Restorative practices build skills that enable teams to strengthen relationships and transform conflict into opportunities for innovation.
Restorative practices intentionally create workplace culture where innovation is not just welcomed, but cultivated and measured. Through capacity-building in specific skill areas at the individual and team level, members of the Cardano community will learn immediately applicable tools for building and sustaining restorative workplace environments.
How will Restorative Practices be taught?
Initially, two foundational tools will be taught. These tools can be contextualized along the continuum (see graphic) of restorative practices, from building to repairing relationships. Teams will be trained to utilize circle processes as proactive measures to establish respect, trust, and psychological safety. From there, they will learn a practical approach for responding to conflict one-on-one through the Restorative Conversation tool. Training participants’ conceptual understanding and practical skills will be further developed through modules focused on increasing communication skills that enhance social-emotional connection.
In the first phase of the project “Recruitment, Orientation, and Enrollment” we will survey interest and define an achievable size and scale for this initial round of training. At this time, we expect an appropriate pilot size will be 3-5 teams with a total of 40-60 participants, with the expectation that all participants will complete all coursework.
Foundational Coursework to be delivered:
- Course 1: Restorative Practices Orientation
- Course 2: Facilitation of Circle Practice for Building Restorative Organizational Culture
- Course 3: Restorative Conversations for Addressing One-on-One Conflict
- Advanced Skills for Restorative Practices
TRAINING FORMAT
Each of the 4 Courses described below will involve Asynchronous and Synchronous Training Modules.
Asynchronous Modules are available on-demand via an online training platform. Designed in collaboration with an Instructional Design Expert who specializes in Adult Learning Strategies, these modules are interactive, utilizing animations, videos, mindfulness moments with journaling, and discussion that occurs asynchronously with trainers.
Bonus! Asynchronous modules will be accessible for enrolled participants for 1 year
Synchronous Modules are facilitated in small groups with our team’s highly experienced trainers and facilitators. These small group cohorts will focus on live demonstrations, interactive learning experiences, and practice utilizing the restorative tools. Feedback, debrief, and small group discussion will deepen learning.
Synchronous sessions give our trainers insight about how each team is progressing with their learning, and opportunities to talk about context-specific applications of restorative practices.
Course 1: Orientation to Restorative Environments for Innovation
Stage on Continuum: Introduction, Orientation
Objectives:
- Establish foundational understanding of Restorative Justice (RJ) through 3 lenses, including core roles, concepts and goals
- Analyze how RJ is situated within a continuum of Restorative Practices
- Participants are introduced to the Social Discipline Window and how support and accountability are central to our work in Restorative Practices
- Apply and reflect in at least 1 interactive activity to get a direct experience with applying Restorative Practices in the workplace
Course 2: Circle Practice Facilitation
Stage on Continuum: Proactive, Prevention
Objectives:
- Participants gain understanding of the basics of Circle Processes: what, how, when, and why
- Participants learn how to be circle keepers through observation, then practice facilitating circle practice
- Participants use circle practice to identify how they will use this tool moving forward
Course 3: Restorative Conversations (RC)
Stage on Continuum: Maintain, Repair
Objectives:
- Learn about Restorative Conversations and Restorative Agreement Meetings: what, why, when
- Practice the steps of the RC:
- Discern when to use it
- Prepare for the RC
- Initiating and participating in the conversation
- Follow up after the conversation
- Build readiness to utilize the RC model within your team to address conflict and misunderstanding early
Supplemental Modules: Advanced Skills for Restorative Practices
Stage on Continuum: All
Objectives:
- Learn complementary concepts and skills to integrate and strengthen all restorative tools
- Asking Open-Ended, Affective Questions with Curiosity
- Reflective listening and Reflective Statements
- Validations, Affirmations, Reframes
- Utilizing Feelings & Needs to Give/Receive Feedback
Deeper Understanding of the Solution
John Bailie (2019) explains that restorative practices create a sense of belonging, voice, and agency, all characteristics that support individual creativity.
The restorative workplace offers a model that consistently encourages creativity by structuring an intentional workspace that nurtures participatory learning and decision making and where it is safe to innovate. In addition, the restorative workplace is not specific to any one type of business or profession but can be created with any team of colleagues willing to learn some basic skills. While restorative justice is best known as a prescriptive process that addresses harm resulting from crime, restorative practitioners expand the use of values and principles at the heart of the justice model to simultaneously create environments that harness diverse perspectives, provide psychological safety to learn and take risks, and build the skills needed for collaboration. Consequently, choosing to work restoratively provides an excellent foundation for creativity to flourish.
Using articulated principles, embedded rituals, and supportive structures, which are all aspects of a restorative workplace, we will create a pilot educational initiative for 6 months to show how conversations, connections, and collaboration spark innovation through a participatory work climate. Research in leadership and creativity will also be incorporated to show that what we know about the conditions necessary to structure a workplace that sparks innovation can be provided through the creation of a restorative environment. In addition, while many people are drawn to restorative practices for its relational approach, the skills of communication, connection, and collaboration central to the restorative approach offer a creative advantage. Ultimately, instead of a top-down or personality-driven model, innovation emerges from the processes that build organizational creative capacity.
