 Conflicts and complaints are a constant in every human society, organisation and workplace setting. They're endemic to interpersonal relationships in general. As Charlie Chaplin once quipped, I am at peace with God, my conflict is with man. The ubiquity of interpersonal conflict means that learning how to deal with hurts, harms and hostilities in a constructive, non-violent way is one of the most important life skills anyone can acquire and possibly one of the rarest in existence. Few people do conflict well. Most of us do it very badly, even most of us restorative practitioners do conflict very badly for a host of psychological, emotional and even neurological reasons. Conflict is typically experienced as a source of threat to our sense of security or identity or equilibrium and when we feel threatened our brains tend to default to one of three primitive survival responses. Those are fight, flight or freeze. But when we respond to conflict by fighting back, the conflict usually escalates. When we run away from it, the conflict's causes remain behind and become more entrenched and when we freeze it's a sign that we have already been consumed by the conflict and overwhelmed by it leaving us powerless and alone. Not only do individuals struggle to cope, most organisations also deal with conflict poorly either by ignoring it, which is a kind of freeze response, or by indulging one of the parties, which is a form of flight from the pain of confrontation or by relying heavily on adversarial or coercive measures to stamp it out, a sort of fighting fire with fire. Coping well with conflict then requires finding an alternative to the instinctive fight, flight, freeze options and I want to suggest in this brief talk that the principles and practices of restorative justice offer such an alternative. Used wisely, restorative approaches can help both individuals and organisational systems to deal with conflicts and complaints in a healthy and constructive way. For human services organisations and professional bodies, there are two main sources of complaints and conflicts. One is from employees within the organisation who complain about the conduct or performance of a fellow employee or a manager or some feature of the organisational system. These complaints relate to the internal relationships in the workplace and for simplicity we could simply call them employment or workplace complaints. The other source is from customers or clients or stakeholders outside the organisation who complain about the actions of someone within the organisation or about the performance of the unit as a whole. These grievances relate to the institution's external relationships and again for simplicity we could simply call them customer or consumer complaints. When it comes to the nature of the complaints or grievances themselves, these fall into three broad categories. First there are complaints about personal misconduct or personal conduct. This is where the complainant feels they have been mistreated in some way by another person perhaps by bullying or harassment or lack of recognition or gossiping or discrimination or rudeness or exploitation or overwork or something similar. Second there are complaints about professional misconduct, allegations that practitioners have failed to uphold the professional or ethical standards required of their vocation. Most professional bodies are under statutory duty to investigate such complaints carefully to ensure that the practitioner is fit for practice and if not is suspended from practice either temporarily for remedial training or permanently. The third category of complaints is complaints about the delivery of services by the workplace or by the organisation or its workforce. The issue here is not the safety or competence of the personnel but the quality or timeliness or expense or accessibility or cultural appropriateness or something similar of the service provided. Whatever the source of the complaints or whatever the nature of the complaints, they represent the existence of conflict that needs to be resolved satisfactorily if the organisation and its workplace is to flourish. Most large organisations in almost all professional associations and regulatory bodies have formal disputes and disciplinary processes for handling consumer complaints and collegial grievances, although they're usually two quite distinct procedures. Now this is a good and necessary thing and there will always be a need for official investigative and disciplinary tribunals but there are two main problems with the way that many complaints systems currently operate. The first is the problem of overload. Complaints regimes all around the world are straining under the weight of increasing demand. People seem more inclined than ever to lodge complaints about how they have been treated or the service they have received and we might speculate as to why that is but it is a fact. At the same time we know that formal complaints represent only a tiny fraction of the actual upsets and distresses that people experience in life. Survey show for example that vastly more people consider themselves to be victims of bullying or harassment at work than actually report it to management. So the reportage is just the tip of a large iceberg. This leads to the second problem that afflicts current complaints regimes. They often fail to deliver the parties a meaningful sense of justice. Both procedural justice, a sense of a fair and respectful process and substantive justice, a fair outcome. When people feel compelled to complain it is usually because they feel they have been treated unfairly in some way. Their grievance has both a material dimension something tangible has been done to them or denied to them and a moral or psychological dimension. Their innate sense of justice has been violated. They feel demeaned or devalued by what has occurred. Formal investigative procedures typically focus on the material issue on the facts of the case but they do not always provide the aggrieved party with a sense of having what restorative theorists call their justice needs met or with the opportunity to discuss the future shape of their relationship with the other party. And this is where some form of restorative engagement has a special role to play. By restorative engagement I mean a way of addressing the problem that is informed by the values, principles and practices of restorative justice. Supremely characteristic of a restorative approach is a concern to address harms and needs through dialogical inclusion rather than to rule on the rights and wrongs through detached adjudication and to do all that is necessary to promote relational recovery and the repair of mutual trust and respect. There are I think three main levels of application for a restorative approach is in a workplace setting. The first is in strengthening teamwork and organizational culture. The second is in resolving interpersonal conflicts between colleagues and workmates. And the third is in dealing with formal complaints and grievances. Now because of time I only want to comment briefly on the first level of application that of creating a healthy workplace environment and strengthening teamwork and collaboration. Let me just have a minute. When I'm under pressure, my mouth always goes dry. I have one minute left. I'm just going to tell you one project I came across recently which I thought is a really interesting way of illustrating the way these principles actually are beginning to play out right across the board. Five years ago Google embarked on project Aristotle an initiative to determine what makes the perfect team. After trawling through 50 years of academic research and analyzing hundreds of Google teams, the research has concluded that the key factor that distinguishes good teams from dysfunctional teams is the norms governing how teammates treat one another. While there is a huge diversity in how good teams operate, they identified two qualities that all good teams share. The first is, and this is their language, equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking. However group discussions are structured in good teams, at the end of the day each person has spoken for roughly the same amount of time as others. If one person or a small number do all the speaking collective intelligence declines markedly. The second characteristic of good groups is that their members have, again their terms, average social sensitivity. That is they have the social and emotional skills to intuit how others in the group are feeling based on non-verbal cues. They share personal stories with one another, they express emotions and they are sensitive to the moods and needs of others. The combination of these two traits creates what organizational psychologists call psychological safety. That is a shared confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. A team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves. Google's data indicated that psychological safety more than anything else is fundamental to making teams function well. And they decided that developing the soft skills to enable people to have the sense of psychological safety was actually fundamental to their business success. Now if that's true in Silicon Valley, how much more is it true of the countless work environments represented in this room where researchers are telling us we now spend 50% more time collaborating with one another at work than we used to just two decades ago. And it's into that sort of collaborative environment that I think restorative practices have their contribution to much. Thank you.