Episode 10 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where our icebreaker ship explores conflict icebergs as a model: what it highlights, and what it hides.
'All models are wrong, but some are useful' - George Box
Show notes, links
The perenially-useful Seeds for Change have a PDF on navigating conflict in groups.

See our "What is facilitation?" podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

Transcript
Ali: This is Resist + Renew.

Kat: A UK-based podcast about social movements.

Sami: What we're fighting for, why, and how it all happens.

Ali: The hosts of the show are:

Kat: Me Kat,

Sami: Me, Sami,

Ali: and me, Ali,

Sami: I'm recording this now baby

Ali: Shit it's a podcast.

*Laughter*

Sami: So welcome everybody to the Resist + Renew short podcast where we chat about facilitation tools, why we love them, and simultaneously, why we hate them. So, moving in to.
we're gonna talk today about conflict icebergs. This is a kind of like model for how people understand and can talk about conflict. And the picture that's often drawn is two icebergs next to each other, where they're kind of like, the top bit sticking out the water will be described as people's position in a conflict. So like, that's kind of like what you can see the first time you're looking at some people that are in a conflict, and what you understand about yourself what you understand about other people, and and then the bit underneath the water people will describe what's like the interests chunk. And so that's talking about like, what is their interest that person has in this conflict? Like, what's the stake they have? And, and then at the very bottom, you'll have needs. So that's the deepest bit. And and this will be like, what is the lack of the kind of fundamental need that people are trying to get met in this conflict, and ways that people often describe this tool. So they'll talk about it as like a position-interest-needs or a conflict iceberg tool? And is they'll say that, like, the reason it's useful as you can use it as a way of thinking about like, well, opposition's may seem like they're not overlapping at all. But actually, if you dig down into interests, then even deeper into needs, you'll maybe uncover a section that actually were both motivated by the same need. And that can help build shared understanding and help as a tool to like move through conflict. And I think people I've sometimes hear say, is,
though, like positions are in conflict and interests can be in conflict needs are never in conflict.
TBC as to how true that is. And so let's chat through a example of when that's been useful.

Kat: Yeah. So I was facilitating a group. And recently where we were trying to work out kind of the next phase of what we were going to be doing together. And there were two ideas that were kind of opposing: one was to start reading a book and working through a book together. And the others was to definitely not read that book and not work through that book together. So they were polarities around what we were going to do. And, and we had quite a lot of exploration around why people wanted to read the book and why people didn't want to read the book. And it felt like they were really like, we weren't going to persuade either side to switch. And so I used the iceberg kind of in my head of like, okay, so there's this tension, I don't know our way through, but maybe if we think down a little bit, there'll be something overlapping.
And we actually just jumped straight into needs, I kind of skipped the interests layer, but went into like,