Hatfield-McCoy
Institute for Agreement Training holds its first workshop
March 2006
By Terri McLean, University of Kentucky College of Agriculture
In the 1800s, Pike County in Eastern Kentucky was the battleground
for the Hatfield-McCoy feud – the fabled dispute that entangled
two families in two neighboring states and left more than a dozen
people dead. Today, it is the site of an innovative workshop to
teach people how to handle conflict much more peacefully.
“What better place on the planet to teach people about
skills that will resolve conflict,” said Tim Campbell, Pike
County extension agent for community and economic development
and organizer of the aptly named Hatfield-McCoy Institute for
Agreement Training.
The workshop, sponsored by the University of Kentucky Cooperative
Extension Service in Pike County, embraces the legacy of the Hatfield-McCoy
conflict in an effort to focus attention on the modern-day concepts
of mediation, negotiation and facilitation, Campbell said.
“We want to create a simple awareness that there are processes
that can resolve conflict,” said Campbell, a trained mediator
and facilitator. “As the incidence of conflict grows worldwide,
so, too, does the demand for dealing effectively and positively
with conflict.”
Equally important, he said, is that the workshop is designed
to introduce “cultural values” that can help people
become better at resolving conflict. One is accepting conflict
as a normal part of life. “It’s in every place we
work and every organization to which we belong,” Campbell
said.
Another is recognizing conflict as an opportunity, not a problem.
“This is the old ‘glass half empty versus half full’
argument,” he added.
Fourteen people – a school teacher, a surgeon, an Extension
Homemaker and a customer-retention specialist included –
participated in the inaugural Hatfield-McCoy Institute, a week-long,
jam-packed workshop that is an expansion of Pike County Extension’s
popular one-day Agreement Training program.
The participants learned largely through interactive exercises,
with a minimum of lectures. Stephanie Richards, the nation’s
only Extension agent for fine arts, was on hand to add what Campbell
called “a dose of reality” to an important component
of conflict resolution training – role-playing.
“Role-playing is a great tool for this type of learning,”
Richards said. “But a lot of times what happens is it turns
into an acting or performance anxiety situation. And just like
with any performance, we’re trying to take that anxiety
off so they can get to the essence of the message being delivered.”
On the second day of the institute, Richards directed several
scenes designed to introduce participants to mediation, a form
of conflict resolution in which a neutral third party negotiates
a resolution between opposing parties in a conflict. Mediation
gives people an opportunity to discuss problems, clear up misunderstandings
and work together.
“We’re not performing, we’re experiencing,”
she told a group of participants as they mediated a make-believe
child custody dispute.
Suellen Zornes, Extension agent for family and consumer sciences
in Boyd County, facilitated the day’s activities.
“You can put the mediation process into everything you
do,” said Zornes, who is also a professional mediator. “You
can use it all your life.”
One participant, a customer-retention specialist for a telephone
service provider in Pike County, attended the workshop to learn
creative ways to solve conflict on the job.
“We’re trying to find ways to deal with customers
who are either difficult customers or are customers who feel they’ve
been done wrong by our company,” she said.
Along with learning the processes involved in conflict resolution,
the goal of the Hatfield-McCoy Institute is to help participants
create a personal or professional atmosphere that fosters what
Campbell touts as “high-performance” teamwork. Such
teamwork embraces diversity and values everyone’s opinions,
he said.
“As a mediator and a facilitator, I’m always happiest
when I’m facilitating a discussion where you have the most
diverse group of people possible,” Campbell said. “Bring
them all to the table with all those different points of view
and … you will get them to work together to solve problems.”
A session on dealing with difficult people, presented by Paula
Raines of Collaborative Partners, was especially well received
by the group, Campbell said. Raines’s work is based on the
Enneagram, a means of assessing personality types to negotiate
more effectively with each other.
“Based on exit questionnaires, her presentation was the
highlight of the week,” he said.
Despite the $400 fee for attending the workshop, the level of
participation in the first Hatfield-McCoy Institute was on target,
Campbell said. More important, he added, participants were “100
percent in favor of doing it again.”
“I know from our own experiences that the need for this
type of information is growing because, regrettably conflict is
growing,” he said.
