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Constructive Conflict Guide > Civic Knowledge and Skills That We Can Use to Help Ourselves and Our Society More Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict > Stripping Away "Overlay" Problems That Make Conflicts Appear More Intractable Than They Really Are
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BI Article
Consensus Building
Consensus building is used to settle conflicts that involve multiple parties and complicated issues. The approach seeks to transform adversarial confrontations into a cooperative search for information and solutions that meet all parties' interests and needs.
BI Article
Focusing on Commonalities
Andrew Masondo wrote, "Understand the differences; act on the commonalities." This essay examines how that can be done.
BI Article
Susan Carpenter and Heidi Burgess Reflect on Susan's 40+ Years' Experience Doing Consensus Building
Susan Carpenter has been working in the field of collaborative problem solving for over 40 years. She talked about the changes she's seen over those years, and the time-tested approaches she has come to rely on for success.
BI Article
Larry Susskind in the Negotiation Journal: Initiating Collaboration in the Midst of a Standoff
Breakthrough Collaboration is a strategy developed by the Consensus Building Institute to create "ripeness" for negotiation when none exists.
BI Article
Applying conflict resolution insights to hyper-polarization: "When will (we) ever learn?"
Long-time conflict resolution scholar and practitioner, Carrie Menkel-Meadow reflects on the many causes of hyper-polarization and suggests new metaphors and approaches for replacing it with constructive, collaborative problem solving.
BI Article
Martin Carcasson Talks with Heidi and Guy Burgess about Wicked Problems, Polarization, Deliberation, and Democracy
In an hour-long interview, Martin talks about the "wicked problem mindset" as a way to diminish polarization, and encourage collaboration, creativity, and healthy democracy, at least at the local level.
BI Article
Larry Susskind: Consensus Building in the Age of Trump
Listening to or caring about "the other side" has become much less common in "the age of Trump," but that just makes the roles of neutrals all the more important.
BI Article
Finding Common Ground / Constructive Addressing Differences: a Discussion Guide
An exercise to help people find common ground where none seems to exist and constructively address remaining differences.
BI Article
Julia Roig and James Savage: Exploring Narrative Practices for Broad-based Movements in Contexts of Democratic Decline
The narratives we engage and deploy shape our world. In the face of rising authoritarianism, what stories and tactics drive collaboration within and between movements?
BI Article
Rachel Kleinfeld and Shamil Idriss on Polarization, Philanthropic Plurality, Social Justice, and Democracy
Those seeking to improve democracy should hold themselves accountable for advancing both peace and justice through collaborative action to meet common goals.
BI Article
Richard Harwood Talks With Heidi Burgess About His "New Civic Path"
Heidi Burgess talks with Richard Harwood, President and Founder of the Harwood Institute about how community members can work together to overcome even their most difficult problems
BI Article
Jacob Bornstein Shares His Strategies for Building Consensus, Even Under the Most Difficult Circumstances
Jacob Bornstein gives a master class on how to assemble and facilitate a collaborative process over very contentious issues -- and easier ones.
BI Article
Jay Rothman: Systematic Collaborative Visioning for Conflict Resolution Action and Evaluation in the Post-Covid19 World
A summary of the conclusions of an action evaluation workshop examing the conflict field's response to COVID.
Subsidiary Folders
Identify Goals, Values, Interests, and Needs
Each of these concepts is different, but understanding all of them is important before one undertakes a negotiation or other conflict resolution effort.
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Compromise and Negotiation
In political conflicts today, compromise is often seen as "selling out," and bad to do. But negotiating win-win solutions is often possible, and if not, making compromises that allow all sides to get much of what they want and need is almost always better than protracted conflicts with destructive consequences for all.
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Expand Networks
In complex conflicts, there are usually many people, interests, issues, and organizations involved. The more you can reach out to, learn about, and potentially work with others, the more likely you will be able to achieve some, if not all, of your goals.
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Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership focuses on shared problem analysis, problem solving, and decision making. It involves actively engaging representatives of all stakeholders in the decision making process, communicating openly, and valuing diverse perspectives.
