Mayer Reminder

As a reminder, Bernard Mayer will be speaking at UB this Thursday, April 2nd, at 7 p.m in the Moot Court Room.

Mayer recently released a new book, Staying with Conflict: A Strategic Approach to Ongoing Disputes, that continues his focus on constructive conflict engagement. From the book… 

In each of these conflicts, whatever the terms of our involvement, our outlook will expand dramatically if instead of asking our customary question, What can we do to resolve or de-escalate this conflict? we ask, How can we help people prepare to engage with this issue over time? As our outlook grows, significant new avenues of intervention become apparent, and our potential to help parties with their core struggles will grow as well. Our challenge as conflict specialists is to meet people and conflicts as they are genuinely experienced and to help disputants deal with each other and their conflicts realistically and constructively. When we focus only on those elements that are resolvable, we are neither meeting people where they truly are nor offering them a realistic scenario for dealing with the most serious issues they face. Instead, we marginalize our role, limit the reach of our work, and fail to realize the full potential we have to help disputants. In the process, we also constrain the growth of our field and our economic viability as conflict professionals. We have the tools, the experience, and the capacity to do better than this, but too often we don’t have the vision.

(Sorry I can’t offer a page number for the quote; it’s a clipping from my Kindle edition of the text.)