Skirball Museum – PL Workshop: Tools of Engagement across Conflict

Image courtesy of Tim Hursley.

Core to what PeoplesLab offers are transformational reflexive skills and strategies to increase self-knowledge and strengthen interpersonal relations needed to build systemic social change.

PeoplesLab offered two workshop sessions at Skirball’s Staff Development Day.

Difference is human, inevitable and necessary for change yet often results in misunderstanding, confusion, reactive behavior, and impasse. Cultural organizations depend on fluid internal relations to maintain coalition and collaboration between members and departments. Consistent team integrity and authenticity require team members to recognize and understand their own internal complexity as well as the personal, professional and cultural differences between them. Group alignment based on values, ideology and vision is critical yet cannot alone produce fluid working relations.

We may be temperamentally open to supporting our differences, yet how we are socialized to our ways of being with others is based on our direct experience—different for each person, even between siblings! Diversity categories of identity may define and align us to an extent yet also result in isolation from one another. Add our more subtle experiences of memory, history, myth, family, dream, and desire to the structural and perceptual differences of our professional discipline, organizational context, and current societal constraints and stresses­­ – are we surprised that collaboration and partnership building can seem challenging?