Third Side Forum

3S Questions – Struggling to Decide how much Development is Good

People in Grand Marais MN are struggling to decide how much development is good for them. Some worry new developments will destroy the very atmosphere that draws visitors and makes people want to live there. Others say the town needs development to add jobs and keep young people in town. Recently two new condos have been developed in the area that has caused some spurred the controversary. To read more about this issue:

Grand Marais gets growing pains

Council reconsiders downtown building moratorium

What Third Side Question would you pose to support a development that meets everyone’s needs?

All posted questions will be sent to the Grand Marais city council to support their work to transform this issue. For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Using the Third Side Curriculum for High school and College

From Steve Gardiner Director, Management Training Purdue Pharma

I have found Josh Weiss’ Third Side: A Pedagogical Accompaniment to be a tremendous resource. I am very interested in corresponding with any high schools or colleges who having been using this curriculum. Do you know of any schools that I might contact? Thank you.

3S Questions – NJ Community responding to “hate” remark

In Manalapan New Jersey Deputy Mayor Michelle Roth's husband made an insensitive remarks about Italians which has caused a great deal of racial and political tension in the community. The community is attempting to negotiate this incident and heal. To read more about this issue:

In one NJ town, community leaders reach out to settle Italian-Jewish divide

Enough already!

Manalapan official told: Quit or many will protest

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to the Deputy Mayor’s office and the Italian-American Association of Monmouth County to support their work to transform this issue. For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Blogrolls for the Third Side

Tom Glaisyer New York

This website gives us an opportunity to share ideas information, and raise questions. Another useful function it could provide is to act as a link to other third side blogs or similar sites. For those unfamiliar with blogs this is typically referred to as a blogroll. So this post is a request to readers to add in the comments section useful blogs or resources that we should include. Perhaps we should build a single list or several lists - Thirdsider blogs related to US domestic issues, international issues, or perhaps break down the blogs by the particular roles played by the third siders who write them?

This naturally brings up the next question....how do we decide which to include or exclude. I'll make the suggestion that any blogs suggested by more than one person automatically get included. (Oh and perhaps let's limit it so that you can't suggest your own blog that limits the self-promotion aspect!) If people would rather a different mechanism for deciding on the contents of the blogroll please respond in the comments below.

3S Questions – A Human-Elephant Conflict in Central Sumatra

Endangered Sumatran elephants have been chained to trees and even poisoned by local villagers in central Riau in Indonesia. The elephants have raided crops at nearby villages and these elephant rampages have damaged homes and killed villagers. Continuous conflicts between the elephants and villagers over territory in the jungle have often been cited as the cause this violence in central Sumatra. And according to Nazir Foead, head of WWF Indonesia's Species Programm the direct result of uncontrolled destruction of their forest habitat. To read more about this issue:

Elephants found chained in forest on Sumatra

Plan launched to reduce human-elephant conflict in Sumatra

Sumatra Project - Human-Elephant Conflict

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to the WWF Indonesia's Species Programme and the Sumatra Project to support their work to transform this issue. For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

To Scale or Not to Scale? Complex Systems Theory and The Third Side

From Patrick Meier, PhD candidate at The Fletcher School, Tufts University

The term “complexity” denotes the degree to which a system is difficult to analyze, understand or manage. Complexity is said to arise when systems contain a large number of mutually interacting parts at many different scales. The more complex the system, the more detailed, and therefore lengthy, our analysis tends to be. The term scale refers to the level of abstraction we choose to describe the interacting parts of a system, which in effect depends on how far we stand from the system we seek to describe. For instance, we can easily provide a simple description of a forest by standing at a reasonable distance or instead describe with more intricate detail the masterful distribution of individual leaves should happenstance have us closer. What does this have to do with The Third Side? Far more than meets the eye at this scale. In what follows we take a closer look at the forest and draw on some basic principles from complexity theory to show why The Third Side is the most appropriate scale to prevent and manage violent conflict.

The complexity of social systems arises from the interactions between and among many individuals, communities, and countries, and so on at many different scales. At a high level of abstraction or aggregation the interacting parts of a social system could be called states or nation-states, cloaking more local events and internal interactions. At a higher level of abstraction, we might begin using the word civilization, which to a certain extent shrouds the internal character or polity of individual states. In contrast, communities and individuals represent a lower level of abstraction. The trade-off between complexity and scale is illustrated by the three curves in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

Complexity as a function of scale for three kinds of systems: independent, organized and structured. The way a system is organized affects how it is seen at different scales. In social systems for instance, people in crowds move more independently than a structured army, while modern international companies reflect some organization yet less hierarchy (adapted from Bar-Yam 2004, 55).

Describing and managing systems in the world involves a decision about the level of detail we wish to provide—and plan to act on. As noted above, the amount of information necessary to describe a system is a function of scale or the detail we can observe from a given vantage point. In Figure 1, the horizontal axis indicates “how far away” we are from the system being described. In other words, it indicates the level of precision or scale of the description. The closer the object is, the greater the detail and the more precise the description. The vertical axis indicates the complexity of the system described by an observer such as The Third Side. This represents the amount of information we need to describe a system moving in time and space at different scales.

