In Australia, North America and also now Western Europe, TJA has been the key educator, passing on to facilitators from a host of different agencies and communities the necessary skills to convene a community conference. This powerful process is being applied in a growing number of different community settings. But we have also applied the theory in new ways, to deal with conflict in workplaces. First, we developed the workplace conference , a forum that brings together the community of people affected by workplace conflict. The number of participants in a conference tends to range from a dozen to thirty.
Participants generally deliberate for between three and five hours.
The workplace conference provides them with an opportunity to express, in a setting of safety and confidentiality, concerns that they have about relations and communication in the workplace. In the course of the workplace conference, the unwritten rules that we call workplace culture are laid out for consideration. All workplace conferences conclude with a plan of action, with deadlines and clearly allocated responsibilities. So the workplace conference is not about experts solving problems. Nor is it about conference participants simply solving problems.