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Jim Stansbury
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Who We Are
Stansbury Resolutions provides facilitation and mediation services that avoid or resolve conflicts. Our clients include government agencies, private companies and not-for-profit organizations throughout Florida and beyond. Our practice reflects a watershed view that extends from upstream opportunity capture and conflict avoidance to downstream conflict resolution. While both dimensions are worthwhile, we prefer to be engaged upstream in facilitated processes where problems can still be avoided or where they have not become rigidly entrenched. Our services here cover broad visioning and
strategic planning; local projects, budgeting and policies, and consensus-building skill development.
We also work downstream as mediators on large, complex, multi-party public disputes. Mediation addresses conflicts that have reached impasse, offering a final opportunity for all parties to reach a resolution of their own making before going to adjudication. Our mediation services usually involve multiple communities and agencies facing permitting or compliance issues such as environmental management and community planning.
Stakeholder and professional collaboration produces agreement
Our facilitation and mediation
services share important principles:
- Both offer self-determination, in which the participants have the opportunity and responsibility to share knowledge, identify problems, set priorities, visualize what success looks like, and identify actions.
- They both emphasize collaboration, which offers the most powerful win/win outcome when compared to competition, accommodation, avoidance or compromise.
- They also require the active presence of a professional neutral who is impartial, experienced and adaptable. Someone who can understand and distill what is being said to capture all inputs and feed them back for verification and enhancement. Most groups or parties cannot self-author and self-facilitate at the same time. It is conflicting for one person to be both a direct participant and a neutral. The result can be heavy-handed domination or the loss of that person’s knowledge, ideas and action to the group’s thinking.
- We do not employ conventional processes that start with professionals and experts before engaging affected parties. Instead, we engage stakeholders at the earliest stage, generating distinctive ideas that build toward a shared result. People affected by policy, development or other actions have many opinions, preferences and ideas that need to be heard and assessed. They also need to contribute to the definition of opportunities and problems that will be addressed.
- Professional staff and advisors also have important roles in a collaborative process. They provide objective information and act as a supporting resource. They have experience and talents that add value and test ideas. They identify factors that may have been overlooked, and provide evaluations of stakeholder ideas, as well as their own concepts.
- To us, it is not a question of whether public or professional input is the more important – we believe both are needed because neither the stakeholders nor the experts know everything that needs to be understood. Ultimately, the sequence of inputs is the most critical factor in success, when effective, facilitated collaboration results in proposals that have both public support and technical credibility.