Image from the article: Understanding collective decision making in ants by Sukanya Charuchandra

NGL helps post-growth business Greaterthan work through a stuck conflict and make difficult decisions together using Convergent Facilitation

Introduction

A challenge that emerges in experimenting with collaborative ways of functioning is: what do we do when we are in conflict and can’t find a way to make a decision together?

In 2025 and 2026, members of Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) supported Greaterthan (GT) to create movement after a period of stuckness coming from a challenging conflict between two founding partners. GT invited Miki Kashtan, through whom NGL came into being in 2017, to support GT in moving forward. Miki invited a group of people within NGL to apprentice with her and steward the project.

Miki facilitated:

• First, a conflict process to restore trust
• Then, a Convergent Facilitation process to make a decision together

Background

GT is a collectively governed, post-growth business that has been experimenting for over a decade with shifting systems and supporting other organizations to do the same, as a way of facing the increasingly complex and interconnected challenges of our world, which requires collective action. 

NGL is a community of people passionate about closing the gap between our current global crises and fully interdependent living. Within NGL, we experiment and apply organizational systems and structures to bring people together to make complex decisions in an integrative way, build capacity for collaborative leadership, and, all in all, find ways to anchor vision in how they function – even within the world as it is.

The conflict in GT was significant: some members even wanted to dissolve GT and start something new. NGL brought in the core premise of Convergent Facilitation: if it is possible to make a decision that works for all, it is preferable over a decision that works for some. With Miki facilitating, the GT members were all willing to try it and see where it took them, and we agreed that some groundwork to restore enough trust to make a decision together would take place first.

Engaging with the conflict 

We – Miki and those in NGL – believed that before GT could come together to make decisions about how to move forward, actively engaging with the conflict was necessary. We were not aiming to ‘resolve’ the conflict, but to increase collective trust, and support the people who were in conflict to act from choice rather than reaction, thus enabling them to be able to actually make a decision together.

We look at the source of a conflict as the gap between both people’s narratives about what happened. And in order to attend to this gap in people’s understanding, and restore enough trust to allow for the CF process, we supported GT members through a process of information gathering, drafting a noncontroversial conflict narrative and acknowledgements, and sharing this with the wider GT community to restore trust.

Gathering Information

We began by collecting information from everyone – including the people primarily involved, as well as the acutely impacted parties in the field where the conflict was happening:

• Gathering any information that would be relevant for weaving togetherness in the field. 
• Crafting agreements together with them to care for impacts that might continue to happen, so that those needed in the decision-making process might find it more possible to work together during the process – whether directly or indirectly.

Drafting a Conflict Narrative 

The purpose of a conflict narrative is for the people involved in the conflict to arrive at a shared reality, even while their versions of what happened diverge.

We started by documenting the narratives that the people in the conflict were initially carrying. To gather information for the conflict narrative, we had multiple calls:

• With each of the two individuals in the conflict, separately: what would you say is happening / is the reason for the conflict? 
• With those acutely impacted in the conflict field: what makes you acutely impacted in this conflict? If the two people in the conflict came to you for advice, what would you propose to address the situation?

In order to have a shared starting point to see what’s happening and what led to the conflict, the conflict narrative needs to be noncontroversial. For us, this involved explicitly naming opinions and interpretations as what someone thinks instead of presenting them as truth. For example, instead of ‘what person A did was dismissive’, clearly attributing the interpretation to an individual: ‘person B experienced what person A did as dismissive’. This supports everyone involved to be able to accept the overall narrative.

Adding Acknowledgments 

After drafting the narrative of each of the two parties, we shared it with each of them individually and accompanied them to digest it. Although it can be painful to hear another’s narrative, this is a pathway for having a shared reality about what is going on.

The next step was collecting and adding acknowledgements and acknowledgement requests. We did this by connecting with the two parties individually, and documenting their responses to two questions:

• What do you think is something you did that contributed to the conflict?
• What would you like to hear from the other person?

This supported us to see where people had a similar story of the conflict, and where there were gaps between their understandings. 

• Example of acknowledgment request: Person A would have liked Person B to name their part in getting them to the conflict and the dynamic of stuckness, ‘I sometimes get the impression they see this as being of my doing alone.’
• Example of acknowledgment: Person A acknowledged that their sharing a different experience of past events may be jarring to Person B, ‘I can understand how my coming in years later saying this must have felt very invalidating.’

Weaving togetherness in the conflict

Up until this point, the two primary parties in the conflict had not interacted with each other about the narrative. Now, Miki facilitated four conversations with the two of them, not to resolve the conflict, but to land together in it – and all of its divergences – from a place of togetherness. 

Miki supported them to see the needs and impacts beneath their narratives and stories, helping both reframe the story and see the different ways they were making sense of the same situation. 

