La Bourse / Volume VI / Nº VI.09 / Workbook — the student

A woman in linen standing at a doorway beside a young olive tree, warm light in the room behind her. — Plate VI.09 · Workbook — the studentThursday, Noon, at the Cathedral Door.A conflict system is not a document either. It is a place, a time, and a group of people who are known to be there — and the cheapest of the three to provide is the place.

WORKBOOK — THE STUDENT

Chapter VI.09 · Conflict, Repair, and the Long Table

A term of practice. One project carried the whole way. Applied to a life.

WHY THIS WORKBOOK IS DIFFERENT

You are not being asked to learn about conflict resolution. You are being asked to build a conflict system for a group you actually belong to, and to compute its threshold before you write a rule.

That is the order, and the order is the lesson. Almost everybody who writes a dispute clause writes the clause first and finds out what it costs afterwards — if ever. This term you will do it the other way: count, cost, compute, and only then draft. By the end you will know one number about a real group of real people that nobody in it currently knows, and that number will settle an argument that would otherwise have been settled by whoever spoke last.

Pick your group now. A house share. A student society. A band. A sports club. A volunteer rota. A family business. A course project team. It needs three properties and nothing else: more than about eight people, a membership you could list, and at least one disagreement in its history that was never properly heard. Every group you have ever belonged to has the third.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Weeks 1–3: find the forum that already exists

Exercise 1.1 — The informal forum.

Every group already has a place where disagreements actually go, and it is almost never the official one. Find yours. Write down:

The place — the kitchen, the group chat at eleven at night, the walk to the station, one particular person's sofa.
The person — the one everybody tells things to, who holds three grievances they did not ask for.
The time — the slot in the week when it happens.

Then write one paragraph on what the informal forum has that a formal one would not: it is free, it is instant, nobody has to ask for it, and it carries no record. Those four properties are your design brief. A formal forum that lacks all four will lose to the kitchen every time.

Exercise 1.2 — The exit register.

List everybody who has left your group in the last three years. For each, write one of four words: finished, moved, drifted, unresolved. Be honest about the fourth. Then count.

This produces your first real input — q, the share of disputes that end in somebody leaving when there is no forum. You cannot compute it precisely; you are estimating a proportion from a small sample, and you should say so on the page. Write your estimate and your confidence in one line, like this:

q ≈ 0.3, from 4 unresolved exits out of roughly 13 disputes I can name. Low confidence on the denominator.

Naming your denominator is the whole exercise. An estimate that admits what it did not see is usable. One that does not is decoration.

Exercise 1.3 — What already worked.

Find one disagreement in your group's history that ended well. Interview two people who were there, separately, and ask the appreciative form: when has this worked, what made it work, and what would it take to have more of that? Never what went wrong.

Write four hundred words on what the two accounts agree on. The agreement is the mechanism. The disagreement is interesting and is not your subject this week.

Exercise 1.4 — Thursday.

Read the Tribunal de las Aguas material in the chapter and in Ostrom (1990), chapter 3. Then answer in writing: what is your group's Thursday? Not what it should be — what day, in the week your group already has, could carry a standing forum without anybody moving anything?

If the honest answer is that there is no such day, that is a finding about your group's structure and it goes in the project.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Weeks 4–7: compute before you argue

Exercise 2.1 — Price the route you already have.

Your group's written dispute mechanism is probably a termination clause, a constitution nobody has read, or nothing. Find it. Write it out verbatim. Then write, underneath, what it would actually cost to use — in time, money, and membership — and how you know.

If the answer is nobody has ever used it, write that. An unused mechanism has a cost of zero and a value of zero, and the gap between those two is where the chapter lives.

Exercise 2.2 — Cost one exclusion.

Compute X for your group. It is not a salary calculation; adapt the structure.

