Picture this – You are in a foreign land, and feeling uneasy. You’re crowded around a table, with people that you barely know. The conversation feels awkward. The food is different. You’re confused. Not in control. You ask yourself, what’s next? Yesterday, I did a workshop, on cross-cultural conflict management, for my local Inter-cultural Association. For […]
Superheros in Cross-Cultural Conflict Management
An icebreaker activity I often use in training workshops is ‘Superhero’. I learned this activity via Thiagi. Here’s how it goes… I divide participants into small subgroups of 3-4. I ask them to identify a superpower that would help them be more successful in the training topic. I give them a few minutes to share […]
Four Things We Can Do To Accelerate Justice Fairness
Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), is helping address the crazy inequalities in the US justice system; much of which is along racial lines; e.g., mass incarceration of blacks, “1 in 3 black males born today can expect to end up in jail or prison”…. At a recent Google ‘Zeitgeist Minds’ […]
A Basic 3-Step Model to Help You Resolve a Business Dispute
“This is taking up way more time than its worth”. Those are words I often hear from people weighed down by a business dispute. As a mediator of business disputes (and other non-criminal civil disputes), here is a basic 3-step framework model that I commonly use to help people move from dispute to resolution. You […]
Respectful Workplace and Construction Companies
Employee: “What do you mean I can’t tell him to fuck off?” Boss: “No, you can’t. Our new Respectful Workplace Policy requires that people treat each other civilly and politely. Telling him to f-off won’t cut it anymore.” Established construction companies are in transition. Historically, the construction industry, especially worksite tradespeople and workers, more-or-less accepted […]