• When Miki had a sense that someone was stuck in their narrative, she checked for concrete examples of what they meant. This helped pull them out of their narratives and focus on what actually happened, separating observation from interpretation. 

• When they spoke about the other person, she checked if it was said explicitly, and supported them to own their interpretation of what was actually said. For example, reframing from ‘this person excluded me’ to ‘I interpreted this action as exclusion.’

Miki also moved them through specific alignments and divergences in their Conflict Narratives. Asking: What hasn’t been spoken that needs to be spoken, before making decisions together? This phase helped to clear remaining important points and move towards restoring trust.

• First, naming pieces that were true for everyone was a source of energy, revealing where there is already some alignment. 

• Second, when the parties shared divergences and checked if the other saw the divergence in the same way, it was a ‘yes’ to doing something together, another source of energy. 

• Finally, making visible that, while not everyone may agree about the content of the divergences, they could still hold together the fact that a divergence exists, was settling for the field overall. 

Miki helped them to share acknowledgments and agreements with each other. This included understanding the narrative from the angle of: What is useful from how the other person was experiencing the situation, whether or not it’s true, for making decisions together? This resulted in agreements based on what they have learned through the conflict narrative. For example, for the pattern of one person experiencing being excluded, an agreement was:

• Whenever Person A becomes aware of the possibility that something they did might impact Person B to experience exclusion, they acknowledge the potential impact, mourn it, or inquire if not sure. 

• Whenever Person B imagines that there may be exclusion going on, they ask if it’s there, with openness to the possibility that their interpretation may be inaccurate.

Digesting the conflict with all members

At the end of the conflict engagement phase, we shared the conflict narrative with the broader GT group in two calls, during which everyone was invited to speak and listen in relation to three questions:

• What is still not clear to you from this document about what led to the conflict?
• What are you discovering for the first time that is surprising or impactful for you?
• Are there any insights that arise for you that you think could support the field?

These digestion calls had several effects for the broader group:

• All impacted members were able to take in new information that wasn’t visible before about what challenges and narratives led to the conflict. 
• They were able to share together in the sadness and compassion for the stuckness that was affecting the whole organization up to that point.
• They reflected and expressed lessons, ideas and wishes for how to move the next phase forward as a united whole.

Following the weaving and digestion calls – when the two parties were more connected with the information beneath their stories and could own their narratives, and the broader community had processed the lessons from the conflict – we sensed that the conflict engagement phase could be closed, and we could move to the next phase of decision making. This didn’t mean that the conflict was ‘resolved’ or that the two parties could work together again, only that they had sufficient trust in each other to hold their considerations and to work toward decisions that could work for all. 

Convergent Facilitation (CF) Process

The main purpose of engaging with the conflict was to create enough trust and willingness to make some key decisions together about the future of GT. Once sufficient trust was established, we started a Convergent Facilitation (CF) process: a collaborative decision-making process designed to build togetherness across differences by integrating what’s important to everyone involved. 

When in conflict, it is usually hard to trust that solutions that work for everyone are possible. Part of our task was to remind participants that our intention was to find a solution that works for everyone, to trust that it was possible, and to hold the process in a way that moved us in that direction.

As GT had faced challenges and stuckness with the conflict, they had not been able to make some decisions together with enough cohesion to move GT forward. They also faced a challenge common in groups that attempt to move out of hierarchical structures: without the push of hierarchy and coercion, and in the absence of clear pathways to continue moving their purpose forward when conflict arises, people didn’t know how to maintain the movement, and energy got stuck.

The decisions they were facing were significant, because they were related to whether and how the organization might continue. We started the CF process with this question: ‘How can GT move forward, in the context of the conflict, from a place that centers their values, orients toward the world they are hoping to steward into being, and seeks to meet as many needs as possible?’ They chose this broader question, instead of a narrower one like ‘will GT continue as an organization?’, to invite creativity, to open up space for ideas of what might be possible to move forward from an alignment with values. 

The CF process involved three distinct phases, in which we started with identifying and gathering noncontroversial criteria, then moved to creating proposals based on those criteria, and then came together to review the proposals and make the decision together.

Phase 1: Gathering Criteria

Purpose. This first phase invited the group to shift away from a common pattern of orienting to divergences and conflict that focuses on strategies and debate, to instead focus on needs. In many modern societies, it is common to have discussions in which each person tries to convince others that their idea is best. Our approach, and the approach built into CF as a process, was different: before getting into any concrete proposals or strategies, we guided the group to first focus on what was important for everyone involved. This orientation and the resulting list of criteria could then form the basis from which creativity could emerge around specific strategies about how to care for all that was important for each person. 

Process. This first phase of gathering criteria formed the basis of trust and coherence for the rest of the CF process. A list of criteria captured the ‘why’ underneath people’s ideas, opinions, and suggestions: in total, we supported the group to surface 42 criteria which summarized and captured fully what was important for people in relation to the decision, while completely releasing, for now, any thought about how to attend to those criteria.