  X  =  replacement cost  +  (probability of escalation × cost of escalation)

For a student society, replacement cost is the hours of recruitment, induction and lost institutional memory. For a house share it is the void period plus the viewing time plus the risk premium on an unknown replacement. For a band it is the rehearsal months. Put an hourly value on the time — your own, honestly — and show it.

Compare it to the chapter's worked figure: £6,300 replacement plus £1,275 expected claim cost = £7,575, built from the 21 per cent of annual salary that Boushey and Glynn (2012) found across thirty case studies. Say why yours is larger or smaller.

Exercise 2.3 — Cost the ladder.

Now cost a six-rung ladder for your group, in the chapter's two parts.

  STANDING (F)   training + reserved time + convening and the record
  PER DISPUTE (c) hearing time + administration

The chapter's house of 200 gets F = £3,500 a year and c = £330. Yours will be much smaller, and it must still have both parts. A ladder with no standing cost is a ladder that has to be convened, which is the thing you are trying to avoid.

Exercise 2.4 — Compute your threshold.

             F / N
  λ*  =  ------------------
          (q − s)·X  −  c

Take s — the share still reaching exclusion with a ladder — as 0.05 unless you have reason to differ, and say what your reason is if you do.

Then compute three things and put them on one page:

λ* in disputes per member per year.
λ* × N — the threshold in whole disputes a year. Notice, as the chapter does, that this figure does not move with N when F is fixed. Check it yourself at half your group's size and twice it.
λ ÷ λ\* — your group's observed rate over the threshold.

The chapter's worked house gets λ\* = 0.01119, which is 2.24 disputes a year, against an observed 0.05 — a ratio of 4.5×.

Exercise 2.5 — Find where it breaks.

The threshold exists only if the ladder diverts more than c / X of disputes from exclusion — 4.4 per cent in the chapter's house. Compute yours. Then answer in writing: at what value of q − s does your ladder stop paying for itself? That number is the honest boundary of your own argument, and a project that states it is worth more than one that does not.

Exercise 2.6 — Convert an effect size.

Take d = 0.155 from the Campbell review and reproduce the chapter's conversion by hand, showing every term: the 1.8138 factor, the 1.3246 odds ratio, the 50 per cent base, the 43.0 per cent treated rate, the 7.0 points, the NNT of 14.3.

Then do it again with a base rate of 30 per cent, and again at 70 per cent, and write two sentences on what happens to the number needed to treat. This is the most transferable skill in the chapter — you will meet standardised effect sizes for the rest of your life and almost nobody converts them.

PART THREE — DREAM AND DESIGN

Weeks 8–11: build the thing

Exercise 3.1 — Write the six rungs.

One page. Name each rung, say who can invoke it, how long it takes, what it produces, and what it costs. Use the chapter's six as a skeleton and change them where your group is genuinely different — but if you delete a rung, say what now happens to the cases it was holding.

Exercise 3.2 — Write the movement rule.

Two sentences. A rung is used twice before the next is available; nobody skips except for defined conduct. Then write the defined conduct — the short, specific list of things that go straight to a higher rung. Keep it to four items. A list of twelve is a list that will be argued about instead of used.

Exercise 3.3 — Design the monitoring, to Ostrom's fourth principle.

Who monitors, and to whom are they accountable? The principle is exact: monitors are accountable to the members or are the members. Write:

how the panel is chosen (elected, rotated, drawn by lot — argue your choice)
the term and the term limit
the recusal rule, and who decides a contested recusal
the annual count — the one page, published: complaints, rungs used, outcomes, median elapsed days, and the resulting λ

That last item is the whole monitoring apparatus. Design the template now; you will need it for the term project.

Exercise 3.4 — Design the fallback, both ways.

Name the terminal rung for your group. It may be an external arbitrator, a parent body, a member vote at a threshold, or a named third party everyone already trusts. Then write the clause that lets any member invoke it against the group, not only the group against a member.

