Proactive peacemaking focuses on creating the conditions and relations that embrace conflict and the prospect of positive mutual choices. This most often is less seeking common ground and compromise and more a focus on turning difference into creativity, i.e., finding the productivity of conflict. To do this actual human interactions need to be more carefully designed to assure: 1) greater efficiency and effectiveness in personal, community and organizational goal accomplishment, 2) higher levels of mutual commitment, and 3) greater customization to local needs and circumstances. The redesign of human interaction in stakeholder and other forums will be explored as a way to respond to the contemporary social context where significant and costly conflicts are being fueled by interdependence, cultural differences, fresh water shortages, resource depletion, climate change, and ethnic strife.
Stan Deetz, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus and a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at UCB he was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance and long term Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. His research and professional practice has focused on inter-sector governance processes, micro-practices of power in organizations, and designing interaction processes for collaborative decision-making. Deetz is author/co-author of over 150 scholarly essays and several books including Leading Organizations through Transitions, Doing Critical Management Research, Managing Interpersonal Communication, Transforming Communication-Transforming Business, and Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and is a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar and an International Communication Association Past-President and Fellow. He has lectured widely giving well over one hundred visiting scholar and invited public lectures at nearly one hundred universities in twenty-four countries. He is currently President of Interaction Design for Innovation, LLC, and works internationally with projects fostering organizational/institutional change and collaborative decision-making processes.