Applying Conflict Coaching to Handle Vietnamese Family’s Conflicts

Conflict coaching is one-on-one conflict resolution process involving one conflict party and a coach that assists conflicting parties to improve their understanding of a conflict and cope with their dispute in the most effective way.1 This process has become more popular in developed countries to deal with workplace conflict and family disputes. There are some challenges in applying this process for those who come from high-context culture country like Vietnam due to the differences among financial condition, perception, communication styles, legal system, customs, religion and gender. This article presents different conflict coaching processes as well as the possibility and the importance of implementing conflict coaching in Vietnam by analyzing the values of conflict coaching process.

Narrative Conflict Coaching

Conflict coaching is a relatively new concept, derived from the domain of executive coaching. The concept has gained a foothold in the conflict resolution literature. There have been references made to a narrative practice of conflict coaching but it has not been articulated as fully as it might be. Here we seek to describe such a practice in relation to Foucault’s concept of the care of the self and Deleuze’s concept of the event. We also outline Deleuze’s approach to the reading of time as chronos and aion and show how these different readings might be put to use. A set of guidelines for narrative conflict coaching are proposed and transcribed conversation is provided as a case study to illustrate the process in action. In this conversation, the conflict coach asks questions which lead the client through an exploration of the series of events that make up the conflict story, the externalizing and deconstructing of this conflict story, and the opening of a counter story as a basis for the client’s preferred future conduct in relation to the conflict.