Last spring, I retired from staff service with a local community organization, Quadra Village Community Centre. Although the advocacy service I provided over the years was focused on seniors, the Centre offered extensive programming for early childhood, youth, and families. Often, staff team conversations touched on gender. Gaining fluency in terminology that was natural to […]
3 Strategies to adapt from the world of animal communications
I’m a dog owner. Dogs are animals. Humans are animals. What can we learn from our animal friends, and their approach to communication? There is an indigenous saying, “dogs make us human”. Connected to my interests in human communications, I enjoy reading about people who have spent their lives working with animals. They were absorbed […]
Conflict Avoidance in the light of Weber’s law
I have a history of conflict avoidance. That avoidance tendency germinated in my early childhood. My parents weren’t a happy couple. Their open conflict played out in me not wanting anything to do with conflict. My early avoidance ways got hardwired in my neural circuitry. They’ll only die when I do. That said, over the […]
Adversarial Collaboration
Does making more than US$75,000 make you happier? Psychologist Matthew Killingsworth from Wharton Business School’s did research and his data showed that it did. Celebrated Nobel Prize winning professor, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman’s research said that it didn’t. Kahneman proposed the two adversaries collaborate and discover the truth together. Killingsworth […]
How WestJet could improve their communications around service dogs
A newsy item this week, where I live, was about a Vancouver Island family that spoke with the media (CBC) after they couldn’t fly with their son’s service dog. This story struck me as all too familiar. Communications gone awry. If ‘communications’ is about getting on the same page, the participants in this conflict weren’t. […]