Trusting that the conflict as a whole was giving the organization relevant feedback about what needed to be addressed, we started this phase by gathering criteria from the previous engagements. Three further meetings helped to finalize the list.

Participant feedback. A participant shared: ‘I have a feeling that so many interconnected things are happening in the background that led us to this conflict. I’m happy we’re looking at them all, not just at the surface level.’ This showed how a conflict – which seemed to be just at the level of relationship — was actually pointing to something bigger within the organization and revealing voids in their functioning.

Integration. In this phase, we witnessed the mystery and power of integration: when someone raised a concern about a criterion that someone else proposed, and we integrated it in framing the criterion, the original person who proposed the criterion was happier. For example, when someone shared that they didn’t like a criterion about ‘nodes in different continents’, we focused our attention on what was important for that person – leaving room for doing things separately and together – and then changed the criterion accordingly, to ‘care for the complexities that arise in relation to having members in different continents’. The new version of the criterion was more robust because it integrated more wisdom. 

Phase 2: Creating Proposals

Purpose. In the second phase of CF, the idea is to come up with one or more proposals that would attend to the list of criteria from Phase 1. We invited creativity around finding strategies that would care for all the criteria in order to find a solution that would work for everyone. It required trusting in the group’s collective capacity to navigate complex situations and allowed the creativity and integrative wisdom of humans coming together to emerge. 

Challenges. As is often the case with CF, the second phase was more complex and it took us two months to arrive at a pathway that could move the proposal-creation process forward. GT members were used to making decisions in a certain way that is different from CF, and they had a tendency to come back to this habitual way of functioning, repeating the same impacts that brought them to the conflict and the stuckness. We created integrative pathways that maintained the integrity of the CF process while keeping some aspects of their current functioning. 

Process. We started by creating committees – small groups entrusted to create proposals – which would then be evaluated in relation to the criteria in Phase 3. We tried different configurations of committees until we landed on having a single group that was entrusted by everyone to create a proposal. 

The final committee was formed of three people who:

• still had the energy and space for creativity to find integrative pathways;
• had enough divergences between them to sufficiently represent everyone’s needs and, from there, to sense into what might work for all; and
• had capacity and willingness to interview a major stakeholder, who was not part of the group, to gather information, care as much as possible for what was important for that person, and also care for what was important for others.

Phase 3: Review and Decision

Purpose. In the third phase, all GT members were convened to see if the created proposal cared sufficiently for the criteria, so that everyone would be willing to accept it. 

• In particular, this phase is different from other decision-making processes like consent or consensus, which focus on asking for agreement, in that in the CF process we actively look for dissent. 
• Also, this phase uses an entire range of possible thresholds – from “significant concern” to “even the smallest doubt” – to invite dissent that is relevant to purpose and capacity within the group.

Process. All GT members were asked – over messages and in live meetings – to evaluate the proposal in relation to the criteria. Several elements contributed to a smooth review and decision phase:

• Proposals were sent to all members via the GT Slack channel, not requiring them to connect to a new channel or call, making it easy for all relevant parties to review 
• The request was specific: inviting concerns, rather than preferences 
• The request was also integrative: if anyone had a concern, they were asked to point out the place where they believed the proposal needed to be changed or tweaked in order to work for everyone

Outcome. Once we had all the concerns, we engaged with them one by one to integrate what people named as missing or controversial until we landed on a proposal that worked for everyone – which then became a decision. 

The decision was to change the shape of GT by dividing it into separate nodes, which GT shared in a newsletter and followup. The proposal included nine sections that detailed specific agreements about the transition phase and about the relation between nodes.

We celebrate that – in the midst of conflict, divergences, and the initial individual pull from some members to close GT in a faster way – we were able to move through a six-month process, with patience, until arriving at a decision that worked for all. 

Learnings and celebrations

GT members shared their own celebrations and learnings at the close of the CF process.

• “It changed my perspective on life. I never considered that there was a possibility that out of a place of dissent a future could be woven that includes everyone.”
• “I see this wasn’t only about needs being heard, but also about needs being taken into account and held.”
• “I have hope that we can actually make decisions that prioritise everyone’s needs. We can be creative to look for solutions and integrate.”
• “I mourn that the process took so long, and yet I’m learning that it takes time. It’s hard to speed certain things up; grass doesn’t grow faster if you pull it.”
• “I learned that agreement is always a possibility – even when it’s hard. Supporting each other to remain in choice is the work. It’s difficult to do this work without outside support.”
• “I appreciate the shared commitment to building futures that are built on principles and values. There is no question that we are all holding this even though there is separation.”
• “I learned what the posture of integrating dissent really feels like; it’s not the same as just doing consent decision making.”
• “Consent looks for tolerance; integrating dissent looks for creative ways to fulfill all needs.”