Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: difficult members

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Russell brand offered some book ideas for group process issues. Here are a 
couple more:

The delicate art of dealing with porcupines: learning to appreciate the finer 
points of others by Bob Phillips.  This is a good book that describes pretty 
well the differences of personality styles and how they clash. The drawback of 
this book is its Christian overtones, which can be skipped over. 

Dealing with people you can' stand: How to bring out the best in people at 
their worst. By Rick Brinkman and Rick Kirschner. This is a good: When this 
type of person does X, the best strategy is to do Y.  I like this because it 
has lots of prescriptions of how to handle situations, many of which can be 
applied outside the contexts of the situations in the book.

Building unitied judgment by the center for conflict resolution is a good 
consensus book with some chapters on conflict resolution. I give away this 
book at my workshops.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood
Cedar Village (forming)

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From:   cohousing-l [at] freedom.mtn.org on behalf of Russell L. Brand
Sent:   Friday, May 23, 1997 5:30 PM
Subject:        Re: difficult members


Pam,

In my experience people generally ask for things other than what they
want.    This is the leading problem we see as programmers, reference
librarians and as mediators.  Generally we have to do some level of
requirements analysis, and/or value clarification before we can get
people to have a clue as to what they really want.  I give *LOTS* of
copies of Roger Fischer's books, "Getting to Yes" and "Getting
Together" as gifts to peope that I have important on going
interactions with and have started to give "Raising a thinking Childen"
by Myrna Shure which addresses many of these same issues but in the
context of child rearing rather than mediation and "Exploring
Requirements Analysis" by Weinberg that talks about them in the
context of software.  

/Russell