Our Mission
We help communities and companies get smarter about how they fight. By incorporating insights from neuroscience, conflict mediation, social psychology, and solutions journalism, we make it easier for people to respond to discord without collapsing into contempt.
Why we do this work
After spending years covering conflict as journalists, we learned we’d been doing it wrong. We’d been focused on the least interesting, least helpful parts of conflict, which usually lead us nowhere.
Since then, we’ve discovered another way to understand conflict, to get beyond the usual talking points and investigate what matters most.
We’ve learned that the stories we tell each other matter. The questions we ask can change everything. Our mission is to help individuals and organizations learn to cultivate good conflict in order to get stronger, together.
Our Methodology
The Good Conflict methodology applies conflict research to real life interactions. It is Communications 2.0, adapted for our current age, based on everything researchers now know about what humans need to thrive in a diverse, information-saturated, fast-changing world.
4 Steps of Good Conflict
1
Identify high conflict
and map it.
2
Investigate the understory.
3
Have the right
fight.
4
Normalize Good Conflict.
We are profoundly grateful to the many journalists, researchers, philanthropists, mediators and editors who have supported and informed this methodology, including everyone at the Center for Understanding in Conflict, the Solutions Journalism Network, and Simon & Schuster.