Consensus, agreements that people can live with, is typically the goal in finding group solutions. You need to bring differing positions to common interests. Without consensus, projects are frequently roadblocked, conflicts grow, and relationships are broken. Existing conflicts require the need to bring the splitting factions back in to alignment. For your consideration, we have collected our latest perspectives and news that we have found to be useful on the subject of consensus. Please read them all here. And if you don’t agree with us, we’d like to hear about that too – please drop a note, we’ll find consensus.
Lots of contentious issues bring Google-Experts out of the woodwork; people who claim to have counter facts because they’ve “done their own research” on the subject. It’s absolutely true that people who are affected by projects or initiatives do indeed bring wisdom and oftentimes ground-truthed knowledge that is really valuable ...
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Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.” Those of us in the engagement and consensus business deal with tough people and situations for a living. Most regular human beings get to carry grudges all the way to their gastroenterologist’s office; we don’t have that ...
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Making publicly acceptable decisions in a healthy democracy almost always comes down to building consensus through some kind of negotiation. And negotiation is a skill that most people can develop and improve. It starts with learning everything you can about the needs of whomever you’re negotiating with, getting the ...
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Any work that you’re doing with the public has to start with defining the problem or challenge that you’re trying to solve. This means that there needs to be a common, agreed upon understanding and belief among everyone that a problem exists in the first place, and exactly what that ...
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Research and empirical evidence suggests that just about everyone agrees that the way we do campaigns and elections in most democracies could do with a serious rethink and overhaul. The trouble is that there’s no real consensus on what and how things should be improved. Some of the best public ...
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As a confessed news junkie, I have learned to moderate my habit out of the need to maintain some level of sanity. I have friends who might challenge the sanity part, but they’re the ones who drink cheap beer. I digress. It’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of ...
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People tend to run from conflict like they’re fleeing the scene of a double homicide. Truth is that most negotiations feel like a conflict to people so we tend to avoid learning much about it. But negotiation just doesn’t have to be as contentious as we think it is. ...
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Giving somebody the business is a term from the old Leave it to Beaver TV series. (Wally Cleaver) “Boy, Beaver, wait’ll the guys find out you were hanging around with a girl. They’ll really give you the business.”
Arguing just for the sake of arguing and giving people a hard ...
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Have too many of us lost the ability to think critically? Maybe. One of the toughest challenges that we face is finding and agreeing on common, evidence-based facts. We’ll never agree on the truth until we can do that. Public engagement requires a collective, common understanding of information – thus ...
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Civil, open minded conversations feel like relics of days gone by. People are welded to positions, opinions and beliefs in ways that are more steadfast and strident than in the past. The work that we all do is typically about pushing beyond just those hard and fast postures to explore ...
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