Black Friday is a creation of marketers. Almost specifically designed to get the average person to buy more stuff, it is a conflict resolution practitioners’ dream fake social “holiday.” People engage in shopping rituals, while also engaging in conflict with each other, over the acquiring of stuff. People fall Read more…
On Thanksgiving Day in America, it’s tempting to look at the whole thing as merely a set-up for the coming commercialization and endless marketing of Christmas. However, the first Pilgrims didn’t look at it that way and neither did the Native Peoples who helped them celebrate the day. Individually, Thanksgiving Read more…
Have you ever heard the one about the consultant who mediated their own divorce? No? Neither have we. We’ve just heard the story many times before and wondered how much of that could have been avoided with some conversations. As a professional consultant though, in the area of conflict, or Read more…
Depending upon who you talk to, the social contract is either breaking down, or being renegotiated, with terms that favor the disaffected, the previously ignored and perennially held back. Fundamental Attribution Error, correspondence bias and the attribution affect—all cornerstones of modern social psychology—describe the contemporary social contract in two basic Read more…
There’s been a trend that has advanced as our electronic tools have outstripped our good sense, our common decency and our impulse control. The trend can be heard in phrases such as “my Twitter feed blew up” or “Facebook melted down.” When the popular media narrative drives emotional responses to Read more…
If you hire your friends because you don’t know who else to hire, and they’re the only ones in your circle that you trust, then you are well on your way to actually having to fire one of them someday. And, before the successful consultant scales up to employing the Read more…
The reason why there is so much meaningless content in your Facebook feed is that the platform has developed into an advertising platform, rather than a connection building platform. If you are building a business as a conflict communication consultant, mediator, arbitrator or another type of practitioner, we can discuss Read more…
I am proud to announce that there are 3 new project developments in the world of Human Services Consulting and Training: I am busy this month, January and February, doing interviews on radio and via podcast, getting the word out about Human Services Consulting and Training’s launch in January 2015 Read more…
As part of the continuing, half a century long hangover that economies, industries, governments and individuals are experiencing as a result of the collapse of the Industrial Revolution and the ushering in of the Idea Age, humanity still longs for “bigness.” Big profits. Big mergers and acquisitions. Big Data. The current Read more…
The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning. Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell Read more…