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Robert Bordone is a negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution expert who founded Harvard Law Schools Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program as well as the Cambridge Negotiation Institute. He was a professor at Harvard for many years and is currently a senior fellow at Harvard Law School. Dr. Joel Salinas is a behavioral neurologist and scientist. He was formerly a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a clinical associate professor of neurology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He was the founded and was chief medical officer at Isaac Health. Whats the big idea? Instead of seeing conflict as a battle to win or a mess to avoid, disagreement can be navigated in a way that creates connection and positive outcomeson both a business financial level and a relational one. There is value to emerging from our cocoons of comfort in search of the benefits that honest, direct, and courageous engagement with conflict can bring. Conflict Resilience provides usable and scientifically validated strategies to negotiate disagreements with greater confidence and clarity. Whether its in your workplace, family, or community, learning to sit with and grow from conflict can create value in every aspect of your life. Below, coauthors Bordone and Salinas share five key insights from their new book, Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. Listen to the audio versionread by both authorsin the Next Big Idea app. 1. Your brain treats conflict like a physical threat. When faced with conflict, the brain reacts as if were under physical attack. The same neural circuits that process physical pain are involved when we experience social rejection or disagreement. This can trigger our fight-flight-freeze-fawn-fester responses, making us either overly aggressive, avoidant, or stuck in rumination. From a Darwinian perspective, these five responses could have a lot of value when under attack with an existential threat. But in the context of modern day-to-day relationships with family, friends, or colleagues, these brain responses can backfire. The brains automatic effort to protect us from discomfort in the moment prevents us from responding in ways that better serve our longer-term interests. The key to conflict resilience is recognizing these automatic reactions, being able to pause and assess whether the in-the-moment threat is real or just discomfort, and then being able to deploy strategies to sit with the discomfort because of what we call the Bigger Better Offer on the other side of conflict. 2. Conflict avoidance makes things worse. When we avoid the discomfort of disagreement by walking away, canceling plans, or changing the topic, we often just amplify the problem over time. Its understandable why you might shy away from tough conversations with your cousin about conflicting political views. You value the relationship and wish to prevent the disagreement from causing harm. While this strategy may help us navigate Thanksgiving dinner, in the long run, avoidance leaves us feeling less connected to that cousin. Prolonged avoidance makes us feel that we dont even know each other. Spending time with them feels painful and fake. Eventually, the connection fades. The instinct to avoid for the sake of preserving a relationship ends up being the long-term kill. Our society is set up to aid and abet the avoidance tendencysocial media, demographic changes, trigger warnings, cancel cultureall make it super easy to avoid and just hang out with those who think like us. As we see in our polarized world, this path dehumanizes and distances. Just like avoiding exercise weakens muscles, avoiding difficult conversations weakens our ability to navigate disagreements. By learning to name whats happeningour emotions, triggers, and fearswe can take control instead of letting conflict control us. 3. Curiosity is your best conflict tool. We tend to enter conflict assuming we already know the other persons perspective. But true conflict resilience comes from curiosity. Instead of debating or defending, try exploring: Ask open-ended questions, listen deeply, and seek to understand before being understood. When people feel heard, difficult conversations become more productive. Its easy to say be curious, but its hard to do when we feel like we really do know what the other side thinks. Psychological biases tend to make us certain about how those we disagree with think, even when the truth is that we are often missing a lot of important information that can unlock the door to how they think, what matters to them, how to persuade them, and how better to connect with them. In our book, we share real-life examples of how cultivating curiosity led to breakthroughs in relationships, negotiations, and deal-making. As we explore the deeper perspectives of those with whom we disagree, the possibilities for connection grow, even if we still dont see eye-to-eye. 4. Discomfort is not damaging. One of the biggest myths about conflict is that its inherently bad or destructive. In our professional work, we are constantly frustrated when people talk about eliminating or reducing conflict. Healthy conflict