Webinar on Virtual Collaboration – December 8, 2016 with Charity Village

This Thursday, December 8, I’m partnering with Charity Village on a (free) webinar on virtual collaboration. Register here. CharityVillage is the Canadian nonprofit sector’s largest and most popular online resource for recruiting, news and how-to information. As a flavour of what’s in the webinar, I wrote this article,  High-context communications in a low-context virtual world, […]

Managing the Half-Life of Workplace Conflict

Recently, I was asked by a local organization to assess a workplace conflict situation and provide some recommendations for them, going forward. While I did that, I also realize that the tensions that had surfaced in the group don’t just end, full stop. In many ways, they morph and carry on, below the surface, in […]

Remembering the Brilliance of Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology

Ursula Franklin died last month, in Toronto. She was 94. Ursula Franklin was a “Canadian giant” for a whole lot of reasons; she was a world-renowned physicist, feminist, Quaker, author, pacifist, professor, Holocaust survivor, public intellectual, mother, and mentor. She was honoured as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982 and with the […]

Communication Breakdown – A day-in-the-life story of a home care service provider

So much of our daily conflicts have communication breakdown as their root cause. By improving our communication skills, our abilities to “make common”, we give ourselves a huge leg up, when it comes to working with others and effectively managing conflict. Jennie’s story Jennie is a home care service provider. Her job is to provide […]

The Existentialist Mediator

I was reading Sarah Blakewell’s At The Existentialist Cafe on the weekend. It’s an engaging window on the key proponents of modern existentialism; Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Marting Heidegger… and others. Blakewell’s book weaves biography and thought, and “takes us to the heart of a philosophy about life that also changed lives, and […]