Situations—including conflict situations—are always ready for something. Unfortunately, people tend to act without really stepping back to understand the situation and what would move it in a productive direction. As a result, time and energy are wasted on ineffective actions, and these misguided attempts to help can even cause harm.
Recognizing the risks of ineffective intervention, the EDR program has a hard-and-fast rule of not getting involved in conflict situations or collaboration projects without first doing what we call a situation assessment. Additionally, since we feel that situation assessments are such an important first step in collaboration, we require all participants in our Collaboration Certificate Course to conduct an assessment as their main project for the course.
In this blog, I explain what a situation assessment is, why to do one (and the risks of not doing one), and how you can get others on board for doing a situation assessment when you think one might be helpful.
What is a situation assessment, and how do you do one?
A situation assessment is an approach anyone can use to assess what a situation is ready for and how to move it in a positive direction. Situation assessments can take many forms, ranging from highly formal assessments to very informal assessments.
Formal situation assessment
A formal situation assessment involves commissioning a skilled impartial Big-F facilitator to carefully design and conduct confidential interviews with representatives from the full range of interested parties. If there is a larger group of constituents affected by the situation, this third party may recommend translating the findings from the interviews into a survey, which will then be administered to the larger audience to test the findings from the interviews across the broader affected audience. The third party will then summarize anonymized findings, share them back with interviewees and other affected parties, and facilitate a conversation about next steps.
As a condition of our involvement in any collaboration or conflict-resolution project, the EDR program requires that we conduct this kind of assessment as the first step, whether the project is an organizational strategic planning effort or a conflict over community planning concerns. For an example of a formal assessment—and how the results of a situation assessment inform the design and framing of a collaborative effort—I suggest you check out this blog on the “Visitation on Utah’s Public Lands: Preserving our Past and Forging our Future” devising seminar the EDR program facilitated.
Informal situation assessment
An informal situation assessment can be done by anyone anytime to inform strategies for moving forward with a situation. This kind of assessment involves casual but intentional one-on-one listening conversations with a diverse range of involved parties. The person conducting an informal situation assessment typically is not a third-party assessor, and they may even be a party involved in the conflict. While they are not impartial to the situation, they can and need to practice “thinking and listening like an assessor.” That means really leaning into effective listening, including listening to truly understand what the other person is trying to communicate, asking open-ended non-leading questions, practicing curiosity, avoiding judgments about what is said, and refraining from rebutting or explaining.
Depending on the situation, the person who does the assessment may share what they learn from their informal listening conversations with the involved parties in an anonymized, summarized way, or they may simply use what they learn to inform productive next steps. Some examples of situations that might benefit from an informal situation assessment include working with your siblings to take care of your elderly parents; distributing household chores among your immediate family; helping your team avoid and address recurring workplace challenges; making your staff meetings more effective and engaging; and framing and structuring an upcoming event to make it most attractive to your desired audience.
Assessments can be somewhere between highly formal or informal. For example, a third-party facilitator may conduct informal assessments from time to time to hear how parties are feeling about an ongoing collaborative effort and make sure the process is tracking in the right direction. Additionally, a party involved in the conflict may approach an assessment in a more formal way, such as conducting confidential interviews with other involved parties.
Regardless of whether an assessment is highly formal, very informal, or somewhere in between, the goal is to hear and understand the range of different perspectives on the situation and ideas for how to move forward. Not only does this allow the assessor to put together a fuller understanding of the situation and possible pathways forward, but it also allows involved parties to feel heard and considered. Being heard and considered is a key human interest, and offering this to all parties goes a long way in readying people to be involved in problem-solving.
For more information about situation assessments and how to do one, see:
- The EDR program’s Situation Assessment 101 handout. Note: This handout particularly focuses on formal situation assessments, but the same general ideas apply to informal assessments.
- EDR blog “The benefits of a situation assessment”
- EDR blog “What is this situation ready for? Readiness checking in 5 steps”
Why should you do a situation assessment?
The overarching reason for doing a situation assessment is to inform effective—and avoid ineffective—interventions. In line with this, situation assessments
- help bring clarity to complex issues, including
- the circumstances and relationship dynamics around the situation.
- who is affected by (or can make and break decisions related to) the situation and their interests.
- opportunities and challenges related to the situation.
- areas of agreement and disagreement among affected parties.
- potential creative and innovative strategies for addressing the situation.
- promising pathways forward.
- provide opportunities for affected parties to share their perspectives and concerns and truly be heard. As noted above, this often goes a long way toward resolving conflict and advancing collaborative problem-solving. It also helps build trust between the assessor and involved parties, regardless of whether the assessor is an impartial third party or not.