is a sign that folks feel free enough to be themselves and that there is enough diversity in the room to make life interesting and vibrant. Disagreement itself doesnt have to lead to division. Tension can lead to growthboth personally and in relationships. We talk about how to stay in conflict to achieve the Bigger Better Offer. We also offer evidence-based tools to help you decide when to commit to stay engaged and when to draw the line between discomfort for growth and submitting yourself to ongoing harm or trauma. Its a hard line to draw, but an important one. 5. Resilience is a skill you can build. Conflict resilience isnt something were naturally good at. Each of us may be more or less conflict-resilient because of our upbringing, personality, and disposition. But whether you think you are super conflict-resilient or completely avoidant, you can get better with practice. Through small, daily actionslike pausing before reacting, naming your emotions, and shifting from defensiveness to curiosityyou can transform conflict from a source of stress into an opportunity for connection and change. The more you practice, the more youll see improved relationships, connections, and outcomes. And the more you practice, the easier it becomes. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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Venice is charging day-trippers to the famed canal city an arrivals tax for the second year starting Friday, a measure aimed at combating the kind of overtourism that put the city’s UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status at risk. A UNESCO body decided against putting Venice on its list of cultural heritage sites deemed in danger after the tax was announced. But opponents of the day-tripper fee say it has done nothing to discourage tourists from visiting Venice even on high-traffic days. Heres a look at Venices battle with overtourism by the numbers: 510 euros (about $6$11) The fee charged to visitors who are not overnighting in Venice to enter its historic center during the second year of the day-tripper tax. Visitors who download a QR code at least three days in advance will pay 5 euros ($5.69)the same amount charged last year throughout the pilot program. But those who make last-minute plans pay double. The QR code is required from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. and is checked at entry points to the city, including the Santa Lucia train station, the Piazzale Roma bus depot and the Tronchetto parking garage. 54 The number of days this year that day visitors to Venice will be charged a fee to enter the historic center. They include mostly weekends and holidays from April 18 to July 27. That is up from 29 last year. The new calendar covers entire weeks over key holidays and extends the weekend period to include Fridays. 2.4 million euros That is the amount Venice took in during a 2024 pilot program for the tax. The city’s top budget official, Michele Zuin, said last year the running costs for the new system ran to 2.7 million euros, overshooting the total fees collected. This year, Zuin projects a surplus of about 1 million euros to 1.5 million euros, which will be used to offset the cost of trash collection and other services for residents. 450,000 The number of day-trippers who paid the tax in 2024. Officials say 8,000 day-trippers paid in advance to enter the city on Friday, among the 77,000 who have already registered so far to enter the city this year. Another 117,000 have registered for exemptions, which apply to anyone born in Venice, those paying property taxes in the city, studying or working in the historic center, or living in the wider Veneto region, among others. 75,000 The average number of daily visitors on the first 11 days of 2024 that Venice charged day-trippers. That’s about 10,000 people more than the number of tourists recorded on each of the three important holidays during the previous year. City council member Giovanni Andrea Martini, an opponent of the measure, said the figures show the project has not deterred visitors. 48,283 The number of official residents in Venices historic center composed of over 100 islands connected by footbridges and traversed by its famed canals. The population peaked at 174,000 in 1951, when Venice was home to thriving industries. The number shrank during Italy’s postwar economic boom as residents moved to the mainland for more modern housingincluding indoor plumbing, which was lacking in Venice. It has been shrinking dramatically over recent decades as local industry lost traction, families sought mainland conveniences, and housing prices rose. Activists also blame the mono-culture of tourism, which they say has emptied the city of basic services like shops for everyday goods and medical care. 51,129 The number of beds for tourists in Venices historic center, including 12,627 in the less regulated short-term rental market, according to April data from the Ocio housing activist group. The number of tourist beds surpassed the number of permanent residents in 2023, according to Ocio’s monitor. Anyone staying in a hotel within the city limits, including on the mainland districts of Mestre and Marghera, pays a lodging tax and is therefore exempt from the day-tripper tax. 25 to 30 million The number of annual arrivals of both day-trippers and overnight guests roughly confirmed by cellphone data tracked from a Smart Control Room since 2020, according to city officials. Colleen Barry, Associated Press
