Mark Szabo

Megaproject Conflicts: Hard Science On Handling The Human Element

3:51 Hours
One of the biggest challenges of large, public-facing megaprojects is dealing with the non-technical requirements, especially the human element. This course will equip you with some important tools that go beyond negotiation techniques to help you mitigate the risk of potential public conflict. We’re going to spend just a little bit of time on the hard science behind complex conflicts. Then we will look at what the implications of that hard science are for how to deal with these types of public-facing conflicts. Next, we will outline some very practical steps that you and your team can put in place to help you survive and thrive in a complex environment, applying some tools from various other disciplines who are already well-equipped and adept at dealing with these sorts of situations. Finally, we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about how to navigate your own internal office environment. In the end, you will have some important new tools to address those non-technicals, and thrive in complex situations.

1.00 Course Intro (7 min.) 
1.01 The Nature of Conflicts (8 min.)
1.02 Finding the Root Cause: The Coherence Trap (15 min.)
1.03 Understanding the Impact of Complexity (8 min.) 
1.04 Why Conflicts are not Negotiations (9 min.)

2.01 The Theory: Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (12 min.) 
2.02 The Power of Agent-Based Modelling (8 min.) 
2.03 Design Thinking Like an Engineer (11 min.) 
2.04 The Seven Principles of Focal Thinking (8 min.) 

3.01 Why We Are The Obstacle (8 min.)
3.02 Managing Conflicts by Key Moments (11 min.)
3.03 Change the Interactions (7 min.) 
3.04 How to be Persuasive in Conflicts (12 min.) 

4.01 Roadblocks at the Office (6 min.)
4.02 How To Use Organizational Change Management (6 min.) 
4.03 A Practical Roadmap to Collaborative Decision Making (8 min.) 
4.04 How to Stay Resilient for the Long Term (8 min.)

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