Camp, there are a lot of decisions that need to be made on all levels of the organization. I am currently a co-chair and take direction from the Director, Alex, of my session. Today, as a session (15 people) we had to make a video for Camp Revelation night, and every single person had an idea of how best to handle the idea of making the video.  At the beginning when we all met at 10:00 this morning, there was a lot of rigid conflict interaction because of all of the differences in ideas and the uncertainty about the outcome of the video. Alex then came up with an idea and we all ended up liking it and putting our own spin on our individual role, which allowed us to all be able to express our ideas and opinions within his umbrella theme. This allowed us to successfully go through the integration stage because we resolved all of the possible solutions into one awesome video. I did an interview with Alex after the video and talked to him about the final stage, integration. I asked him how he felt about the entire morning from rigid conflict to successful integration and all he had to say was “at the end of the day all I wanted was for y’all to be excited about what we were doing, and the way to get that was by using everyone’s ideas in the plan to become invested in the overall product.”

Darling, John R., Walker W. Earl, (2001) "Effective conflict management; use of the behavioral style model," Leaderhsip & Organization Development Journal, Vol 22 Iss: 5, pp 230-242

Folfer, Joseph P., Marshall Scott Poole, and Randall K. Stutman. Working through Conflict:     Strategies for Relationships, Groups, and Organizations. New York: Longman, 2013. Print.