You’re at a party. You don’t know many people at the party. You notice the emotion of discomfort as your stomach clenches and your breathing gets constricted. Your mind labels that as feeling awkward. Yet, someone else, at that same party, with those same emotional bodily sensations, might label the experience as exciting because they get […]
Emotions are data: Respond to conflict with emotional intelligence
November 26, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
How Canada should negotiate with the new Trump administration
November 12, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
With Trump soon to be back in power, Canada, my home country, needs to focus on the opportunities, not our worst fears. That’s the key message in an opinion piece in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail, “Taking control of our relationship with Trump”. The article was co-authored by Janice Gross Stein (Belzberg Professor of Conflict […]
AI product demo: How Google’s NotebookLM helps manage complex information
November 8, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
Google calls NotebookLM an “AI-powered research and writing assistant”. It’s more than that. It “helps users understand complex information by instantly becoming an expert on uploaded sources.” You can upload various types of files to NotebookLM, give it an ask, and watch it “generate” … Focused on AI, I wanted NotebookLM to intersect the big […]
AI and Mediation: Working with the Fourth Party
November 7, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
AI is changing how professional mediators can do business. A pre-recorded presentation by Clare Fowler and Colin Rule (both with Mediate.com), for next week’s Association of Conflict Resolution conference gives a terrific snapshot of what’s possible for today’s dispute resolution professional; e.g. mediator. Click on the image below for the full presentation: The Fourth Party […]
Gender through the eyes of a primatologist
October 28, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
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
October 23, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
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
October 21, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
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
October 13, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
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
June 13, 2024 by · Leave a Comment
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. […]
