Cross Collaborate

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Once a good friend and colleague was exchanging “war” stories with me about confrontation during the peaceful business of collaborative meetings. He assured me that he had a story that would top anything I could offer, and he was right. Here’s the brief version. I was facilitating a group that was supposed to reach agreement [...]

Public involvement sometimes presents a stark contrast between community and technical knowledge. Often public agency representatives, with the best intentions of gathering information about local concerns, may arrive at a community meeting, make a presentation, but find itself facing a lot of frustrated and angry people. The meeting might end with members of the community [...]

In cross-cultural settings, leaders who convene collaborative processes, as well as practitioners who mediate and facilitate them, may find themselves identified not by their current roles or personalities but by a history of conflict they had nothing to do with. Some years ago, I was visiting a Native American community along the Colorado River in [...]