Approaches to Training

Conflict resolution training often focuses on preparing people as individuals and pays little attention to their strategic linkages to the setting or to longer-term issues of sustainability. As such, it tends to focus on the event of training as the transfer of content. A transformative approach suggests that training is less about the transfer of content than it is about the creation of a dynamic process involving key people who together focus on the realities of the conflict in their context. Strategic capacity and relationship building require a reframing of training from content to process and from transfer to transformation.

We can visualize this in a matrix that links two aspects of training. Across the top is an outcome dimension related to the reasons for conducting the training. On the left side of the matrix is a time dimension. The matrix is useful for designing, evaluating, and comparing approaches to training. By comparing the two approaches (content/transfer and process/context), we can better visualize how to rethink training as strategic capacity and relationship building.