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Introduction:
Herb Kelman talks about the role of brainstorming in problem solving workshops.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Brainstorming in Problem Solving Workshops
Herb Kelman
Professor Emeritus, Program on Negotiation, Harvard University
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The next
phase, the next element of the agenda, is discussion of constraints, which are
extremely important, the political constraints, and the two sides need each
other to understand that, the public opinion on the other side. This is
something that the parties in conflict generally don't understand. They
understand their own public opinion very well, they know what the constraints
are, but they kind of seem to think that the other can operate without
constraints. I prefer not to do too much of that in the earlier phases, like in
the joint thinking phase, because this is sort of consistent with the whole logic of
brainstorming, you don't want people to chop off potentially creative
ideas right at the start. I don't want them to say that this will never work. I
say lets leave that for the moment and see if we in this room can agree on
something, and come up with a formula. Then we ask if it can work, if not, why not,
and what can we do about it.
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