How can you avoid conflict during strategic planning sessions?

1 Understand the context

Before you start facilitating a strategic planning session, you need to understand the context of the situation. What are the goals, expectations, and assumptions of the participants? What are the sources and levels of conflict among them? What are the potential risks and benefits of addressing or ignoring the conflict? You can use tools such as stakeholder analysis, SWOT analysis, or force field analysis to gain a deeper insight into the context and prepare accordingly.

2 Establish ground rules

One of the best ways to prevent conflict from escalating is to establish ground rules for the session. Ground rules are a set of norms and behaviors that everyone agrees to follow during the session. They can include things like respecting each other, listening actively, asking questions, staying on topic, and resolving disagreements constructively. You can either propose some ground rules yourself or invite the participants to co-create them. Make sure you review and reinforce the ground rules throughout the session.

3 Use appropriate methods

Another way to avoid or reduce conflict is to use appropriate methods and techniques for facilitating the session. Depending on the context and the objectives, you can choose methods that promote collaboration, participation, and consensus. For example, you can use brainstorming, affinity diagramming, or nominal group technique to generate and organize ideas. You can use voting, ranking, or multi-criteria analysis to prioritize and evaluate options. You can use action planning, SMART goals, or RACI matrix to define and assign tasks.

4 Facilitate dialogue

As a facilitator, your role is to facilitate dialogue among the participants, not to impose your own opinions or solutions. Dialogue is a process of exchanging and exploring perspectives, assumptions, and values, with the aim of reaching a shared understanding and agreement. To facilitate dialogue, you need to use open-ended questions, paraphrasing, summarizing, and probing techniques. You also need to balance the participation, encourage feedback, and acknowledge emotions.