What are the implications of this complexity-scale trade-off for conflict prevention and management? “Like any complex social phenomenon, violent conflict does not result from the linear summation of a neatly defined set of causes, but from interactions among multiple phenomena in a complex system with several levels of organization (…) As complexity and chaos theories show, in such a system behaviors will not respond in a linear way to changes in one variable, however significant that variable may be” (Rubin 2004, 22). Attempting to prevent or mitigate violent conflict at the wrong scale or level of complexity may produce new problems in unlikely locations or scales.

For more download the complete article - Click here

Feedback and reflections are welcome.

3S Questions – Talk about Stadiums heats up airwaves

Kansas City is facing a debate over whether to approve $777 million worth of upgrades to the Truman Sports Complex. This debate has led to finger-pointing and name-calling. Two radio stations have taken the debate to the airwaves. Here are some articles on this issue.

Talk about Stadiums heats up airwaves

A roster of key players on the stadium election

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to 810 WHB-AM and 610 KCSP-AM to support their work to transform this issue. For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Applying the 3S in health care enhancing patient safety

From Kurt O’Brien
Seattle WA

Those of us who works in health care today can readily attest to the current (and oftentimes intense) focus on improving patient safety. Reducing errors, improving documentation of mistakes, and creating a culture where people feel free to speak up are just some of the specific areas that administrators and physician leaders are looking to improve.

While we have the most advanced health care technology in the world, mistakes still occur and conflicts still erupt in our clinics and operating rooms. A recent study conducted by VitalSmarts discovered that over 90% of the time health care practitioners don’t speak up after witnessing mistakes, observing instances of incompetence, or when disrespectful behavior is present. This figure is astonishing when one considers what’s at stake. This has caused hospital leaders to advocate for improving communication skills (notably, dialogue skills) which will help give practitioners the tools they need to surface and talk respectfully about difficult or sensitive subjects.

While teaching these skills to healthcare workers is vitally important, I also don’t believe it’s enough. In order to truly impact this culture of silence, people need to see their own responsibility and accountability to the larger whole, and I believe the Third Side can serve this purpose. The Third Side is about changing mindsets. It’s about helping individuals realize that they are inherently part of a larger system, and that their actions will always influence the broader community.

When I have presented on the Third Side at my own institution, people are immediately taken with it. They begin to understand that they can take an active role – that they have a responsibility to take an active role – in creating a culture where silence no longer dominates.

In the Surgical Services department at the University of Washington Medical Center, we are interested in applying the Third Side to a major improvement project the department has undertaken. We are in the process of meeting and planning what form this will take, and I would like to invite readers of this forum to contribute ideas or experiences that we can tap into – we have so much we can learn from each other.

3S Questions – Two Boards,Two Agendas, Zero Unity Torpedo Wake

The Wake County Public School System in Raleigh North Carolina is facing enormous tension between the school board and the city commissioners responsible for allocating the funds to the schools. A lot of time and effort is spent in this inherent battle that occurs every spring. Here are some articles on this issue.

Two boards, two agendas, zero unity torpedo Wake schools 

A cafeteria of ideas for building schools without raising property taxes 

Wake Officials Debate Year-Round Schools

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to the Wake County School Board and the City Commissioners to support their work to transform this issue.  For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Challenges of Holding the Third Side

From Josh Weiss
Boston MA

A recent Boston Globe article describes a series of disputes and rivalries that has shattered the alliance of the powerful black Boston ministers who founded the Boston Ten Point Coalition in 1992 and took to the streets to combat, face-to-face, an unprecedented wave of youth  homicides.

Article: A Shattered Alliance  By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff  |  February 14, 2006

Here are some excerpts from the article:

In 1992, a band of black ministers united and launched an unprecedented effort to fight youth crime. Now three of those leaders barely speak to one another.

The breaking point came for the Rev. Jeffrey Brown at a meeting of black ministers at Peoples Baptist Church in Roxbury in summer 2004, when youth workers employed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers asked Brown to step outside.

One of Rivers's workers physically threatened him on orders from Rivers, Brown said in a recent interview. 

Rivers told the Globe there were no threats, only ''misunderstandings," but the youth worker and Hammond both corroborated Brown's account.

When the approach began to bear fruit in the 1990s, Wall said in his office at Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, in Codman Square, ''all of a sudden people [outside the coalition] were saying, 'Something worked!' and a lot of attention, a lot of money came in. . . . When the money
started to come in, when the media began choosing who to highlight,  those relationships began to break."

Rivers's willingness to speak bluntly and critically of black society's  internal problems, his early advocacy of faith-based initiatives, and his knack of attracting media attention frequently made him the face of the clergy's fight against crime.

That left many other pastors from the more than 40 churches that joined the original coalition hungering for money and recognition,  according to politicians, clergy, and law-enforcement officials.

As a result, rivalry spread far beyond the top leaders.

In the beginning, ''we all were in it together," Wall said. Minister Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam was in the leadership group, he pointed out. ''We had great collaboration," Wall said. ''We needed each other."

The ministers are not able to work on youth violence now in the way they did in the 1990s, but each is still at it, and that is what counts, says the Rev. Charles Stith, former pastor of Union United Methodist Church in the South End.

What are the challenges of sustaining the third side and how do we support thirdsiders over time?