Cross Collaborate

You are browsing the archives of2009 December.

Will federal agencies really become more fully transparent, participatory and collaborative, as the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive promises? Hopes are high among advocates of the new policies that such practices will become the standard across the government. Turning that hope into the reality of a federal world of collaborative organizations, however, poses a vast [...]

Thanks to Joseph Pelling for making his video available at Vimeo and to Superbly Human for bringing this into his Twitter stream. We used to go to work. Now we’re all creative innovators thinking outside the box 24/7. Creative dreams to all for the New Year!

Robert Benjamin’s essay on the place of irrationality in mediation, discussed in the previous post, urges mediators to focus as much on the emotional and even illogical motives contributing to conflict as on the rational analysis of issues. Many practitioners do this, in so far as they can, because they not only recognize the importance [...]

Robert Benjamin recently published another of his typically thoughtful and provocative essays at Mediate.com. On Becoming a Rationally Irrational Mediator/Negotiator is the first part of an ambitious five-part series on the role of the irrational in conflict resolution. In this first installment, Benjamin sets the stage for a detailed challenge to the reliance on rational [...]