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Overview of Third-Party Approaches
"Thid party" approaches, such as facilitation, mediation, and arbitration and even adjudication, use an outside "third" party to come in to help disputants process their conflict more constructively and, ideally, come up with a decision on how to resolve it.
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Collaboration Problems
The best decisions usually come out of collaborations where people with different expertise and viewpoints collaborate to evaluate problems and develop solutions that will meet the needs of people of all political stripes. But hyper-polarization makes such collaboration very difficult. Opponents don't trust each other, they don't believe each other, and they seldom are willing to sit down with the other side to listen and learn.
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Promote Collaborative Problem Solving
Much of the success of democratic systems stems from their ability to identify shared problems, assess the strengths and weaknesses of possible solutions, work through differing opinions and priorities, and reach workable compromises.
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Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership focuses on shared problem analysis, problem solving, and decision making. It involves actively engaging representatives of all stakeholders in the decision making process, communicating openly, and valuing diverse perspectives.
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Collaborative Problem Solvers
The complexities of modern society make it very difficult to negotiate agreements on ways to solve problems that wisely and equitably balance competing interests. Collaborative problem solvers can help us do this.
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Consensus Builders
Consensus Builders go beyond the negotiation and mediation of relatively small scale disputes to help those involved in complex, multi-party disputes develop a broad consensus on ways of handling complex clusters of interlocking issues that affect large numbers of people and involve multiple interest groups.
Colleague Activities
Adversarial Collaboration Project
An especially promising project that helps those involved in scientific debates work through their differences in a spirit of collaborative learning.
Colleague Activities
Consensus Building Institute Resources
Another "if it being done it must be possible" story -- an extensive collection of resources explaining how people are successfully collaborating despite deep differences.
Colleague Activities
Keystone Habits for a Collaborative Learning Culture
"Keystone habits" have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization or system. They can jump start collaboration.
Colleague Activities
The Horizons Project: Sharing a United Front
Social change agents need to build a united front by fosterning a shared understanding of the threat, collaborating across difference, and forming dense networks.
Colleague Activities
We are Not Divided: Reasons to Be Cheerful Project
A good news media outlook posting stories about people using collaboration and other conflict resolution strategies to come together to solve problems.
Colleague Activities
ABA Cornerstones of Democracy: Civics, Civility and Collaboration Commission
ABA's Cornerstones of Democracy Conversation Guide to learn how to engage members in your community in civil conversations on critical issues.
Colleague Activities
ONE TEAM: Using sports to build bridges between Jewish and Bedouin teenage girls
During these heart-wrenching times in Israel, Danny Hakim's inspiring work offers a touching, optimistic, much-needed break from the painful daily Israeli news cycle.
Colleague Activities
Collaborating Across Differences to Reduce Authoritarianism: A Literature Review
A literature review exploring the question: What are the practices that support groups that come together to collaborate across differences to reduce authoritarianism?
Colleague Activities
A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration
Five elements are required for collaborative success: a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communications, and backbone infrastructure.
Colleague Activities
Exploring the Collaboration Cycle
Community change is not linear, but more of a cyclical process. This mirrors phases of development found in ecology.
Colleague Activities
Constellation Model of Governance
A complexity-inspired framework designed to 'hold' collaborations within dynamic systems by balancing chaos and order, energy and structure.
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ComplexCity: a Manual for Collaborative Complexity Engineering
A proposal to coordinate the effort of grassroots citizens to address complex problems using an online complex system.
News and Opinion
Transfroming the Conversation on Carbon Pricing USA
A policy dialogue between carbon pricing advocates and environmental justice activists about how to advance climate policy in ways that better include the concerns of vulnerable communities.
News and Opinion
Give Ordinary People a Say On Abortion (and Other Contentious Issues)
An inspiring report on Ireland's Citizens Assembly and its surprisingly successful efforts to bring collaborative problem-solving to the morally fraught issue of abortion.
News and Opinion
A Firearm-Owning Republican's Solutions for Gun Violence
A look at what the Zone of Possible Agreement looks like with respect to gun control in the US.