Promise, this is the last post on blogs by C.R. Petersen. Till the next time he emails, that is.
The blog we feature from him this time is on Community Collaboration and Participation.
This blog talks about communication between people and groups. I believe the techniques C.R. Petersen talks about in this blog are what they call Group Dynamics processes.
Excerpts from Community Collaboration and Participation:
As was said earlier, a life time of good can be accomplished if we work on areas where we agree and sincerely work to develop better understanding and more agreement.
Usually when people talk about political differences they talk about the left and right side of a spectrum or continuum. I have found that paradigm; though it may be useful in some settings, often gets in the way of true collaboration. Sometimes the people at either extreme end of the spectrum have more in common with each other than they do with the people in the middle. You might even look at it like a circle; however, I do not believe that even a circle paints the correct picture. Most people are not completely on the right or the left but may have most of their ideas on one side but other ideas that really fit better on the other. Some of us have ideas that don’t really fit anywhere on the spectrum and because of this I like to think of it more as a ball than simply left or right. If most of us were to plot all of our attitudes and beliefs they would be all over the place and not simply lined up left or right. Thinking about it this way helps me to think about us all playing ball together. It helps to take away the idea of “us against them.”
For example almost all of us want the best for our children. We may have a little different take on what that might look like or how to accomplish it, but we want the best. From this starting point we can find, if we work on understanding each other and coming to agreement, many areas where we agree and much that we can do together.
