Mediation Practice Areas

Confluence Collaboration serves as a collaborative mediation practitioner for conflict management and resolution, facilitating thoughtful and constructive environments to help move everyone involved toward a common goal. 

We practice in these three main areas:

1. Environment & Natural Resources
2. Land Use Planning & Transportation
3. Organizational Change Management

Depending on the situation, our mediation process design may include some of these elements to help groups who are seeking change:

1. Listen to new perspectives.
2. Exchange relevant stories.
3. Re-examine assumptions.
4. Develop a common platform of relevant facts about key issues.
5. Outline paths to reach common goals.

Environment & Natural Resources

We have years of experience in designing and facilitating collaborative mediation processes for natural resource management and environmental pollution issues.

We have helped a wide range of stakeholders and partners progress toward common goals, including:

• agency heads and staff at all levels of government
• local, county and state elected officials
• special purpose districts (business improvement, stormwater & water conservancies)
• civil and traffic engineers, hydrologists, biologists, and sanitarians
• farmers and ranchers
• fishermen and watermen
• environmental groups
• community-based conservation collaboratives
• forestry and ecological restoration experts
• builders, developers, and architects
• small businesses and non-profits
• citizens and homeowners’ associations
• private schools and religious organizations

Land Use Planning & Transportation

Since government agency planners can sometimes be perceived as subject matter experts with a predisposed point of view on certain planning and design issues, we serve as neutral intermediaries between the planners and the interested public.

Our role is to help each group better understand the other.

This may involve translating the voices of the public so planners can better understand their concerns. Sometimes it means working with planners to make their technical ideas more accessible to the public.

We have successfully resolved a wide variety of transportation and land-use conflicts, including those related to: 

• density per acre and open space
• setbacks and height limitations 
• expansion and “pop ups” of large new dwellings in older neighborhoods (infill) 
• location and extent of urban amenities 
• landscaping
• traffic congestion 
• road widening and realignment 
• mixed-use and transit-oriented development
• massing and floor-area ratios
• highest & best use and intensification of uses
• emergency planning by service area

Additional land use & transportation highlights:

• For three years, we served as counsel to a county legislative body, drafting its planning and zoning decisions, and defending those decisions in trial and appellate courts.
• We worked with comprehensive, traffic, community, and environmental planners to focus issues, educate the public on those planning issues, collect public feedback, and build understanding and consensus.
• We have taught several college and adult education courses on land use planning, environmental feasibility analysis, and transportation planning.

Organizational Change Management

Managing change can be a daunting undertaking, whether it’s in government or business.

We have dealt with many issues that commonly arise within government agencies, small businesses, non-profits, and family-owned companies, including:

Group Dynamics

• impact of each organizational unit’s dynamics on interactions in larger groups
• conflicts and interactions between subcultures and units within an organization
• conflicting goals and values between key members in the organization or unit

Roles & Responsibilities

• clarification and definition of roles and responsibilities 
• scope of authority 
• lack of communication and cooperation between units with overlapping responsibilities due to siloing 
• scope and limits of delegation
• effects of organizational culture on group and task maintenance 

Legacy & Resource Planning

• succession planning 
• competition for resources within the organization
• manager’s compensation 

Leadership Alignment

• alignment of mission and vision to strategy
• alignment of organizational structure to strategy
• loss of organizational direction (mission drift and mission creep)