Frontiers Seminar Blog
Constructive Confrontation Initiative Spring 2018 Posts to Date
See Syllabus for additional background posts and planned, future posts (many of which are now accessible).
Other Blogs: MOOS Fundamentals | BI in Context | Colleague Activities
Posts ordered from most recent to earliest.
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Cynicism, reinventing the wheel, information friction and overload are among the problems that need to be tackled.
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Here's a start of a list of things you can do to be a part of MPP.
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The civil rights movement, & the environmental movement are both successful "massively parallel" precedents to MPP.
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Massively Parallel Peacebuilding enlists everyone engaged in or affected by conflict to help change its destructive course.
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Good conflict resolution skills are not just for peacebuilders--they are crucial for disputants as well.
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In 1978, it looked as if democracy and peace were advancing globally. Now they are both retreating. Can we reverse that trend?
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Are we on the brink of catastrophe...and if so, can we step back...or will we fall (or jump)?
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Part II of the Frontiers Seminar shows how EVERYONE can and must get involved in solving today's big problems.
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Harnessing the power of markets: a strategy for scaling up efforts to deal with complex, intractable conflict.
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Google traffic and other traffic control activities can teach us a lot about dealing with conflict.
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We need to stop thinking in terms of mediation triads, and scale up conflict work to societal levels.
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Complexity-oriented approaches to conflict are more like medicine and less like engineering.
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How can peacebuilders use a knowledge of neuroscience to do their jobs better? We are just beginning to learn.
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Neuroscience can explain why so many peacebuilding interventions don't work as hoped--and how to do better.
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Those who seek power-over others are dealing better with social and psychological complexity. This needs to change!
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We need to think about social problems as complex adaptive systems requiring massively parallel problem-solving.
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We need to resist "divide and conqueror's" efforts to control society by exacerbating left/right tensions.
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An explanation of why this may be our best/last chance to make democracy work (and avoid autocracy and anocracy).
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Speeding society's ability to rapidly adapt to changing conditions should be a key goal of the conflict field.
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An exploration of how understanding ecodynamics and evolution can help us deal with complex conflict.
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Simple models won't work! We must develop conflict intervention models for higher-level complex systems.
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Intractable conflicts are complex adaptive systems, so they need complex, adaptive responses.
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Understanding the difference between complicated and complex systems is key to understanding that no one is in charge in intractable conflicts.
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Complex conflicts require complex responses: the SAT and PAL models are linked approaches for doing just that.
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Different from linear approaches, Coleman says intractable conflicts can still be tamed by 3 steps.
