Newsletter #118 — May 25, 2023
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
- Theories of Change
Design Thinking for Social Innovation — By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top. - Effective Problem-Solving Efforts
A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration — Five elements are required for collaborative success: a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communications, and backbone infrastructure. - Left / Right Conflict
The Flip Side on the Durham Report — A presentation of views from the Left and the Right about the Durham Report on FBI and other law enforcement investigations of the Trump and Clinton Presidential campaigns. - Constructive Communication
Amplifying Sameness and Damping Difference — Though a search for common ground is useful, it can be taken too far. Disagreement and difference are essential for learning, change, and growth. Ideas should be challenged before they are accepted. - Theories of Change
The DNA of Organizational Transformation--Structure, Relationships & Shared Purpose — These three elements are intertwined together, much like the strands of DNA. By working together, they can transform organizational culture and improve members' well being. - Constructive Communication
The Response: The World Talks — Bringing together people from around the world for 1:1 virtual dialogues, The World Talks is a global dialogue experiment built by a coalition of independent media partners from 15 countries. - De-Escalation Strategies
Collaborating with the Enemy — A summary and review of Adam Kahane's book on how to work with people you don't agree with, like, or trust.
Beyond Intractability in Context
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better.
- Big Picture Thinking Projects
You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times — An especially perceptive, big picture essay that places the time in which we are now living into the broader context of human history (while also helping us make sense of it all). - Class Inequity
The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won. — A review and preview of an important and thought provoking new book on the dynamics that produce inequality, unfairness, poverty, and wealth. - Saving Democracy
The Case for Violating the Debt Limit Is Dangerous Nonsense — An explanation of why using clever legal loopholes to get around tough choices undermines the rule of law (and, in this case, is unlikely to work). - Crime / Policing / Guns
Why do Americans want guns? It comes down to one word. — An explanation of the big reason why people in the US want guns. It's not that they want to threaten others, they are afraid of others. - Psychological Complexity
What You See Is All There Is: The Menu Problem and Behavioral Science — A quick summary of an especially important cognitive bias – one that continually threatens to get us into trouble. - Race / Anti-Racism
Why Some Companies Are Saying ‘Diversity and Belonging’ Instead of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ — A report on new thinking about diversity programs and hope that we might be learning how to craft these programs in ways that better live up to their lofty ideals. - Social Complexity
The force behind America’s fast-growing nonprofit sector, and more! — Stunning statistics about the huge role that nonprofit organizations play in US society. - Examples of Complexity
Orders of Disorder: Who Disbanded Iraq’s Army and De-Baathified Its Bureaucracy? — A detailed look at exactly how two of the most consequential and catastrophic decisions of the Iraqi war were made (and an example of exactly how the course of history gets determined). - Constructive Communication
A Politics Worth Watching — A strategy that citizens, the news media, and philanthropists could use to present political issues in a way that can garner sustained and thoughtful public attention. - Improving Problem Assessment
Vanderbilt’s Bold Stand for ‘Neutrality’ — An update on Vanderbilt's neutrality policy and a vision for progressively uncovering the truth through an examination of available evidence and an exchange of views about the meaning of that evidence. - Authoritarianism
My Country Was a Dictatorship Before. This Feels Worse. — A sad story from Tunisia, the one place where we had hoped that the Arab Spring had succeeded. - Cancel Culture
The Anti-American Psychological Association — A disturbing report on the degree to which the science of psychology has replaced objective consideration of the field's big questions with progressive advocacy. - Cancel Culture
How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors — More on the fuzzy line between psychotherapy and politics and the notion that one political view constitutes absolute truth. - Large-scale networking
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox — A genuinely interesting network-building strategy and a way to expand and diversify the information bubbles in which we all live. - Examples of Complexity
An Experiment Repeated 600 Times Finds Hints to Evolution’s Secrets — For students of evolutionary dynamics, a report on an experiment that has tracked evolutionary processes for over 600 generations!
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