Finding New Ground - Paperback

by Robert J. Chadwick (Author)

Conflict is at the heart of life. It impacts relationships of the heart, the home, the community, and at work. Most flee from it, some embrace it, but few learn how to master conflict and productively transform it into a consensus. Author Robert Chadwick is one of those few. For over forty years, he has been helping individuals and communities experience and learn how to best address their personal, interpersonal, and intergroup conflicts. In Finding New Ground, he shares his insights and a process from his storied career as a conflict resolution manager. He shows readers how to apply these insights and the process in their own life situations, finding new ground in their relationships, creating a path to a way of being that changes everyone around them. The author's purpose is to help you experience, learn, and understand a process for addressing and resolving conflicts and building consensus with 100 percent agreement. The book informs readers on how people define conflict, their feelings about it, what causes it, the arenas in which it occurs, and why conflict must always be confronted. It demonstrates why people avoid resolving their conflicts. It demonstrates what a true consensus is and why it is always possible. A central section of the book explores an intergroup conflict that erupts over the use of a fictional river basin in the American West. This fictional account is based on Chadwick's real-life experience, providing a context for learning about the process in a real way. You are part of the story as a co-facilitator with the author. Throughout this story the actual words and statements of previous workshop participants are used to create a sense of reality. Through this story, the reader will vicariously experience and understand the complexity of this simple consensus building process and learn how to apply the skills and tools for finding new ground. These include the use of the circle, listening with respect, empowering yourself and others, creating a sense of equity, and fostering a sense of community. This real life situation shows how a conflict-riddled group moved from divisiveness and animosity to consensus while they crafted a short term purpose, a long term vision, articulated shared beliefs, and developed a common strategic plan. His model of consensus building has worked across different cultures. It has been deployed in countries like India, Thailand, Canada, Hong Kong, Russia, and Belgium. His workshop participants cut a wide swath through contemporary society, ranging from loggers and librarians to police officers, educators, and professional managers. His methods have been used by people from a range of ages, from kindergarten students to senior citizens in their ninth decade of life. Chadwick's book presents a proven transformative model for addressing contemporary conflicts and building consensus. Individuals, families, community, churches, and businesses all stand to learn a lot from his unique approach to finding new ground. His method is grounded in reality, and through building consensus allows participants to move beyond the hostility of conflict to fostering the creation of civility and community.

Author Biography

Robert Chadwick (Bob) is inter-nationally recognized for his special abilities to bring differing groups together to communicate and develop common solutions. He has pioneered the development of consensus building techniques which foster creative solutions to old conflicts. With 29 years experience as a professional, manager, executive and internal organizational development consultant in a major Federal Agency, and 25 years as a private consultant, Bob has accumulated a comprehensive education and experience in managerial and conflict resolution strategies. He has a proven ability to help groups and communities successfully in mission development, organizational change, team building, labor negotiations, and conflict resolution. His management development and consensus activities have involved people at all levels of the public and private sectors. Bob has worked throughout the United States and Internationally on conflicts surrounding agriculture, technology transfer, natural resources, scarce resources allocation, education and rapid social and political change. He has developed skills and techniques that are easily learned and are directly applicable to any management decision or conflict situation. They can be applied to personal, interpersonal and intergroup conflicts, especially those relating to rapid change, a perception of scarcity, power struggles, managing diversity, and fostering civility. These techniques are applied in a format in which the stakeholders learn how to seek consensus while negotiating and resolving their conflict. He creates an environment in which the participants develop a belief that consensus is possible and they are willing to take the risk to make it happen. He has facilitated consensus solutions in over 1,500 situations involving more than 30,000 people in this country and internationally. He is conversant with the issues and concerns of public agency and private industry managers, educators, professionals, elected officials from Federal to local levels, environmentalists, union members, loggers, miners, ranchers, housewives, professionals, American Indians and other cultural groups, attorneys, and others on contemporary issues. The process has been applied in numerous countries, including India, Thailand, Egypt, Singapore, Canada, England, Belgium, Hong Kong. Bob lives with his wife in Terrebonne, OR. They have 8 children, 23 grandchildren and 9 great grandchildren. This book is written for them.