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.
For those of us who love ice hockey, ’tis the season! As a fan of ice hockey and my work, it struck me that a hockey match is kind of like a public meeting that, if facilitated properly, can end up being a satisfying experience for most. Like many public ...
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The guy running the project was honest; brutally honest in fact. He said he’d done his time in the military, took his degree, his rank and his time in and hooked on with a federal agency that he barely knew existed before he joined it. He was interested in getting ...
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These are challenging times for us public participation practitioners. Our life’s work is conflict management and dispute resolution, plus adjusting to the various conflict resolution styles. To support this, we’ve built some nice, neat boxes that contain tools for working with people in most of the ‘real world’ situations encountered ...
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What is active listening? Many years ago when I was a callow public involvement apprentice, I took a course from one of our icons, Jim Creighton, the founding president of The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), on Active Listening. It was so intimidating on a personal level, ...
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Conflict resolution strategies and conflict resolution techniques aren’t very difficult to understand, but they’re often challenging to implement because of our own egos. Sometimes this means we’re sweeping problems under the rug or downplaying the situation at hand–even covering it up. However, executing an effective conflict resolution strategy means we ...
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Of all of the conflict resolution activities that we have at our disposal – and there are a lot of them – this one is probably the granddaddy of them all.
Do you feel like I do – not only don’t people listen, but most don’t know how to listen? ...
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There are many conflict resolution techniques that can be used in a variety of circumstances. A prior blog post discussed conflict resolution activities that we’re going to expand on a bit here....
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We’re in the people business. So we like to observe people. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the incredible experience of watching two small boys learn how to deal with the world and with each other. And it hit me: Yikes – people start out as children! ...
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People deal with conflict in a variety of ways, therefore you need different conflict resolution strategies.
We at Participation Company spend a lot of time talking about conflict resolution through active listening and training people to resolve conflict using a variety of strategies. This is how the Thomas-Kilmann measurement instrument ...
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It’s understandable for people to want to find those big, hairy conflict resolution skills or ideas that will instantly fix the problem that they’re having on their public project....
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