It is common for our responses to conflict to be organised around the desire to bring security and healing to those involved, and thus to focus on resolving conflict. This seems obvious only because it is a given for most people that conflict is problematic.

The damage - to lives, to relationships, to the well being of the community - that the violent expression of conflict can inflict may support this view of conflict as something dangerous, that must be controlled.

But the violent expression is not the conflict itself. And it is an ineffective means of expression in part exactly because it seeks to control, to impose, to force.

Restorative Circles take therefore a significantly different, though no less dynamic and engaged, approach. In response to a violent or criminal act, a broken agreement or crisis in trust, a moment of significant change, they ask: what can be learnt here, both in terms of understanding what happened and its context, and in terms of new, life-serving behaviour?

Restorative Circles engage non-adversarily with the complex and often intense reactions to what was done. They seek to create the conditions in which the conflict itself - attempting to express itself through painful choices, and often masked by them - reveals its message. They then seed new action.

One consequence of this is to see conflict not as something that needs to be changed or managed, but as the expression of crucial feedback about personal and communal well being.

In this short clip from an introduction to Restorative Systems, some angles of this sometimes surprising distinction are investigated.