Multi-Party Facilitation - Improvisation: How to ‘Do The Jazz’ in Multi-party Facilitations (11/12/09)
Alex Azarov
Multi-party facilitations often reach such levels of complexity that the facilitator must be thoroughly prepared. However, things often don’t eventuate the way we predict and preparation alone is not enough to avoid a possible de-railing of the process. A skilled facilitator must be able to manage unexpected group dynamics in a similar way to a jazz musician taking part in an improvised performance.

The Need For Collaborative Capacity (11/09/09)
John Folk-Williams
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.

Mediators Calling For Climate Change Mediation Provision (11/03/09)
Kenneth Cloke
Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB) is calling on all delegates to include a mediation provision in the climate change treaty. Currently, the Kyoto Protocol includes negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, and judicial options, but not mediation.

California Senate Uses Mediation to Avoid Legislative Action (11/03/09)
Keith Seat

The president pro tempore of the California Senate pulled legislation and sent it to outside mediation in order to prevent the Senate from overriding environmental laws to make it easier for Los Angeles to attract a professional football team with a new stadium. The president pro tempore has used mediation in this way before on transportation projects; he views negotiation as the preferred way of working out roadblocks, rather than precedent setting legislation that would ease environmental and land-use regulations for the stadium.

San Diego Union-Tribune (Sept. 12, 2009)

Implementing Agreements: The Ordeal Of Change (10/26/09)
John Folk-Williams
The real test of a collaborative agreement only begins when the changes it requires hit the streets. That’s when it gets personal. Carrying out an agreement usually means that particular people will have to do things differently, pay costs they’re not used to paying, live with new restrictions, new requirements.

How Do Consensus Groups Make Choices? (10/26/09)
John Folk-Williams
As in any other field, public sector consensus building always gets to the critical moment when choices have to be made. In my experience, how a group accomplishes this reveals more about motives behind decisions than any other step in the process.

Harmonizing Science, Policy And Politics (10/26/09)
Larry Susskind
At MIT, we are training Science Impact Coordinators (SICs) willing to put themselves in the middle between experts, advocates and regulators. Unless someone is able to manage these difficult interactions, we will miss crucial opportunities to protect dwindling natural resources. What does a graduate student with an undergraduate science degree, a passion for environmental improvement and an interest in managing constructive dialogue in politically-stressed situations need to know to facilitate such interactions? That's what we are trying to determine.

Collaborative Implementation of Consensus Agreements (10/19/09)
John Folk-Williams
Collaborative agreements often come together after seemingly endless sessions of hard negotiation. When reached, they may well represent a breakthrough achievement, finally getting long-time adversaries to agree on the toughest issues dividing them. After that triumph, though, implementation may require continuing collaborative work for years. While there are many examples of success, others produce disappointing results. Why does that happen? How can it be avoided?

Avoiding the Next Generation of Climate Change Conflicts (10/04/09)
John K, Gamman, Scott McCreary
America's move toward an environmental friendly future and green economy is being challenged by an unexpected source: a decision making process that too often pits the concerns of local communities and conservationists against renewable energy developers. Industrial-sized solar and wind projects needed to reach carbon reduction goals and new transmission line corridors to be part of the Smart Grid are being opposed by many communities, resulting in political stalemate. The traditional command and control regulatory process is unable to deal with this complexity. This article puts forward a strategy for resolving political conflicts related to solar, wind energy and transmission line projects.

Resistance To Change (9/28/09)
John Folk-Williams
I’ve been following some excellent posts about resistance to change initiatives, such as those at Holger Naumeier’s Change Management Blog and Jack Vinson’s Knowledge Jolt with Jack. The context of these discussions is organizational change management, but there are interesting parallels with the field of public policy consensus building.

Defining Problems To Build Consensus (9/14/09)
John Folk-Williams
Leaders and managers who convene consensus building groups are often frustrated by the difficulty of one of the first steps: defining the problem the group is trying to resolve.

Power And Trust As Negotiation Strategies And The Lessons Of The Cove (9/14/09)
Victoria Pynchon
Every year, a town in Japan named Taiji kills 2300 dolphins and small whales. This year, that slaughter was halted for a single day because of the activism of the man who trained Flipper for television, Rick O'Barry.

John Forester: Dealing With Differences (9/14/09)
John Folk-Williams
Many who spend their time trying to find agreement among adversaries have long been familiar with the work of John Forester. A professor of planning at Cornell, he’s always followed his own path directly into the realities of facilitative practice rather than the intricacies of theory. Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes is a remarkable presentation of what he’s learned over the past decade.

