Are the police corrupt? Should we trust them? What role should they play in society?
This is a topic that is both deeply historical and immediately relevant. This article is about a specific problem in the national dialogue on police: how does the public’s perception about the police impact the public’s trust in that institution?
SWOT analysis can be incredibly useful in visualizing conflict. It can provide an overview of your internal capacity for action (strengths and weaknesses) and external circumstances (opportunities and threats). Used effectively, SWOT analysis can inform and enable good decision-making. However, I think SWOT analysis is often a tool that is easily misused, like something people only use in their yearly strategic planning rather in daily decision-making.
Whether it’s at home, in the workplace, or in society, culture is an important part of a living system of conflict decision-making. Culture represents the accepted conflict resolution processes, behavioral norms, general values, and world views of a specific group of people.
Because of culture’s ubiquity, it has an enormous impact on whether conflict creates or destroys value for you. Ideally, culture helps its individuals resolve conflict and create value. However, culture can lay a foundation for failure. It can sacrifice making good decisions for quick decisions, or making creative decisions for “this is how we’ve always done it” decisions.
“Strategic flexibility” is a concept I’ve been interested in since first reading The Strategy Paradox, by Michael E. Raynor. An important part of conflict decision-making is visualizing the conflict, and this lead me to ask, “what would strategic flexibility look if it were represented as a decision tree?”