Conflict Strategists

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

We divide the MPP roles into two large categories: strategists and actors.  This distinction is based on the fundamental distinction between right-brained thinking and left-brained thinking.  The right brain looks at the "big picture," and determines what needs to be done — this is the strategy side of the brain.  The left brain tells the body what to do in response to what the right side "sees." So these are the actors.  We argue that the same principle applies to societies, with their complex specialization and division of labor systems. The people and organizations we call "strategists" specialize in right brain, "big picture," thinking, trying to understand as much of what's going on in the whole system as they can, and then developing ideas about what needs to be done to accomplish a particular goal.  The left-brained, "detail people" are the people we call "actors" who actually do the work.

Included in the Conflict Strategist category are Conflict Lookouts who alert society to dangers (especially, conflict-related dangers) that they believe society needs to urgently address. Other strategists are "Complexifiers" who help us deal with the immense scale and complexity of modern society. The last category of Strategists are what we call "Democracy Firsters"— people and organizations which argue that we must address the short-comings of democracy, and the conflicts that are pulling democracies apart, before we can use those democracies, or indeed, any other approach, to successfully address our many other substantive problems. The first two subcategories (conflict lookouts and complexifiers) have several subcategories under them that are explained in the links below. 

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