I recently had the pleasure of presenting at New Jersey’s ADR XI. And how great is at that not only is there sufficient ADR interest and practice to warrant a yearly state conference, but that it’s been running for 11 years now!

Anyhow, at the conference, I raised this ever-popular proposition:

But the thing is, I think that’s rubbish. Why on earth is the burden of proof on justifying a link between graduate education and professional conflict resolution practice? Law, medicine, accounting, psychology… we have precedent and practice of recognizing the value of linking education with professional practice. Professions benefit from better educated and trained practitioners, and education benefits because of the standards and real-world grounding that comes with a formal link to a practice.

I’m tired of arguing a case that shouldn’t need to be made in the first place. So here’s the alternative proposition, supporting the quirky status quo we have now.

If anyone really feels compelled to continue along the strange and dysfunctional path the field is on, let’s make it their burden to justify.

And in my next post, because I’m feeling a bit contentious and provocative in the summer heat, I’ll discuss the JD’s suitability (or not) as a qualifying graduate education background. Yes, I’m going there.

It’s so true. Bullets kill. Kill your presentation, that is.

This summer I’m teaching a grad course in organizational dispute resolution, and organized as a seminar, student presentations make up the backbone of class.

Do you think there are lots of powerpoint presentations?
Yes, yes there are.

But that doesn’t mean the presentations get dull and repetitive, because (a) our students are terrific and (b) there’s an explicit ban against “death by powerpoint.” If your conflict resolution presentations are chock-full of bullet points riddled slides, just stop it. Seriously. The whole point of having slides is that we learn more from well constructed multi-media presentations than we do from material presented just orally. And no, slides crammed full of the same text you’re speaking doesn’t really cut it as hitting that multi-media cognitive sweet spot.

Moreover, bullet-point lists are the worst sorts text. They can’t show complex relationships and dynamics. But do the conflicts and concepts we’re trying to describe have complex relationships and dynamics? Yes, yes they do. So, again, if you’re using long lists of bullets, then stop it. Your ideas are more complex and nuanced than any 2-level hierarchal list can convey.

Finally, let’s all agree that the whole point of slides is not for you to project your speaking notes onto a big screen located behind you. Face-to-face time is rare and precious. If you’re just, for all intensive purposes, reading or only mildly elaborating on the text of your slides, then you’re not really adding much value to things, are you? Yuck. My rule of thumb is that if someone can flip through my slides and get most or all of the points I’m making, then I’m really being lazy and uncreative.

So, there you have it. Bullets kills. So, stop using them, or at least use them less, and knock ‘em dead.

(And, if you’d like a wonderful discussion of the dumbing down inherit in many power point presentations, let me suggest Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.)

Word counts can make for an interesting perspective on a set of qualitative data. Take Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech. There’s the straightforward way of representing the results, just giving a summary table with word use totals.

Here’s a segment of the report generated from the open-source qualitative data analysis tool, TAMSAnalyzer:

But how about a more artistic display? Wordle.net is a new website that generates artistic tag clouds, pruning the usual dull words (the, is, in, as, etc.) and making each word’s size relative to its frequency in the overall text. Fun! and Pretty! See…

Perhaps not a solid choice for research, but a wonderfully convenient and creative way to play with, explore, and represent text.

There’s a common expression that “two heads are better than one,” and that may often be the case. However, since we often bring groups together to work on resolving conflict, it’s also important to recognize when and why groups may fail at producing high-quality deliberations.

Two U Chicago scholars have released an interesting working paper on this issue, available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1121400

Below is the paper’s abstract:
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.

(Image by flickr user clagnut and used under creative commons license)

Unfortunately, a glitch in my WordPress (blogging software) installation has been preventing me from posting new material, and it’s taken me a while to track down and fix the problem. All is well now. On the plus side, the time off-line means that I’ve accumulated a nice backlog of postings, so check back often.

For starters, here’s the link to a web page I created to support my Interagency ADR Working Group presentation. The page includes my presentation slides, some example mediation evaluation forms, and a bibliography.

The International Association for Conflict Management recently released its Spring/Summer 2008 Newsletter. It’s available in pdf form here.

In reading a blog entry about research into the personal happiness benefits of prosocial spending, I came across a nice quote by the New York Times science writer, John Tierney. His guiding principles:

1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

2. But that’s a good working theory.

Here’s the advertisement for an upcoming presentation I’ll be giving in Washington, DC for the Interagency ADR Working Group. Attendance is open, just RSVP in advance.
—-
ADR LUNCHTIME SERIES
Learning from Our Practice: Connecting Curiosity with Evaluation Tools
to Learn from and Assess ADR Programs and Practices

What is the relationship between evaluation and practice in our field? What are best, and worst, practices in evaluating and learning from the conflict resolution work we do? Through case studies, exercises, and open discussion, participants will explore opportunities and techniques for better embedding evaluation and research in their practice.

John Windmueller, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor and Acting Director, Negotiations and Conflict Management Program, University of Baltimore

Presented by: The Interagency ADR Working Group, Workplace Conflict Management Section Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: Noon - 1:30 PM (Please allow extra time for security procedures.)

Location:
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave, SW, Room GJ-015
Washington, D.C.
Directions: Orange/Blue Line-Smithsonian/Holocaust Museum/Bureau of Engraving and Printing Exit; Yellow Line-L’Enfant Plaza/Maryland Ave. Exit

Please RSVP by April 7, 2008, with name, citizenship, and agency/employer to Cindy Mazur, ADR Director, FEMA, at cindy.mazur@dhs.gov.

Questions? Call Cindy at (202)646-4094. If you would like to listen via teleconference, please contact Pamela Pontillo at Pamela.Pontillo@hq.doe.gov.

Socrates’ observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a) just got some nice supporting empirical evidence, at least insofar that an examined life in dire circumstances might be far more livable.

Ok, in reality, the study seems weak. There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of self-reported attitude shifts that aren’t triangulated with other evidence of change, and it’s only a single case study/context. Still, I liked it. (Photo was taken taken years ago while visiting friends in Vancouver.)

p.s. The skepticism about relying solely on self-reported accounts of attitude shifts reminds of an old behaviorist joke. What did one behaviorist say to the other behaviorist after sex? …. “Was it good for me?”

It’s nice to be able to run Windows-only applications without having to spend much time suffering the operating system. Since making the switch from SPSS to JMP for statistics work, there really is only one Windows-based application that I have to spend much time in: QSR’s NVivo, which is a tool for analyzing qualitative data. Fortunately, VMWare’s Fusion lets me run Windows apps seamlessly with my usual Mac tools.

To illustrate, here’s NVivo running atop Safari: