Creative Conflict Engagement | Amity Conflict Specialists

Seeing familiar dynamics differently

The creative process becomes a lens through which people can see familiar interpersonal dynamics differently. Creative Conflict Engagement creates opportunities to notice how people contribute, respond to others, navigate uncertainty or constraints, encounter different perspectives, and adapt when things do not unfold as expected.

The creative process is only part of the work. Through facilitated reflection and collaborative sense-making, participants examine what happened, hear how others experienced or interpreted it, and consider what those observations reveal about familiar patterns in how they communicate, collaborate, and engage difference.

The resulting insights can then be connected to everyday organizational life. In some forms of Creative Conflict Engagement, the creative work also leaves behind a tangible artifact that can carry the experience and its meaning beyond the original interaction.

The working principle

Express > Impress

No artistic expertise is required, and none is being assessed. Creative expression here is a way of thinking together, not a performance to be judged.

Forms this can take

Collaborative visual making
Photography
Writing and storytelling
Music and performance
Building and making
Improvisation

Creative expression is broader than the arts. The right form depends on the group and what it is working through.

What this can look like

Collaborative Canvas public/images/collaborative-canvas.jpg

Collaborative Canvas

What happens when individual contributions become part of something no one person controls?

Participants create a shared abstract artwork one contribution at a time. Working within a limited palette and a few simple parameters, each person encounters a canvas that has already been changed by those who came before and makes choices about what to add, where to add it, and how to respond to what is already there.

There is no predetermined image to reproduce and no artistic expertise is needed. As the canvas develops, individual contributions overlap, interact, and change the context for what comes next.

Once the painting is complete, facilitated reflection invites participants to examine the experience together. What influenced their choices? Where did they hesitate? How did they respond to constraints or to other people’s contributions? What happened when something they added was changed by what came later? Through collaborative sense-making, the group can explore connections between what happened on the canvas and familiar dynamics around contribution, difference, adaptation, control, and shared ownership.

The finished canvas belongs to the group. Displayed in their shared environment, it can serve as an ongoing reminder of both the experience and the meaning participants created together.

The creative form can change. The purpose does not.

Creative Conflict Engagement is not tied to a particular medium. The form is chosen for what it can help a group notice, express, explore, or understand together.

Photovoice

Participants use photography and facilitated reflection to surface perspectives and experiences that may be difficult to access through conversation alone. Images become a starting point for dialogue, perspective-taking, and deeper exploration of what people are seeing and experiencing.

Shared creative work

Collaborative visual projects, music, performance, and other forms of making give people something to create and navigate together. The process can make familiar dynamics around participation, influence, difference, decision-making, and connection easier to see and discuss.

Creative engagement in community

Creative work can extend beyond a workshop or facilitated conversation. Participatory projects can invite broader communities into reflection, storytelling, relationship-building, and constructive engagement with the issues that shape their shared environment.

Grounded in practice and scholarship

Creative Conflict Engagement draws on more than two decades of conflict practice and a body of scholarship exploring how participatory and creative methods can expand the ways people engage conflict.

Birthe Reimers’ research has examined Photovoice as a tool for peacebuilding, knowledge exchange, systemic feedback, and conflict engagement; the Comprehensive Conflict Engagement Model as a bridge between conflict theory and practice; and participatory approaches designed to strengthen connection and belonging within communities.

Her published work spans community peacebuilding and organizational Ombuds practice, including research in Conflict Resolution Quarterly, the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, and the Journal of the International Ombuds Association.

Explore Birthe’s research and publications

Also explore Ombuds Advisory

Wondering what this could look like for your team?

Tell us what the group is working through and we can talk about what would fit.

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