The resistance to needed changes in your organization is insidious, pernicious, persistent and determined. And if you are committed to making changes by grappling with the resistance, your approach to resistant people, resistant systems, and resistant attitudes should be as well.
Selling to people in businesses is hard for three important reasons: There are very few (or no) champions of your product or service offering because no one knows how good your product or service offering is inside the organization you’re selling to. There are no direct ways to influence the Read more…
Will this be on the test? This is the question that we struggle with every new semester. It reveals what and where the focus of students has been trained into them over the last 12 years of primary schooling. Will this impact my grade? This is the question that reveals Read more…
For the innovative peacebuilder, the truly important switch must happen in how thinking about products and services cross the chasm. Most of the time, processes (such as mediation, negotiation, or dispute resolution) are confused with products. A process is, in essence, a service. Sure, there are sometimes opportunities to grow Read more…
Three points need to be emphasized at the beginning of any training, workshop, or seminar. Your way of thinking about conflict, communication, and persuasion must shift before anything else can happen. Your way of consuming information, your attention span, and your level of caring about the content you are about Read more…
The skills required to facilitate training for an audience with content that wasn’t developed by the facilitator, are the same skills sale people practice every day: Persuasion: Since a facilitator doesn’t create the presentation content (or product) they are facilitating (just like the sales person doesn’t create the product they Read more…
As the economic, cultural, and spiritual forces that used to bind us together continue to refragment from overarching macro-cultures to indispensable micro-cultures, alternative dispute resolution practitioners must take notice. Overarching macro-culture was driven by communal events, television, economic stability, and overarching cultural “norms” that allowed people to engage in conflicts Read more…
There are two paradigms that are rubbing against each other, creating friction in economies, lives, employment choices, and even in personal lives: The first paradigm is that of productivity. The type of productivity where an employee does “more with less,” where people are forced to shave the personal and the Read more…
Influential personalities and brands online are about to become even more influential as the years go by. And mediators, lawyers, and negotiators should take note. Influencer advertising is tricky to navigate, whether you are trying to partner with the peacebuilding neighborhood association with a vibrant Facebook community or the pop Read more…
It used to be ok to be, well, “ok.” It used to be “ok” to do good enough work at home with your kids, in the neighborhood with your community, and in your church with your time. It used to be “ok” to just show up, do what you’re told, Read more…