Menu Shortcut Page Conflict resolution training is often used as either a conflict prevention or a conflict management technique. It is almost always better to teach people to deal with their own problems than to come in as an outside third party, act as a one-time mediator to get the parties through the initial crisis situation, and then leave again, without doing anything to help them deal with future problems on their own. For that reason, many intervenors prefer to train or educate people about a variety of conflict resolution techniques than to mediate a specific conflict.
Training varies greatly in nature and content.
Other times it is done after a conflict has developed, but before it is so escalated that mediation is absolutely necessary. At still other times, it happens in conjunction with mediation. Advocates of transformative mediation, however, charge that problem-solving mediation is not empowering, but rather is disempowering, as the mediator tends to exercise a strong amount of control over both the process and the outcome, and the disputants don't learn much, if anything, about how to solve their problems themselves. Hence there is much more emphasis on helping people learn how to deal with the conflict effectively themselves. However, transformative mediation assumes that every disputant is capable of making good decisions for him or herself.