ON CONFLICT BLOG
What Great Communicators Do First
I was on a walk with a friend recently when she said something that has stayed with me. She said: “If I could tattoo one phrase onto my body, it would be: Compassion, then wisdom.” This is a pretty emphatic statement coming from someone who is a strong communicator. So, I noticed it and coded it as something important to pay attention to. My friend had offered this whimsical thought as a reinforcement to what I was talking about. I was
Are You Dealing With Someone Resistance to Change?
I hear this a lot in my work: “That person is just resistant to change.” It’s usually followed by how that person is: stubborn, difficult, stuck. But what if resistance isn’t a character flaw? What if resistance is logical and protective and a self-regulatory function? What if resistance does not reside within one person but is due to a mismatch in nervous system approaches? When we can stop seeing resistance as the failure of someone to change, we open up a new avenue. Our
Leading Through a Time of Anxiety
Many of the leaders I work with would not describe themselves or the teams they lead as anxious. The leaders I love to support are thoughtful, competent, compassionate, and centered. And yet, we are leading in anxious times. In such times, leadership performance is challenged to rise to the next level. In our anxious systems, we’ve got political tension. Technological acceleration. Economic unpredictability. Social fragmentation. Even if you and your team are steady, none of us is operating outside the wider nervous system of
Believe You Can Change the World
As someone who believes deeply in peace, collaboration, and servant leadership, the past year has been a hard go. Whether you lead a music band, a team in government, a volunteer group, or you simply want to set a positive example, you’ve likely felt it too: polarization is growing, and power-over, competitive approaches dominate. Common courtesy and cooperation seem to be evaporating and being replaced by incivility. Fear, frustration, and disempowerment can shift how any of us think, speak, and act in a nanosecond.
Why Circles and Roundtables Work: A Simple, Powerful Tool for Teams
“Whatever the problem, the answer is in the circle. When we gather in circles, people’s energy is released in ways that create order, coherence, and new possibilities.” … Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science Have you ever sat around in a circle? Perhaps it was at a campfire sing-along, or at a circular table or perhaps just informally standing around with friends. There’s something magical that seems to happen in those social configurations. MIT professor Sandy Pentland has studied high-performing teams
What is the Role of Community in Conflict
For a long time, I’ve been enamoured of a book by Bill Ury called The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop. So much so, I wrote a whole summary of the book(available here). The book details Ury’s experiences visiting and studying peace cultures. One of the Big Ideas has to do with how peace-oriented communities view conflict between two or more people within their community. Surprising to most of us – when two people are in conflict, the