Conflict & Insider Threat Prevention Consultant Courses

Managing the Really Limited Resources that No One Talks About

When you ask people to name their least available resource on a project, they generally say money and then people.  When you ask why people? They generally give a superficial answer.  The course takes this question to a deeper level and begins to form a realistic answer. If you have every wanted to get to the bottom of the resource problem and learn to understand it, this course gets you on your way. It is a counter-intuitive approach to Conflict Prevention.

Managing the Scarcity of Self-Control

Managers often think they know why employees fail to follow through with an assignment:  "They don't want to do it. They are lazy. They have a bad attitude.  They need more specialized training."  None of these are likely true.  Perhaps the problem is self-control?

This course explores the problem of self-control. Everyone shares this challenge. Success requires the mastery of self-control. Without it, nothing good happens. 

Manaing the Scarcity of Attention

People commonly think that material resources are finite but cognitive resources are infinite.  This course used Behavioral Science to demonstrate why this is not the case and what you can do about it to remain successful. 

People talk about attention span quite regularly.  Most people believe that they have great attention spans as long as the subject interests them.  Unfortunately, this is not the case. Attention span fails us even when we love the topic.  This course tells us what we must do to overcome this human condition.

Managing the Scarcity of Cognitive Capacity

Everyone, no matter have brilliant, has to live with a scarcity of cognitive capacity. Cognitive capacity is like energy, we never have enough. A time will come when we need more cognitive capacity.  This course provides the groundwork for managing this human condition.

Cognitive capacity is connected to everything we do.  In business, cognitive capacity is linked to strategy, operations, planning, product development, leadership and even innovation and inspiration.  This course introduces the "problem of the scarcity of cognitive capacity" and how discusses how you can manage it.

Managing the Scarcity of Understanding

How people understand reality is linked to the mental models they form about reality. Many times these mental models are incorrect and counterproductive.  This course explores the "problem of understanding" and provides important insights to assist with managing the problem.

What is your mental model?  How does it guide your understanding of reality?  Have you thought much about the things you think you understand?  So many people understand a lot less of reality than they think they do.  All of us have a scarcity of understanding.  This course assists you in assessing your mental model and enable you better manage it.

Managing Behavioral Design in Conflict Prevention

Design is the missing linking in success.  Behavioral Design is the foundation for success.  This course explores the role of Behavioral Design in management thinking.

Design consists of systems of design, spaces of design, and environments of design.  This course cuts through the language of design and directly addresses problems of Behavioral Design.  It presents important solutions of design as part of the design process.

Mastering the Core Approaches for Resolving Conflict: Part One

Conflict is in the human DNA.  Everywhere people come together they inevitably engage in some form of conflict.  Although many people have their favorite conflict resolution strategy, only a handful of strategies are generally received as globally applicable.  This course introduces the most commonly accepted approach for conflict management and resolution.

There is one powerful sure fire way to master conflict. Avoid conflict as much as you can.  Walk away, ignore it. Avoid it whenever you can. Beyond this often impossible to take advice, learn to master these five approaches and then design your own approach beginning with these.  Be creative in a smart kind of way.  This course will assist you in doing this. 

Mastering the Core Approaches for Resolving Conflict: Part Two

This course takes you through three principal approaches used by teams to address conflict.  These approaches contribute the development of an extensive toolkit for addressing the many kinds of conflict experience within the workplace.

Who would not favor a conflict free workplace?  Not everyone.  Some people are drawn to conflict like scrap metal to a magnet. Conflict comes along for many reasons.  The problem here is the people problem.  Conflict is easy to address, but people are the problem.  Everyone has limits, and conflict reveals these more clearly than anything else.  If you want to know someone, pay attention to how they respond to conflict.

Mastering the Core Approaches for Resolving Conflict: Part Three

Every significant conflict requires a solution, sooner or latter.  Solutions require design and design requires an appropriate methodology.  This course leads us though the conceptions that creates your design space.  The design space is where you develop the architecture of your solution and link it to the problem.

People still argument about the need to understand the past to solve problems in the present.  Many times, though, you may never know about the conditions in the past that generated the current conflict.  Even if you are smart enough to identify these historical causal events, it does not necessarily follow that you can use this information to resolve the current conflict.  You are in the here and now and your solution likewise needs to be for the here and now.  Your conflict resolution methodology has to be relevant to the here and now to remain practical. Focus on solving the problem today by designing a solution that will work today, but in an enduring way.

