A new multi award-winning Australian drama, released last week, aims to take its audience inside the claustrophobic, controversial and often explosive world of conflict resolution in the workplace.

Adapted and directed by Michael Rymer (Angel Baby, Queen of the Damned, In Too Deep), Face to Face is based on the play of the same name by playwright and screenwriter David Williamson, who was inspired by transcripts from actual restorative justice conferences.

These conferences, on which the play was originally based, were facilitated by managing director of ProActive ReSolutions, John McDonald (pictured), whose character is portrayed by Matthew Newton in the film.

The story is based around Wayne, a young construction worker (played by Luke Ford), who purposefully rams into the back of his boss's car (played by Vince Colosimo). Rather than dealing with the issue in a courtroom, a face-to-face restorative justice conference in the central setting of a room takes place. This involves the offending young man as he faces his victims, workmates and mother, who have their own issues and secrets.

McDonald said that conflict in the workplace is typically handled by being avoided. "We avoid it and hope it will go away," he told Human Capital. "So when it's low-level disrespectful behavior, with poor interactions or poor communication, we just tend to ignore it - which is fine a lot of the time because it does go away. But there are times when it doesn't."

While most organisations have some sort of grievance process in place, which typically take a rights-based approach to resolving the difficulties between people, McDonald explained that these are very technical; they try to identify and isolate the facts and decide who did what to who and then punish the person who caused the upset. "I believe grievance processes are well named because they tend to generate further grievance with people," he said. "Conflicts are qualitatively very difficult experiences for us as human beings - they are more about how we feel than they are about what happened. If you try to isolate the facts it's really like throwing fuel on the fire because we all see things very differently."

An alternative approach is known as conferencing. This conferencing process is fast becoming the leading technique in dealing with long term, simmering conflict and highly volatile and destructive behaviours and conduct issues, particularly in the workplace.

The sessions, which see victims and perpetrators in the justice system, or colleagues in the workplace brought together to face one another, were developed in Australia by McDonald and his team over many years of resolving conflict in hostile situations.

Rather than imposing a solution on the group that could exacerbate the conflict, conferencing allows the group of affected people to come together, confront their difficulties and develop a plan to reconcile their differences.

Participants benefit from the opportunity to say things to each other that they have either avoided saying or have said hurtfully rather than helpfully. The group then decides together what needs to be done in order to behave constructively towards each other.

McDonald and his team spend hours preparing for these sessions by individually interviewing those affected to determine their understanding of the conflict. They then facilitate a session where everyone is heard in terms of what has happened and how they have been affected. Together as a group they commit to a plan of how to make things better. This is then followed up with by the facilitator to ensure that the Conference Agreement is being implemented.

"The big fault with the way we handle situations where things go wrong between people at work is we ask two questions: who did it and what do we have to do to them," McDonald said. "It starts when we are parents. Then at school, teachers do the same thing. In the workplace, managers feel they have to do the same: do the investigation, establish the facts, punish someone or dock their pay or whatever. It assumes that a small group of people in authority know what is best for the group. However, conflicts between people in the workplace are often long-standing, complex, messy. You simply can't win if you try to answer those two questions.

"The conference asks different sets of questions: it simply asks what's happened. You can't ignore the fact that people have behaved badly or let the side down. But then you ask what the impact of this has been, and what needs to be done differently so we don't go there again. It casts the experience as an opportunity to accept some responsibility but also to learn from it."