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Constructive Conflict Guide >
Specialized Massively Parallel Roles / Tasks >
Conflict Actors
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Negotiators
Negotiators help people and organizations find mutually beneficial ways of working through problems. They identify issues, interests, options, and figure out how to balance those with the interests off the other side(s). Unlike mediators, however, negotiators work to support the interests of one side only, while mediators do the same thing for all the parties together.
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Mediators
Mediators help negotiators work through disputes that they cannot solve on their own. They help the parties convene and facilitate meetings, communicate effectively, earn trust, work through emotional issues, identify mutually beneficial possibilities, conclude agreements, and then implement those agreements.
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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.
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Peacebuilders
Peacebuilders take consensus building processes one step further by helping design and implement programs that go beyond the negotiation of agreements to broader efforts to bridge societal divides and transform hyper-polarized societies into more peaceful and, ideally, reconciled societies. In essence, they are trying to implement the agreements that mediators and consensus builders help develop.
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Constructive Advocates
Constructive Advocates work to defend their group's interests in ways that simultaneously respect, recognize, and help protect the legitimate interests of other groups involved in the conflict, including those on the other side(s).
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Global NGOs
Global NGOs focus on developing, generally with respect to some specific group of issues, solutions that help protect society (or the whole world) as a whole.
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Philanthropists
Philanthropists provide critically needed funding for a wide range of problem-solving efforts as well as the broader array of MPP-related activities. Their highly competitive vetting process plays an important role in assuring that the many MPP-related projects that are philanthropy funded are well conceived and executed.
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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 Problem Solving/Consensus Building
Collaborative Problem Solving (also called consensus building) is used to settle conflicts that involve many 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.
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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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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.