Our Story

Why Do We Do What We Do?

We believe to reach their full potential, People, Leaders, and Organizations must become conflict competent.

From Our Founder:

I have spent more than two decades helping people and organizations navigate conflict better by harnessing its positive effects: strengthening relationships, sparking creativity, and encouraging collaboration. After building a successful mediation practice and witnessing all of the positive effects of changing the approach to conflict in the legal field, I knew mediation concepts could also bring positive results to more complex conflict navigation inside companies and organizations and could also be leveraged to develop courageous, effective leaders. My path grew quickly and organically from simply mediating cases between individual parties to applying my conflict navigation skills to more complicated task of working within organizations and developing individuals, leaders, and groups’ conflict competence.

What Do We Do?

Empowering People, Leaders & Organizations to Make Peace with Conflict & Leverage Its Positive Power

After over two decades of mediating hundreds of cases and working with individuals and organizations struggling with conflict, four truths are clear.

First, a shocking percentage of people, leaders, and organizations are in denial that conflict is inevitable.

Second, people are not naturally equipped to do conflict well, instead they are hardwired with natural reflexes to go into drama or worse yet, avoidance.

Third, this combination of being caught off guard by conflict and lacking the skills to navigate it gets people and organizations “stuck” so they can’t move forward, costing them productivity, relationships and countless missed opportunities.

However, the fourth truth is where the gold is buried. When people and organizations make peace with the truth that conflict is inevitable and get intentional in their approach by learning new conflict skills, they are empowered to harness all of conflict’s positive possibilities: strengthened relationships, engagement, creativity and innovation, collaboration, and understanding. They become “conflict competent”.

How Do We Do It?

Customized Meditation, Facilitation, Coaching & Development Techniques

To achieve our mission, I have organically surrounded myself with like minded individuals around the country, people who share the same or complimentary missions. They include experts in decision making, organizational development, mediation, conflict consulting, and behavioral psychology, people who I often call on to work with me to provide clients with customized solutions. These colleagues are not “partners” in the traditional sense. They have their own projects and businesses, however they are allies in the mission of creating “conflict competence” in individuals and organizations. We pull resources, research, and experience from multiple disciplines to provide our clients with customized solutions in mediation, conflict navigation, organizational and leadership development.

It no longer made sense to physically house this work in a law firm that is steeped in the traditional competitive, defensive approach to conflict. The Conflict Lab is a space dedicated to this important work with every inch designed to help cultivate peoples’ finest thinking during mediations, facilitations, trainings, team building and coaching sessions. The completed space is bright, airy, and filled with comfortable furniture. There is a rooftop deck for when some fresh air is needed and a fully stocked kitchen to provide some warm bread to break together. We even have the “creature comforts” of a lap dog provided by our mascot, Conflit (“Flea”) the French Bulldog.

So we present The Conflict Lab, the end result of this more than 20 year journey, a place for people and organizations to make peace with conflict and start having the conversations that matter most. I hope you will join us!

– Founder, Selina J. Shultz, Esq., LL.M.