Identifying the Leadership Conflict

Leadership is a medium sized word with cosmological interest. Human beings have written thousands of books about Leadership. Over the years, the traits of Leadership have expanded to include about every possible personal adjective such as "inspirational,"  "unselfish," "focused," "motivational," and so forth.   People often forget that situations generate not only conflict but leaders as well. 

Leadership is vital to organization success.  This is obvious to nearly everyone.  However, there is a dark side to leadership. Leadership is responsible for many of the conflicts organizations experience every day.  Some of these are necessary and eventually get things done. Unfortunately, though, many are not.  They are an unnecessary distraction that emerge from emotional behaviors that defeat the best Leadership intentions.  Most conflict is emotional, not rational.  A great part of this conflict is ignited by the disconnection of the leaders from their followers. 

Mastering the Core Approaches for Resolving Conflict: Part Three

People use several approaches for resolving conflict.  Although I prefer to prevention conflict from arising, this cannot always be possible.  The course continues introducing the most common approaches to conflict resolution.  It is a foundation course that enables you to begin to organize your thinking about conflict in general and begin to learn how to prevent it before it has to be resolved or managed.

This course outlines the steps required to resolve employee conflict before it escalates.  It continued the discussion presented in the first two volumes of this series.  The course enables you to build your focus on the topic of conflict resolution.

Mastering the Core Approaches for Resolving Conflict: Part Four

This course concludes the introduction to the core approaches to resolving conflict. This series has presented the problem of conflict resolution and introduces the most commonly used approaches for resolving conflict.

Most people, not all, detest conflict.  It leaves a bad taste and stirs-up bad feelings.  This series is for you.  It enables you to design a framework for resolving conflict.  This framework work, but you have to focus on the details.

Using Systems Thinking to Manage Archetypes and Bias: Part One

Systems Thinking is a certain way of looking at the world that enables you to describe the systems of reality such as Human Activity Systems that have bias.  Systems Thinking enables you to understand archetypes at a deep level of awareness so you can master them as possibilities of positive change.  This is more than pop psychology.  Systems Thinking is a way of mastering the world you live in to prevent conflict.

The Center for Conflict Prevention exists to prevent conflict.  This means that we have to be expert has resolving existing conflict to prevent additional kinds of conflict from emerging.  Conflict exists along a continuum. Conflict is also a system or a component of a system. Conflict can emerge from a conflict of philosophy.  Conflict can also occur because methodologies are inappropriate or irrelevant to the subject to which they are applied.  None of this "stuff of life" is easy, but it is manageable and transformative. We exist to transform problems into solutions that improve the quality of life. 

Using Systems Thinking to Manage Archetypes and Bias: Part Two

This course begins with the Strategic Aptitude Framework  and continues to examine the nature of human inter-relationships and the place of bias in molding them.

Conflict is a fluid state in human affairs because human inter-relationships are fluid. Unlike the usual perspective of science, Systems Thinking focuses on the fluid nature of inter-relationships among systems from the subsystem level to the supra-system level.  Systems Thinking views every systems as a process in which the dynamics of the operations form structure and the scope of the systems extension defines boundaries and environments of interest from the near to the far.  Systems Thinking offers a potent approach for preventing conflict.

Classifying Systems Types: Part One

This is Part One of a multi-part series on Systems Thinking.  It present the environment of Systems Thinking.  The series clarifies what it means to be a systems thinker and explores why Conflict Prevention requires a systems view.  When conflict is on the horizon, people need to change their perspective or the conflict will escalate. 

Do you know what a separate and isolated input is and what role it plays in Conflict Prevention?  Systems Thinking and Conflict Prevention is for people who really want to make a positive difference to the world around them whether in the workplace or in personal life.  Not only will Systems Thinking enable you to prevent conflict, it will also assist you with navigating the tar pits of everyday life.  This series is for the serious minded conflict prevention master.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Two

In Part Two, we dive deeper into Systems Thinking.  We examine the 3P's of the Systems Environment as we further distinguish Systems Thinking from the reductionist perspective.  We further prepare the framework for applying Systems Thinking to conflict prevention.

Systems are composed of components, operations, structures, and environment.  They transform matter, energy, and information.  They examine inter-relationships and their implications. Fundamentally, Systems Thinking is the most appropriate approach for preventing conflict because conflict is a relationship process that is always in motion.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Three

What happens when you increase the openness of open systems or completely close the openness of open systems?  What relationship does either behavior have with the generation of conflict?  It is enough to make you wonder if conflict has anything to do with the way you manage the boundaries of your organization.

