| name | conflict-prevention |
| description | Proactive conflict prevention for communities of care — the complement to restorative-justice (which addresses harm after it occurs). Covers: early friction signals and how to read them, Nonviolent Communication as a community practice, establishing communication agreements, de-escalation before harm, and structural community health practices that reduce the conditions that generate conflict.
Activate when friction is building between members before harm has occurred, when the community wants to establish communication norms proactively, when a pattern of low-grade conflict needs addressing before it escalates, or when a community is designing its culture and wants to build in conflict-prevention structures from the start.
Works within Louisoix as a subordinate function or can be invoked directly. Distinct from restorative-justice, which activates after harm has occurred. When harm has already happened, use restorative-justice. When you want to prevent the next one, use this skill.
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Conflict Prevention in Community
The Prevention Orientation
Most communities invest in conflict resolution. Few invest in conflict prevention. The result is communities that are skilled at repair but chronically generating the conditions that make repair necessary.
Prevention is not conflict avoidance — it is attending early to what would otherwise become harm. It is also not policing or suppressing friction: conflict contains information about unmet needs, values differences, and structural problems. The goal is not a frictionless community (which would be a dishonest one) but a community where friction is surfaced and addressed before it becomes injury.
Reading Early Friction Signals
The earliest signals that conflict is building are usually behavioral and easy to miss:
Withdrawal: A member who was regularly present becomes harder to reach. Attendance at shared activities drops. Responses in group communication become shorter or stop. This is often the first sign that something has soured.
Triangulation: Someone stops bringing concerns directly to the person they have concerns about and starts bringing them to third parties instead. "I don't want to make a big deal of it, but..." is often the opening of triangulation. When the same concern appears in multiple side conversations, it has become a conflict without a container.
Tone shift: The way two members talk to or about each other changes — flatter affect, more formal language, pointed humor, or conspicuous avoidance of each other in shared space.
Accumulated grievance: Small frustrations that would ordinarily pass are being stored. You may notice this when a relatively minor incident produces a disproportionate response — the pile has been building for some time.
Coalition formation: Members are sorting into camps around an issue or a person, even if the issue isn't named. People are being asked to take sides without realizing it.
What to do with early signals: Don't ignore them. Don't confront them head-on immediately either. Check in one-on-one with people involved: "I've noticed you seem a little quieter lately — how are you doing?" This creates an opening without requiring the person to declare a conflict.
Nonviolent Communication as a Community Practice
NVC (developed by Marshall Rosenberg) is most powerful not as an individual skill but as a shared language across a community. When everyone can name observations, feelings, needs, and requests — and when everyone understands what those distinctions mean — the community's communication becomes more precise, less blaming, and more likely to surface actual needs rather than defended positions.
The Four Components
Observation: What actually happened, described without evaluation. "You interrupted me three times in this meeting" is an observation. "You were being dismissive" is an evaluation. Observations are harder to dispute. Evaluations generate defensiveness.
Feeling: What the observation prompted in you, named accurately. Feelings are internal states (sad, frustrated, scared, confused, relieved). "I feel like you don't respect me" is not a feeling — it is a thought about another person's motivation. "I felt frustrated and embarrassed" is a feeling. This distinction matters because feelings are inarguable; thoughts about other people's inner states are disputed constantly.
Need: The underlying need connected to the feeling. All feelings point to needs that are either met or unmet. Frustration and embarrassment in a meeting interrupted three times might point to needs for respect, to be heard, or to have your contribution recognized. Naming the need moves the conversation from blame to what is actually wanted.
Request: A specific, actionable, present-tense request — not a demand. "I'd like to ask that in future meetings, if you want to add something while I'm speaking, you wait until I've finished" is a request. It is specific (what), situated (when), and behavioral (observable). Demands are non-negotiable; requests invite dialogue.
NVC in Practice for Communities
- Introduce NVC concepts gradually — the framework is more useful when it's part of shared language than when it's a one-person technique
- Model observations-and-feelings language in how you speak in community settings, without requiring others to adopt it immediately
- When someone makes an evaluative statement, gently translate: "When you say they were being manipulative, what did you actually observe? What happened?"
- When someone is stuck in a conflict, help them identify the need beneath the position: "What would getting that actually give you?"
Establishing Community Communication Agreements
Communication agreements are explicit, collectively-authored norms for how the community talks to and about each other. Unlike top-down rules, agreements are made together and therefore carry the legitimacy of consent.