The Wisdom Of Crowds, Collaborative Networks & Public Policy (8/31/09)
John Folk-Williams
Over the last few years, concepts like collaboration, the wisdom of crowds and collaborative networks have taken hold as innovative ways for involving large groups of people to help solve complicated public policy problems. However, the terms are often used so loosely that they’re in danger of being lumped together and, in effect, dismissed, especially in the public sector, with the comforting assurance that “we’ve been doing that all along.”

Parliamentary Inquiry Proposes Mediation to Resolve Disputes Between Police and Protesters (8/25/09)
Keith Seat

Following one death and hundreds of complaints about police conduct in controlling demonstrators at the April G20 summit in London, a parliamentary inquiry by the Joint Committee on Human Rights proposed that independent mediators be used. The Committee report blamed both police and demonstrators for failing to communicate prior to the protests, leading to excessive violence, and noted that improved communication and dispute resolution may be achieved through mediation between the police and protesters in the future.

Reuters (July 28, 2009); Guardian (July 28, 2009)

California Attorney General Offers to Mediate Environmental Dispute (8/25/09)
Keith Seat

Litigation brought by three environmental groups against Chevron over an upgrade of its refinery in Richmond, California resulted in an order to stop work, which led to layoffs of 1,000 construction workers. State Attorney General Jerry Brown offered to mediate and suggested the issues could be resolved quickly. The Richmond City Council unanimously passed a supporting resolution and the environmental groups stated they are willing to participate. Chevron is not interested, as private mediation is still under way making other mediation proposals premature, according to a spokesperson.

CBS5 (July 22, 2009)

What Should You Do When The Other Person Is Lying? (8/24/09)
Larry Susskind
There's a lot of confusion about the best way to respond to a lie. One strategy is to ignore it and act as if the statement was never made. I guess folks who take this tack hope they'll avoid giving a false statement any traction. A second response is to suggest that the person making the statement probably didn't realize what he or she was saying. This approach presumes that its always best to give someone the benefit of the doubt and presume there's just a misunderstanding on their part. I don't think so. From my standpoint, the most effective response to a lie is to name it, frame it, and claim it.

How Should You Respond To The Noisy Health Reform Critics? (8/17/09)
Larry Susskind
So, what's the best advice we can give a Congressperson in such a situation? Most aren't going to get the easy ride that President Obama got in New Hampshire. Hard as he tried, he couldn't get any of the 1600 people present to challenge what he was saying. Here are five suggestions that grow out of what we have learned about facilitating public dialogue in politically charged situations:

Mediator Power & Collaborative Public Policy (8/17/09)
John Folk-Williams
What is mediator power and how does it operate in collaborative governance and public policy? I pose this question after reading the current issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly (Vol. 26, No. 4). This collection of scholarly articles challenges basic concepts of mediation and calls for a searching reconsideration of its definition and practice.

Hey, C'mon, Why Can't Reds And Blues Agree? (8/10/09)
Larry Susskind
I was thinking about the reds and the blues. You'd think they'd be able to reach agreement once in a while without bashing each other. But, the more I analyze it, the more I realize that the reds and blues are probably doomed. Some of the time, it's not in one side or the other's interest to reach agreement.

12 Online Resources On Collaboration And Public Policy (8/10/09)
John Folk-Williams
This is the first installment of a periodic series of posts highlighting sources of information and insight about collaborative public policy and its many related fields. Cross Collaborate looks at collaborative public policy as an emerging field that draws on numerous sources, including change management, negotiation, collaborative networks, deliberative democracy, mediation, consensus building and other related areas of practice. Each of these sources of influence has provided specific concepts and tools that collaborative leaders and practitioners need to understand in order to select the appropriate method for each situation they encounter.

Weaving Collaborative Networks (8/03/09)
John Folk-Williams
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 post, I summarized a project that Valdis Krebs and June Holley worked on in southeastern Ohio. Their assignment was to facilitate the formation of a regional collaborative network with the aim of advancing economic development and so reverse many years of decline.

Weaving Collaborative Networks - 1 (7/27/09)
John Folk-Williams
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.

Washington County Requires Mediation in Land-Use Disputes (7/21/09)
Keith Seat

The commissioners of Kitsap County, Washington now require mediation of land-use disputes prior to seeking a hearing examiner decision, which may result in an appeal to the county commissioners. The effort to require mediation began after a controversial case involving three appeals was settled late in the process; the commissioners decided to encourage parties to get straight to the compromise and avoid the appeals.

Kitsap Sun (June 24, 2009)

Collaboration, Dialogue And Negotiation (7/20/09)
John Folk-Williams
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 other and how they say it are the early signals for evaluating commitment and the likelihood of success. Everyone is listening carefully. What do they need to hear in order to trust the collaborative effort?