Gini Nelson’s Engaging Conflicts

My apologies for not posting recently. I’ve been working on a new project related to a third party’s social community website that has not gone public yet. As soon as it is public, I’ll share my involvement with the project and ask your suggestions and help for its success. One of my goals, as some of you know, is to popularize conflict management, by which I mean facilitating the novice public to think more about and handle better the daily conflicts that, well, we have to engage in daily life. Again, I thank Bernie Mayer for stating the question and issue so clearly in his 2004 book Beyond Neutrality: Confronting the Crisis in Conflict Resolution. As he asks there, why aren’t the public beating down the doors of mediators (hmmm, is public singular or plural?), and how can we present the benefits of better conflict management to the public, so that they will?

I’ve been studying those questions since before reading his book, and am still doing so. I started with the “why don’t they?” question, and presented my thoughts about the relevant mix of brain hard-wiring, individual psychological innate and learned personality components, social psychology-context factors, and other relevant factors in a fun and well-received workshop (The New Brain, Descartes’ Error, and Cultural Biology: Applying the New Brain Studies and Psychological Type Theories to Conflict Management Practice) at the 2005 ACR conference in Minneapolis. In 2006 I put on my own conference with Nan Waller Burnett– the first Rocky Mountain ADR Retreat: Creating Peace In and Through the ADR Practitioner, and started the Engaging Conflicts blog. Nan, a dynamic facilitator and teacher of ADR, continued our conference experience in January 2007 with the second Rocky Mountain retreat, as I will continue it in September 2007 with the first Santa Fe Conference and Retreat, Being Human: Exploring Our Blind Spots and Biases (the signup link is in the column to the right). (My heartfelt thanks to Prof. John Lande for letting me use the Being Human phrase from one of his recent articles that I posted about here.) I love these things– I love speaking with my peers, attorneys and mediators already at ease with the abstract concepts relating to conflict and conflict management. We are experts with experience and skills that novices don’t have. Therein lies one of the key factors in the second issue– how do we talk to the novice public about conflict and handling it better in ways that make sense to them and are meaningful to them? I study this, too.
One of the best answers I’ve found is that we suffer from what Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their new book, Made to Stick (as in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point “stickiness”) call “the curse of knowledge.” I read the book last week, and will write more about it tomorrow.