Write two hundred words on what that clause changes about the conversations at rungs one through five, using Mnookin and Kornhauser's shadow-of-the-law argument explicitly.

Exercise 3.5 — The Dream page.

Present tense, description not prophecy, five hundred words. Describe your group eighteen months after this is running. What is boring about it? What conversation happens earlier than it used to? What does somebody new notice in their first month?

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Weeks 12–14: make it hold, and notice it

Exercise 4.1 — The three failure modes, applied.

For each of the chapter's four — capture, drift to the top rung, the refuser who is correct, and nothing behind it — write: how it would look in your group, which number in your annual count would show it first, and one defence that is available to you now.

Exercise 4.2 — The second chair.

Name the second person who could chair a hearing. Then do the thing that makes it real: teach them. Half an hour, the six rungs, the movement rule, the recusal rule. Write a paragraph on what they asked that you had not thought about.

Exercise 4.3 — The first sitting with nothing on it.

Hold it. A standing forum, on your Thursday, with an empty agenda. Four minutes. Then write four hundred words on what it felt like — including if it felt absurd, which it may.

Exercise 4.4 — Delight, found.

Note, in one paragraph each, three moments this term when something got easier because a forum existed. If you cannot find three, write the honest version of why, and what that tells you about the design.

THE TERM PROJECT

One document, carried the whole way

A conflict system for a real group, with its threshold computed.

Eight parts, in this order:

The group — who, how many, and the informal forum that already exists.
The exit register — three years, classified, with q estimated and the denominator stated.
The cost of one exclusion — X, built from its parts, with your hourly valuation shown.
The ladder, costed — F and c, both parts, itemised.
The threshold — λ, λ × N, λ ÷ λ, and the c/X* floor. Show the working so somebody can check a division without re-deriving it.
The six rungs and the movement rule — the drafted procedure.
The monitoring — the panel's selection, term, recusal rule and the annual count template.
The fallback — the terminal rung and the both-ways clause, with the shadow argument made in your own words.

The acceptance test for the project is a single sentence: could somebody who was not in your seminar take this document to your group and run it? Not admire it. Run it. If a reader would have to ask you a question to hold the first sitting, the document is not finished.

SELF-ASSESSMENT

Score yourself honestly against seven. One point each.

I can state Ostrom's fourth, fifth and sixth principles from memory, in her terms, including the accountability direction in the fourth.
I can convert a standardised mean difference into a number needed to treat, showing every term, without looking it up.
I computed λ* for a real group from inputs I gathered myself, and I stated which of them I was least confident about.
I can explain why the threshold in whole disputes does not move with group size, and check it at two sizes.
I can state the enforcement break-even — 55.6 per cent — and say what it means about whether a fallback is needed where I am, rather than in general.
I can name the population the restorative evidence covers, and the arms in which the effect was null or reversed, without being prompted.
Somebody outside my seminar could run my procedure from my document.

Five or more and you have the chapter. Below four, the one to return to is number three: the arithmetic is not the hard part, and gathering your own inputs is.

CARRYING IT FORWARD

Three things worth keeping past the term.

The habit of counting exits. Wherever you end up, the four-word classification — finished, moved, drifted, unresolved — takes ten minutes a year and tells you more about an organisation than its values statement does.

The conversion. π/√3 = 1.8138. You will meet d = 0.2 and d = 0.4 for the rest of your working life and you will now be one of the few people in the room who can say what either means in people.

The Thursday. Any group you join or start, ask early: what is our standing day? It is the cheapest governance decision available and it is almost never made.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR SEMINAR

When has a disagreement in a group you belonged to been handled well? What was in place before it happened that made that possible?
What is the third rung you have wished for — the response between say nothing and leave?
If our seminar had a standing forum, what would come to it in the first month?
What would you want published about how we handle disagreement, and what would you not?
Who here has served on something like a panel, and what surprised them?
What would have to be true for a refusal to take part to be read as a signal rather than as bad faith?