Conflict is Inevitable - It Defines a Culture of Collaboration & Innovation
Conflict is inevitable in any workplace, but how conflict is dealt with will greatly affect employees’ creative contributions. How institutions address conflict defines an essential part of their culture (Fehr & Gelfand, 2012; Schein & Schein, 2017). Workplaces that present a façade of harmony might overlook the importance of what Braithwaite (1989) terms necessary “constructive conflict” (p. 185). Restorative practices acknowledge that conflict is inevitable and teaches employees how to recognize and use the opportunity that conflict presents. In many companies an employee might experience a conflict, have a supervisor document a complaint, and have a Human Resource manager file it away in a locked cabinet, where it remains until it is needed to document a persistent failing if no improvement has been shown.
A more helpful alternative is to position “leaders as ‘climate engineers’ who reinforce employees’ climate perceptions by developing, enforcing, and implementing a consistent suite of organizational practices” (as cited by Baumann and Bennet in Fehr & Gelfand, 2012, p. 676) to uphold the norms for a collaborative and participatory workplace. Restorative practices recognize conflict as such an integral part of human behavior that a continuum of responses has been developed to address conflict depending on the severity and numbers involved. For example, gossip is unacceptable in a restorative workplace; each employee is told this in their orientation. But simply banning gossip would be inadequate to stop it from happening. Instead, employees are taught to address issues colleague- to-colleague with an emotional tenor that allows individuals to recognize how their words or actions may impact others so they can change their behavior. It requires courage and practice but is very effective in stopping gossip, making employees more aware of their words and behaviors, and building empathy.
Further up the continuum, restorative conferencing brings together people who have been impacted, directly or indirectly, to participate in a dialogue process to explore actions and impacts regardless of intention. Rather than minimize or ignore an incident, we speak with candor about how it impacted us and others. All parties to the incident are asked to take responsibility for their part in causing harm; similarly all parties are asked to be willing to make changes to repair that harm. Often, simply having a restorative conversation (one-on-one) or facilitated dialogue (group process with facilitator) is sufficient for repair, but at times a written agreement with specific, measurable agreements can result from the restorative intervention. This kind of written agreement typically includes a specific date for one more reconvening which contributes to a culture of accountability and follow-through, key attributes of a psychologically safe workplace.
How do Restorative Practices Impact Innovation?
- Raise the collective intelligence of a group through intentional spaces for equal voice
- Balance the loudest voices in the room
- Use processes that facilitate inclusivity in idea-sharing
- Improve morale, sense of community and belonging
- Retain diverse perspectives and expertise at the table
- Avoid grudges and resentment that lead to divisiveness and inertia
- Congruence with Cardano’s Commitment to Change the Paradigm
- Capacity-building: empower individuals with agency to address their own disagreements
- Leave the status quo behind: who’s had a productive experience with HR?
- From conflict resolution to conflict transformation: what if we employ conflict to effectively generate innovation?
According to Google’s Project Aristotle, the two primary behavioral norms associated with the most successful teams are:
- The ability of all members of the team to practice turn-taking, in other words, the ability to share and hear many ideas without judgment and evaluation.
- A high level of social-intuiting, meaning an ability to assess others’ emotional states via nonverbal cues.
When these 2 norms are in place, a team is actively building an environment of psychological safety, which Google’s study proved is directly correlated to increasing a team’s collective intelligence. On the flipside, when these two norms are not present, the group’s collective intelligence is diminished.
Addressing Norm 1 & 2
Restorative Practices (RP) explicitly teach applicable skills and frameworks for inviting equal voice and active listening. RP create spaces for generating new ideas and sharing perspectives, with agreements in place that prevent the cross-talk and judgment that create unsafe environments. In this way, RP foster generative discussions with a spirit of “yes, and” in place of “either / or.” All participants’ ideas and suggestions are valued.
In order to nurture an inclusive environment within a global community, Cardano must deliberately incorporate methods for overcoming cultural differences in order to connect authentically and be mindful about language- verbal and nonverbal- that may inadvertently cause harm. Setting aside intentional time for building relationships is the first step in improving social intuiting skills. Within that time, RP are used as methods for engagement that surfaces how team members are feeling, and what their present needs are. Restorative tools allow for this social connection time to be efficient and productive in accomplishing psychological safety norms 1 and 2. The investment of some time in these practices proactively enables teams to avoid loss of exponential amounts of time when teams react to harm by devolving into complaining, commiserating, and drama.
Collaboration, expressing diverse ideas, innovation and a defined conflict resolution process are key first principles to the success of Cardano and need to be cultivated, tracked & measured. Oftentimes companies or projects copy & paste what others have done to spur innovation, yet this only works if unique leaders are present. Instead, by educating the Cardano Community on the Collaboration - Conflict Continuum, and training champions who help track, measure & analyze this, Cardano provides an environment of High Support - High Control to ensure the Community around the world contributes to a “working WITH” environment [See the "Doing With" quadrant in the graphic below.] This aligns the social capital of the community with the high innovation needed to be an industry leader!