- help build mutual understanding among involved parties. I think of a situation assessment as “shining a mirror” on the situation. In doing so, it can help everyone develop a shared understanding about the situation, who needs to be involved in addressing it and how, key challenges and opportunities, and priority next steps.
- avoid the many risks and potential pitfalls of not doing a situation assessment, which include
- a longer problem-solving process that costs more and/or is ineffective due to the lack of appropriate process design.
- not reaching collaborative solutions because involved parties do not trust each other and/or the process, or because key sources of conflict are not addressed.
- inhibited issue progress because not all key interested parties (including those with power to authorize, fund, block, or stall decisions and actions) are involved.
- ineffectively designed problem-solving process, so involved parties can’t generate innovative solutions and co-create mutual gains.
- a lack of shared understanding and/or assumptions about the issue of mutual concern that preclude or get in the way of collaborative problem-solving.
How can I get others to support and invest in a situation assessment?
When I teach people about situation assessments, they often say something along the lines of, “I’m convinced that this is a good idea, but how do I get other people to be willing to invest the time and resources that are necessary to do a situation assessment?”
This is something worth thinking about if you are considering a formal situation assessment, which is likely to take at least two to three months and require thousands of dollars. Building on the above reasons for doing a situation assessment, here are some of the key talking points I use to help people understand why it is worth taking the time and money to do a formal assessment, particularly in situations with high consequences or lasting impacts:
- If you do not conduct a situation assessment, you are basically shooting in the dark. In other words, you do not actually know what problem needs to be addressed, who needs to be involved in addressing it, and what strategies are likely to lead to positive outcomes. As a result, there is a high possibility that interventions will not only be ineffective (which is frustrating and eats up time and money) but they may also potentially cause more harm than good. Just like a doctor won’t prescribe you medicine or a medical procedure without first doing appropriate diagnostic tests, the EDR program won’t intervene in complex settings without first doing our diagnostic work, and we strongly recommend others don’t do so either.
- Conducting a situation assessment is a “go slow to go fast” approach. It requires up-front time from the assessor, but very little up-front time from the interested parties. Additionally, conducting a situation assessment enables the facilitator to make meetings and group work highly efficient, effective, and engaging. This results in people being more inclined to show up, feel like it is worth their time, and get things done. It also avoids efforts dragging on and issues going unresolved. In the long run, these efficiencies almost always save considerable time and money, and avoid all sorts of headaches.
- Sometimes a situation assessment reveals that now is not the right time to act on this issue, or that the situation is ready for something very different than what involved parties were envisioning. As an example of this, years ago, the EDR program was commissioned to design a process for engaging agricultural water users around a program related to regional water management. As always, we started with a situation assessment. After conducting confidential one-on-one interviews with key parties leading the development of the program, we concluded that those parties needed to resolve several critical technical details before engaging water users; our assessment was that failing to do so was likely to lead water users to push back against, rather than support, the water management program. We therefore recommended halting efforts to engage agricultural water users around the program until those technical questions were resolved.
While formal assessments typically require significant funding and time, informal assessments do not. They can be done quickly and do not require anything other than someone who is committed to the process and willing and able to listen like an assessor.
Don’t underestimate the power of a simple, highly informal assessment. Sometimes an informal assessment is just what is needed to get new insight into a tricky situation and inform productive pathways forward. Additionally, in situations where a formal assessment might be necessary but where there currently is not support or funding in place for this endeavor, an informal situation assessment can be a way to help build momentum and interest in a more formal process.
Give it a try!
If you’re involved in a multi-party conflict situation—or a situation that just feels a little stuck—give a situation assessment a try, whether by conducting an informal assessment yourself or commissioning an impartial third-party Big-F facilitator to do a formal assessment for you. And if you ever choose to hire a Big-F facilitator to help you with a collaborative process, remember to incorporate a situation assessment into your project budget and timeline.
If we want to make conflict productive, let’s make starting with a situation assessment “just the way we do things around here.”
Danya Rumore, Ph.D., is the director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution program in the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah. She is a research professor in the S.J. Quinney College of Law and a clinical associate professor in the city and metropolitan planning department at the University of Utah. She teaches about, practices, and conducts research on conflict, negotiation, dispute resolution, leadership, and collaborative problem solving. She is also the founder and a co-director of the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative.
About the EDR blog: Hosted by the Wallace Stegner Center’s Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) program, the EDR blog shares ideas, tools, and resources to cultivate a culture of collaboration and help readers be more skillful in working through conflict. Read additional blog posts at edrblog.org.