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Samantha Hardy

Are frameworks useful to help understand complex conflict contexts?

Claire Holland and Judith Rafferty, conflict management specialists, academics, researchers and trainers with the Conflict Management Academy (CMA), say YES! According to Judith and Claire, frameworks are a useful way to break down and look at complicated conflict situations in a way that can bring greater awareness, understanding, and clarity to the situation. It’s not […]

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Staying with Conflict by Bernard Mayer

This book is not new, it’s been around since 2009, but it remains one of the few books about how to work with conflict that is not resolvable, or that may take many years to resolve. The book introduces the role of the conflict specialist (in contrast to the more limited ‘conflict resolver’ and their

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Third Millennium Thinking by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun.

This book, written by a physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist/lawyer  is basically about how to apply the “thinking tools” used by experts in these disciplines to everyday life and decision making. It’s about managing information overwhelm, and learning how to think.  The book developed from a UC Berkeley course called “Big Ideas” that taught

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Transformative mediation – separating the myth from the reality

Many mediators know about transformative mediation, but in my experience, not many mediators really understand it. I was certified as a transformative mediator in 2010 (Baruch Bush was my assessor) and was approved to teach transformative mediation by the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT) a few years later. Since then, I have

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sustein

This book is about how we easily we become habituated to our surroundings, and how this can be problematic for many reasons (although it’s also practical in some ways). We can habituate to good things, and then reduce our appreciation of them. We can also habituate to bad things, and then become less motivated to

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection by Julie and John

John Gottman is a very well known researcher in the field mental health and relationships. Julie, his wife, is an award winning psychologist. Together, they founded the Gottman Institute, which includes the “Love Lab” in which they have observed over 3,000 couples interact, especially when in conflict. Their analysis of these couples’ behaviours has enabled

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Mental Health and Conflicts: A Handbook for Empowerment by Dan Berstein

I honestly cannot say enough about this book.  This book is ESSENTIAL reading for anyone working in the conflict space. There is a lot of current interest in topics like trauma-informed practice, neurodiversity, difficult people, high conflict personalities and mental health.  This book cuts through the often misguided popular culture and easy fixes and gets

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer

Brian Grazer is an American film and television producer, who founded Imagine Entertainment in 1986 with Ron Howard.  While you may think him an usual candidate for authoring a book about curiosity, it turns out he is perfect for this task.  For the past 35 years, Grazer has been sitting down and having ‘curiosity conversations’

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