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The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. It’s been five years since the intense early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first round of lockdowns that mandated work-from-home for companies around the world. Among the debate at the time: concerns about how younger workers and new recruits would cope without access to experienced colleagues and mentors. Doomed to impersonal video conferencing in converted bedrooms, these youngsters couldnt hope to gain the confidence and deep experience of their predecessors. They would make their mistakes out of sight, and fail to learn. Now imagine those new workers and interns are digital, not human. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022, its not unusual to see generative AI systems referred to as interns, coworkers or even colleagues. In that case, its tempting to see their offspring, AI agents, as more experienced employees. Using the brain of a large language model, agents are given a specific purpose and granted access to an organizations software tools and data in order to autonomously fulfil their task. For many enterprises, the question is not whether they should adopt agentic AI, but how quickly and how widely. Gartner forecasts that, agentic AI will address and resolve 80% of regular customer service issues with no human intervention by 2029, and this will result in a 30% reduction in operational costs. With stats like that, other business functions will surely followand fast. Chain of thought Big-name tech companies such as Salesforce are going all-in on an agentic future and AI companions are already a common feature in business tools such as Zoom and Slack. AI rivals are reaching agreement at an unprecedented pace on new technology protocols that allow the integration of AI models with all types of business tools and applications. In this new era, the digital workers are being handed the keys to the enterprise. What can possibly go wrong? Potentially, quite a lot. All the major models are fallible and flawed. As Anthropic, maker of the popular Claude family of AI models, explains in a new research paper: Language models like Claude aren’t programmed directly by humansinstead, theyre trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the models developers. This means that we dont understand how models do most of the things they do. [Italics added for emphasis.] Anthropics own research shows Claude being tricked into naming the ingredients for a bomb, though stopping short of giving instructions on how to make one. Separate Anthropic-backed research found that more advanced reasoning models, which show the chain of thought they use to reach their conclusions, dont always say what they think. Without the ability to rely on chain of thought, there may be safely-relevant factors affecting model behavior that remain hidden, the researchers concluded. (The researchers evaluated the faithfulness of two state-of-the-art reasoning models, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1.) Connecting AI models to business tools, via agents, raises the safety stakes. An agent that has access to an email system can be exploited as a useful tool for attacker intent on phishing. Access to database systems can be levered to extract valuable data from an organization. Even instances of accidental misuse can have significant consequences in terms of disruption, cost, and reputational damage to an organization. An adult in the room In the absence of the ability to predict or drive the behavior, these new digital colleagueslike their human counterpartsneed chaperones to provide guidance and feedback. Its important there is at least one adult in the room to constantly monitor these (not very streetwise) interns, intervening in real time when they may be sent on a fools errand, tricked into handing over their wallet, or encouraged to say or do something offensive or illegal. We know from experience that attempting to rapidly introduce new technology across an enterprise can be a recipe for chaos. Someone, somewhereand likely many peoplewill find themselves in the headlines looking silly, at best. At worst, they may lose valuable intellectual property and suffer serious financial and reputational loss. The best solution for an agentic workforce is agentic oversightusing powerful, customized agents to simulate real-world scenarios and probe AI for weaknesses. Continuous, automated red teaming of these new technologies, at speed, can give enterprises the confidence they need before they send their armies of new interns and employees out to do real jobs. This agentic warfare approach offers the greatest chance of implementing enterprise AI for its intended purposes. After all, you wouldnt give an unvetted new employee completely unhindered and unsupervised access to your business systems, would you? Donnchadh Casey is CEO of CalypsoAI.
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