This course is the third part of a five part series.  It continues the consideration of system types and conflict prevention.  When you begin to see the world as a Systems Thinker does, you will begin to see that you are studying the inter-relationships among teams and organizations, and even between entire enterprises.  Think about the conflicts you go through at work. How many of these can you attribute to the violation of systems principles such as boundary management and the behavioral rules for transforming the behavior of your colleagues?  Conflict arises from negatives of human behavior that occur as an insufficiency in any business process. Systems Thinking overcomes this negative.  

Classifying Systems Types: Part Four

Much of the universe functions as a universal system.  On earth, people form systems, thrive in systems, exist as part of some level of system, describe reality as a system, and on it goes.  If we think about it, and use our mind in a disciplined way, we cannot escape the systems perspective. This series provides a framework that enables people to master the systems perspective in preventing conflict.

Systems Thinking is the path to conflict prevention because conflict is a process that occurs in Human Activity Systems.  The decision-making that occurs regarding the prevention of conflict occurs in Appreciative Systems. Moreover, the direction people take through the conflict life-cycle occurs within an Evolutionary Guidance System.  You see, systems are everywhere an aspect of Conflict Prevention.  This series will enable you to gain a solid footing in the territory of Conflict Prevention by becoming comfortable with the relationship between systems description and conflict prevention..  

Classifying Systems Types: Part Five

This course continues an examination of open systems types and their relationship to conflict prevention.  Here we examine the Appreciative System and see that it changes the way people describe systems behaviors and transformation by focusing on the values of people.

Do you ever feel under-appreciated?  Probably, some time or another.  The strange thing about showing appreciation is that much of what we do to be appreciative may not matter.  Appreciative Systems enables us to get it right more often because such systems actually describe the factors that an individual or team actually find valuable and appreciate.  This course examines such systems and examines their link to Conflict Prevention.  Everyone in the workplace values something.  They have standards that guide their performance and produce appreciative actions.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Six

Conflict Prevention occurs best in organizations that have been designed to prevent conflict.  Conflict Prevention systems are purposeful because they involve human beings.  This series explores these ideas and examines purposeful systems and their link to Conflict Prevention.  If you are serious about preventing conflict you need to structure your organization to help you do this.

Appreciative Systems, Purposeful Systems, Evolutionary Guidance Systems, and Human Activity Systems. Why do these systems matter today more than ever?  Because they will enable you to better structure your organization to become more productive and less conflict intensive.  Although happy employees do not necessarily become superstars, miserable employees destroy teams.  Why tolerate workplace misery?  Great companies are not miserable places to work.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Seven

This course begins a deeper look at the Evolutionary Guidance System and its contribution to Conflict Prevention.  The EGS presents a potent idealized systems approach for implementing a more productive workplace with less emotional cost.

Do you know what conflict cost your organization?  Do you know what it does to you employees?  Do you care? You should if you care about improving your professional life, and especially if you care about enjoying a healthy personal life. Conflict does more harm than good because it impeded the emotional ability of leaders to act when employees hesitate to follow.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Eight

This course, Part Eight of our series, examines Human Activity Systems in-depth as purposeful human systems.

This course examines "high conflict organizations" to examine what goes wrong in them to ignite unwanted conflict.  This course connects Human Activity Systems to Conflict Prevention as a way to build a foundation for Conflict Prevention.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Nine

This course discusses Design Inquiry as a way of describing human systems. Also, it explores additional characteristics of Evolution Guidance Systems. This course discusses the Evolutionary Guidance System Model as the foundation for building an environment that prevents conflict.

Classifying Systems Types: Part Ten

This course expands the examination of the Evolutionary Guidance System (EGS) by introducing the management link to Conflict Prevention and the use of the EGS.  This course presents several potent principles that govern the design of Evolutionary Guidance System for Conflict Prevention. 

This course explains why managers might want to focus on redesigning the systemic structure of the organization rather than work on altering the day-to-day patterns of behavior.  In organizations, conflict often arises because people react differently to the structure of the organization. For this reason, it is a good strategy to balance the structure of the organization.  Management can use the idealized model to describe and then implement an appropriately balanced organization structure.  This course points to such a solution. 

Classifying Systems Types: Part Eleven

This course continues with an examination of the Principles of systems design that impact the redesign of organizations as part of the program to implement Conflict Prevention processes.   The Principles presented here will guide designers in the elaboration of the idealized Evolutionary Guidance System that when implemented will enhance Conflict Prevention.

The implementation of a conflict free environment is a high ideal which may seem impractical.  After all, some conflict is essential to spark innovation.  This course enables you to build reasonable Conflict Prevention structures that will gain rapid employee buy-in because employees will now be able to focus on the activities that really matter.  Systems designs  enable organizations to accelerate Business Value Realization.