Gold rush
The Dutch dream? To build your own house with a garden close to Amsterdam central station. The dream can become a reality, but only for 19 couples or families. Scarcity indeed, and that leads to conflicts. This what happened to the community of ‘zelfbouwers’.
Getting to YES
How can you turn your adversary into a collaborative partner and overcome difficulties? As a mediator but also in my personal life I use the Break Through Method to transform conflicts. In this article I illustrate how you can do that too!
Say what you mean. Do what you say.
‘The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I do not do what I say’: it is beautifully put by Martin Buber and it is spot on. I sinned against it recently and suffered the consequences.
People often ask me whether I lead a conflict free life as a mediator. I don’t offcourse. Just recently, an inspiring collaboration of mine turned into to an argument that almost escalated into a conflict.
(un)Happy in Paris
One of my close friends moved to Paris last week with her husband and their children. The much romanticised city is not far off and accepting a promotion abroad seems like an opportunity. On top of that both of them are fluent in French: piece of cake right? Erasmus claimed to be a worldcitizen and […]
Constructive confrontations
Telling people you work with and value what you don’t like about them, how do you do that? By saying something nice first, bringing the criticism next and then ending with something nice again (also known as ‘sandwiching’)? Sure that helps, but it doesn’t answer the question how you say what bothers you. Well this is […]
Rationality is an illusion
Not everyone sees the same things but we think we do. It’s a shared illusion, and only one of the psychological biases that disturb our daily communication. Working with conflicts (at best reducing and resolving them) I regularly witness illusions lead to so called rational behaviour that is in reality pretty irrational. At a workshop in Amsterdam […]
It’s your best quality that leads to conflicts
I’m sure you know the type of person who, at a job interview, says their only flaw is ‘perfectionism’. It’s not that far off really. Our worst traits are always an overdose of our best qualities. Daniel Ofman, a Dutch engineer, was the first author to describe this. And judging from my own conflicts and the conflicts […]
A cultural conflict at work
A Belgian friend of mine works as a researcher at one of the academic hospitals in Amsterdam. She loves what she does. The other night we talked about work over a home made dish of pasta. Surprisingly she was highly irritated and dissapointed with her superiors. Listening to her rant I realised that she is going through a […]