Effective Agreements Are:
Behavioral, not aspirational. "We treat each other with respect" is aspirational. "We don't discuss absent members in ways we wouldn't say to their face" is behavioral. Behavioral agreements are observable and accountable; aspirational ones are not.
Made proactively, not reactively. Agreements made in the heat of conflict tend to be punitive or designed around specific incidents. Agreements made before conflict are more durable and more clearly about values than about individuals.
Owned by the community, not enforced by individuals. When an agreement is violated, the response is "we agreed to do X differently" — not "you broke my rule." This keeps accountability relational rather than hierarchical.
Revisable. Agreements should be periodically reviewed and updated. A community's needs change; agreements should change with them. Build in a review process from the start.
Agreement Categories to Consider
- Conflict: How do we raise concerns with each other? What do we do if direct conversation doesn't resolve something? Who do we bring in, and when?
- Decision-making: How are decisions made? What makes a decision legitimate? What happens when someone disagrees with a decision that's already been made?
- Absence: How do we handle it when a member isn't present for a conversation about them? What level of representation do absent members get?
- Privacy: What happens in community stays in community — specifically what? What can be shared outside the community and what can't?
- Social media: What about shared community life can be shared publicly? Does anyone get veto over content about them?
- Complaint and feedback: What's the right channel for different kinds of concerns? How do we give feedback to each other?
De-escalation Before the Breaking Point
When friction is clearly building but harm hasn't occurred yet, there is a window for de-escalation. This window closes when the situation becomes an incident.
Acknowledge the friction without dramatizing it. "I've noticed some tension between you two. I'm not asking you to resolve it today, but I wanted to name that I see it and I care." This normalizes the existence of friction and opens a door.
Separate the people before the conversation. If two people are heading toward a charged interaction, gently manage the logistics: don't seat them next to each other in tense meetings, don't ask them to collaborate on something high-stakes right now. Buy time for the nervous systems to settle.
Offer one-on-one space to each party. Before convening any joint conversation, understand each person's perspective separately. What are they actually concerned about? What do they need? This prevents a joint conversation from becoming a confrontation before there's any shared foundation.
Look for the structural cause. Many interpersonal conflicts have structural origins: unclear roles, ambiguous authority, unequal information, unfair workload distribution. If two people are in friction over who decides something, the problem may not be them — it may be that the decision-making structure is unclear. Address the structure and the conflict often resolves.
Lower the temperature with acknowledgment. Much of what looks like conflict is unacknowledged need. Publicly acknowledging a community member's contribution, difficulty, or perspective — before they've had to fight for it — often deflates the pressure that was building toward a demand.
Structural Health Practices
These practices build community conditions that reduce the generation of conflict over time.
Regular community health conversations. Not problem-solving meetings, but check-ins on how people are doing and what they're noticing. "What's working well? What feels hard? What do you need more of?" These conversations catch friction early and normalize naming it.
One-on-one steward check-ins. Stewards who regularly connect with community members one-on-one have early access to friction before it becomes a conflict. People will say things in private they won't raise in community settings.
Acknowledge and repair small injuries quickly. Communities that let small injuries go unacknowledged accumulate resentment. When something goes wrong in a low-stakes way, repair it quickly and explicitly: "I said something dismissive earlier. I didn't mean it that way and I'm sorry." This models that repair is normal, easy, and expected — which reduces the fear that making conflict visible will be catastrophic.
Distinguish the person from the pattern. When a community member repeatedly does something that causes friction, the conversation needs to address the pattern, not just the incident. Addressing only incidents allows the pattern to continue indefinitely.
Tend to the people who are quietest. In most communities, the loudest voices generate the most visible friction — but the members who go quiet are often carrying the most. Check in on quiet members, especially after a tense period.
What Conflict Prevention Is Not
It is not suppression. Telling people not to bring up concerns, smoothing over genuine disagreement for the sake of harmony, or creating a social norm that conflict is unwelcome — these are destructive, not preventive. They drive conflict underground where it becomes more toxic.
It is not premature resolution. Not all friction needs to be resolved. Sometimes two people simply have values differences or personality clashes that are manageable but not fixable. Prevention is about keeping unresolved friction from becoming harm, not forcing resolution before it's ready.
It is not neutrality. Some conflicts involve one person consistently treating others badly. The steward's role in prevention is not to remain equidistant from all parties — it is to interrupt patterns that are harmful to community members and to the community as a whole.
When harm has occurred and repair is needed, invoke the restorative-justice skill.
When a communication breakdown involves trauma responses, invoke the trauma-informed-care skill.
