Cross Collaborate

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Increasingly, leaders and managers are looking to collaborative methods for dealing with contentious policy issues. When making a first attempt, they may well recognize that success takes a lot more than bringing people together to talk. They know they need guidance.
The solution is often to call on a professional mediator or facilitator to design and [...]

I want to pick up the theme of the last post in this series and explore the relationship between public policy consensus building for purposes of conflict resolution and the formation and growth of self-organizing networks. Although there are many differences, both have similar long-term goals and can complement each other effectively. In the earlier [...]

In an earlier post, I suggested that resolution of public policy conflict by collaborative methods might benefit from applying lessens learned from the emergence of complex networks. Both enhance the ability of individuals and organizations to solve problems they can’t manage on their own.
They also seem, though, to differ sharply in many ways.

Conflict resolution [...]

Reaching collaborative agreements is complicated and requires the favorable convergence of many factors, among them incentives, interests, politics, resources and leadership. But once the decision to collaborate is in place, the convening done and the meetings underway, the process initially depends on the quality of communication among the participants. What people say to each [...]