The Social Capital Window of Restorative Practices
Diversity is crucial to invite various experiences, backgrounds, education levels, and ways of thinking (Chin et al., 2016; Giles, 2018; Grant, 2018; Hooker & Csikszentmihalyi, 2003; Hoskisson et al., 2016; Sawyer, 2017). For innovation to thrive, instilling a clear value to honor and encourage diverse thinking is necessary. This is why, for example, simply hiring women and minorities falls short despite good intentions to increase diversity. Research has shown that in mixed-gendered working groups, men are more likely to interrupt, exerting dominance in conversation (Karakowsky & Miller, 2004). Research concludes that workplaces still reflect Eurocentric norms that cause bias and, further, that those biases are ignored if colleagues prioritize group harmony over any other factors (Opie & Roberts, 2017). Supporting true inclusion by encouraging the expression and reception of different voices, ideas, and perspectives may include constructive conflict, which can be challenging to any workplace but especially a workplace that has discouraged dealing with conflict. Inclusive initiatives must be structured and practiced before their value can be appreciated for the wealth of new information and opportunities it can bring to a workplace.
Addressing Financial Impact: Loss of employees/team members from a project is costly
- It costs a company approximately 33% of one employee’s annual salary to replace them.
- Departure of valuable team members from a given project can lead not just to a loss of money and energy invested, but also harm to the team’s overall goals and product.
Through implementation of RP, teams are encouraged to address conflict when it is still minor. Anyone who has been employed at a workplace has either witnessed or been involved in a dynamic where people imagine they are “letting go” of the minor stuff, when in reality, the small problems begin to accumulate and agitate under the surface, gradually growing into big problems, leading to blow-up fights, long-term resentment, and irreparable grudges.
Teams who participate in RP training will learn to practice Conflict Transformation through use of the Restorative Conversation tool. This tool builds agency between parties who have caused harm and been harmed to come together to grow through new understanding and perspectives. By communicating through the conflict, they gain a new lens that lifts them out of tunnel vision, allowing them to discover new and unforeseen solutions. The process challenges and disarms assumptions and biases. Conflict will likely always be uncomfortable, but when teams have a map in place that guides them through a difficult conversation, they will generate new ideas that will both heal relationships and foster innovation in the process. The repaired relationship strengthens the team’s capacity to work well together, and the experience of conflict transformation will organically impact their ability to generate new ideas while addressing differences respectfully.
Challenge 1: Ensuring follow through and accountability by all training participants to complete all training course modules, asynchronous and synchronous.
Addressed by:
- The Learning Management System (LMS) that hosts the Restorative Practices training allows administrators to track every participant’s progress towards course completion. Our team will generate bi-monthly reports that can be shared back with participating Cardano members for accountability purposes. We can establish a required level of completion for “graduation” or “certification.”
- Every training participant will have their own login to the training content, and can complete coursework at their own pace, at times convenient for their schedule and lifestyle.
- For synchronous work with trainers, we will be creative in offering sessions at various times/days, and will send out the calendar info for these sessions with advanced notice. We will request that training participants do their best to adjust schedules in order to attend synchronous sessions, as they are critical for demonstrations, interactive activities, and direct experience practicing and debriefing their skills development.
Challenge 2: Measuring Fidelity to Practice, how to effectively supervise that training course participants are applying and utilizing restorative communication tools in a way that is congruent with restorative values. (i.e. It is natural and often unconscious that people default to conventional “punitive” measures while masking them with restorative terms.)
Addressed by:
- In the asynchronous learning modules, participants will be required to answer sporadic open-ended questions throughout, which will be reviewed by facilitators, who will provide follow-up feedback or questions as needed directly to participants. This enables facilitators to keep a climate check on learners, and track and respond when there may be challenges or misunderstanding with the material.
- In the synchronous learning modules, facilitators will utilize a model of “Instruct, Demonstrate, Practice, Debrief” which creates multiple opportunities for training participants to have their questions answered in real time.
- Facilitators will elicit “case studies” from participants and ask them to report on their own experiences applying restorative tools in real life.
- Facilitators can observe and address specific challenges during practice sessions.
- Facilitators will follow Strategies for Adult Learning to empower honest self-reflection among participants about their own comprehension and growth.
- Evaluations conducted throughout coursework will require participants to self-report about their individual and team’s progress with implementing tools- this will shed light for facilitators on how the tools are being applied.
Challenge 3: Supporting training participants with adapting and tailoring restorative tools to be culturally competent in their unique and diverse contexts. (This isn’t too difficult to do generally, but becomes more difficult depending on scale- i.e. If we have teams that are coming from >25 distinct cultural contexts.)
Addressed by:
- In the first phase of the project “Recruitment, Orientation, and Enrollment” we will survey interest and define an achievable size and scale for this initial round of training. <u>At this time, we expect an appropriate pilot size will be 3-5 teams with a total of 40-60 participants. </u>
- From the feedback received on our proposal, we will collaborate with the Cardano community to get recommendations about selecting an initial pilot group of training participants that accounts for this challenge. <u>Note that learning derived from this initial pilot will be applied and allow us to substantially grow the pool of training participants with each subsequent restorative practices training cohort. </u>