Newsletter, February 2007 |
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Contents this month
STOP PRESS - e-Government award
Dialogue by Design has won a Commendation in the e-Government category of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Planning Awards 2006 for our e-consultation process around the North West Regional Assembly's Regional Spatial Strategy.
The judges said that 'significant efficiency and productivity savings have been made compared with document-based methods'.
Conflict and conversation
One of the downsides to the third party role we play is that it
is always the most interesting work that cannot be described. In
the last couple of months Dialogue by Design has been helping to
untangle a particularly sensitive situation involving a large company,
a small community and a lot of cross people.
Progress has come from something very simple: helping people to
have the conversations they should have had a long time ago. In
the course of this work one of those involved said to me that the
real problem is that 'they' are so irrational it is quite impossible
to talk to them. It is hardly the first time I have heard the 'i'
word used of 'the other side', and I doubt there is a single reader
of this newsletter who has not, at some time, either used it or
been very tempted to do so.
Coincidentally I was asked to contribute to a new publication that
centres on the idea of 'conversation'. The editors asked me a simple
question: what makes conversation rich and deep rather than poor
and shallow?
If you follow
the link it will take you to what I wrote. I can't
pretend it's very profound, but if you are stuck in a conversation
going nowhere, and you are tempted to dismiss those around you
as irrational and beyond redemption, you might want to take a breath
and try again.
Andrew Acland
