ABSTRACT
As Frank Blechman beautifully put it, the skills of organizing, mobilizing, and conflict generation could be retooled and refined not only toward the goal of conflict resolution, but also even more powerfully to the goals of practical decision making and implementation — to creative negotiation. In virtually all of these cases, people see lessons about how to listen in situations of disagreement, debate, and differing priorities and claims. These practitioners urge people to respect differing claims and yet to take them as tentative, as depending on the settings in which they have been raised, as depending on the information that has been available up to any given point in time. The hard-won wisdom of the point suggests the important differences people need to appreciate and even insist upon between two very distinct forms of "discussion". Practical agreements can emerge from no-agreement beginnings because they can be built interactively and cumulatively with the help of skilled planners and intermediaries.
