Conflict is part of the human exerience – it’s baked into our DNA – and lasting solutions require resolving conflict. Here you can read the best information on conflict resolution strategies, hand curated by our experts and trainers in public solutions. People don’t always agree, and resolving those disagreements is key to what we do in public participation. Resolving conflicts takes a lot of “soft skills,” more so than just facts. Data rarely changes someone’s mind. To do that you need humility, respect, authenticity and transparency, qualities that are necessary in dealing with the public for your government, organization, or business. These are the newsworthy articles that we have found contribute to this conversation on conflict resolution. Enjoy, dear reader.
The Facebook page titled ‘Stop Mandatory Vaccinations’ has more than 140,000 followers. These are people who may have meant well in trying to learn what’s best for their children, but have reached dangerous conclusions that put other children at serious and unnecessary risk. Social connections – meaning social media, trust, ...
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Marketers play on our emotions and sensibilities. People who choose to go out of their way to buy free range eggs do so because at some inner emotional level they can picture that proud, independent chicken majestically loping across the wide open prairie under azure skies with a big happy ...
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Once again, the following article feels like it focuses on internal business problems, but the fact is that it works in just about any kind of issue. Whether you’re working with difficult people in your office or facilitating a public meeting full of upset people, many of the principles are ...
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This is a story about water allocation in Saskatchewan. Unless you happen to be a water policy geek, this probably sounds like a snoozer, but bear with me. This is actually a story about empathy and a lesson learned from a seemingly unlikely source.
Creativity, adaptability, persuasion and empathy are ...
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Let’s get to the point: truth and reason are frequently losing. Your measured evaluation, research and reams of data presented in an objective way to an increasingly skeptical and mostly disinterested public, intended to appeal to their logic and common good, is competing with a steady diet of electronic and ...
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Working with people and serving the public good isn’t for the faint of heart, especially these days; it takes true grit. That sounds like a funny description for what many people consider to be a soft skill, but it’s most certainly the case. Frankly, it’s easy to become discouraged when ...
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I belong to a motorcycle gang. I’m also in a bicycle club. I never go to the meetings, I don’t actually know many of the other respective members, and I don’t usually see them unless we meet on the road, but we have ...
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We talk about (re)building trust in government a lot in this newsletter and it will be interesting to watch the long-term reputation ramifications of the partial government shutdown – still underway, as of this writing. Public trust in government continues to erode and increasingly permeates down into state and local ...
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I spent most of my earlier career years interviewing lots of different kinds of people about lots of topics, which was fertile training ground for the kind of work that we now do. So if you’re interested in getting better at drawing the values, needs and interests from people that ...
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