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Constructive Conflict Guide >
The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity
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BI Article
Applying conflict resolution insights to the hyper-polarized, society-wide conflicts threatening liberal democracies
A call for those with conflict-related expertise to do more to help society more constructively handle the scale and complexity of today's big conflicts while also more effectively countering the efforts of bad-faith actors who are actively working to inflame and exploit our conflicts.
BI Article
Contradictory Thoughts About Dialogue
Dialogue can change attitudes, but those changes tend to be fleeting unless a great deal of thought and care goes into both the process and the aftermath. Designing for scale up is key.
BI Article
Jay Rothman on Large Scale Interventions
In this interview, Jay Rothman continues to reflect on strategies for scaling up small group processes in ways that enable whole communities to develop "both-and" solutions the common problems.
BI Article
Katie Hyten Explains how Essential Partners is Taking Dialogue to Scale
Essential Partners has figured out both how to scale dialogue to the community level (if not beyond) and to make the relationship improvements dialogue engenders sustainable over the long term.
BI Article
Heidi Burgess Talks With James Coan about Taking De-Polarization Work "to Scale."
Dialogue is great for the few participants, but it simply cannot be scaled up enough to change societal attitudes and behaviors. James Coan and Heidi Burgess discuss alternative ways to scale depolarization work.
BI Article
Rachel Kleinfeld's "Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy"
US democracy is failing. Each moment deepens the polarization that makes its problems harder to fix. As Americans, we must start now, at scale, strategically, with a broad, cross-party coalition to save our democracy.
BI Article
Identify--and Scale Up--Your Areas of Influence
An update to the video of the same name, this post explores how we can best influence responses to racism in the summer of 2020.
BI Article
Talk with Shamil Idress, CEO of Search for Common Ground
Heidi Burgess interviews Shamill Idress about his career, Search for Common Ground's work, current challenges facing Search, the peacebuilding field, and the world as a whole--and how we can meet them.
BI Audio/Video
Katie Hyten on Scaling Up Dialogue to Help Communities Work Together Effectively
Katie Hyten explains how EP partners with organizations to help them use dialogic communication to strengthen the relationships in organizations and communities, so they can to do their jobs better.
BI Audio/Video
Jay Rothman on Scaling Up Interventions to Work at the Community Level
Working at scale involves the combination of top-down, bottom-up, and middle out approaches, while working with individuals (the self), the groups separately, and then the community (the groups together).
BI Article
Chip Hauss: Going to Scale
How peacebuilders can work with others to "scale up" their efforts to grapple with the many wicked problems facing humanity currently.
BI Audio/Video
Heidi Burgess and James Coan on the Problem of De-Polarization and Scale
James Coan, Co-Founder of More Like US is trying to figure out how to work "at scale" to diminish "the perception gap" between what people think "the other" is like and what they are really like.
Subsidiary Folders
Theories of Change
Theories of change are ideas about how a desired change can be accomplished. I think I can lose weight by cutting out desserts. That's a theory of change. So, too is the belief that we can reduce political polarization by encouraging people to talk to each other in dialogue groups, or come together in deliberative fora to jointly analyze and propose solutions to mutual problems.
Subsidiary Folders
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking is holistic thinking -- understanding that everything in a system is related in some way and that changes in one part of the system can ripple across the rest of the system, often through interlocked sets of feedback loops. A system's behavior is more than the sum of its parts--it can be chaotic and unpredictable. But at the same time, systems often exhibit certain repetitive behaviors (such as escalating feedback loops), the result of which can be fairly accurately predicted.
Related Folders
The Staggering Scale of Society-Wide Conflict
We tend to think of conflict as a simple two party game (perhaps with a role for a third party mediator). The reality of society-wide conflict is that it simultaneously involves the chaos of millions of such simultaneous and interlocking games.
Related Folders
Ideas for Addressing Scale and Complexity to Build Upon
The first step toward constructively managing scale and complexity is to recognize that this is a long-standing problem and societies have already developed many effective complexity-oriented techniques that we can build on.
Colleague Activities
Scaling-Up Peacebuilding and Social Justice Work: A Conceptual Model
An academic exploration of one of the most important and difficult challenges facing peacebuilders -- scaling up their efforts to the point where they can positively alter the trajectory of society.
Colleague Activities
CBT and Peacebuilding
A Chip Hauss blog post looking at how cognitive behavioral therapy can be brought "to scale" and used for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
Colleague Activities
Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development (CPDD)
(CPDD) investigates and addresses human security concerns in Boston and around the world. With particular attention to the problem of scale, we aim to help peacebuilding, democracy, and development organizations and movements to "scale up" so as to deepen and expand their impacts.
Colleague Activities
Building The Bridge To Peace: Reframing Peace And Peacebuilding
A discussion of existing mindsents around peacebuilding; research-based suggestions for reframing the way we present this work to outsiders so they understand what it involves.
Colleague Activities
Moving From Ladders of Engagement to Self-Organizing As Decentralized Leadership
A description of a self-organizing strategy for producing a decentralized, non-hierarchical type of engagement and leadership that is better suited to the demands of large and complex societies.
Colleague Activities
The Eight Pillars of Positive Peace
Based on almost 25,000 indices and survey variables, the Institute for Economics and Peace identified 8 factors that are particularly important for peaceful societies.
Colleague Activities
The Case for Teaching Students Constructive Dialogue at Scale: UNC's New School of Civic Life and Leadership
UNC's new School of Civic Life and Leadership will better prepare all UNC students to engage in civic life by improving their ability to communicate constructively in the public square.
News and Opinion
Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI
Thoughtful ideas on how democratic institutions dating from the mid-18th century can be adapted to the scale and complexity of the 21st-century.