David Welch's Work: The Shifting Landscape Of Conflict Management

The work titled "the shifting landscape of conflict management" authored by David Welch, was part of a compendium of works that were coalesced into the book titled “Managing Conflict In A World Adrift.” The author’s main posit is that in the real world, conflict is common and daily management is a challenge, and that one that is well managed could prevent, or delay a conflict from occurring until a resolution can be found; and a poorly managed conflict would fail to prevent it from escalating, and may even accelerate it. There were many key points in this writing that can be evaluated to support the author’s thesis. I will address two areas which I found very interesting.
Conflict by its very nature is very hard to manage and in order to do so you must have all the factors at hand in order

The management of the later, is harder to accomplish due to multiple parties involved, differing perspectives, cultures and beliefs, and the ultimate objectives wanted by each of parties. Another important aspect of conflict management is how to come up with possible resolutions to prevent conflicts from escalating. Welch, implements three items to distinguish when doing so. He uses a metaphor of building a bomb to explain the three levels of causes. One is deep cause, which is the crafting of the plans to build the bomb. The second, or intermediate cause, would be the actual act of building the bomb, and the third, is the proximate cause, the triggering of the bomb. He further surmises that the goal of conflict management is to prevent the bomb from being built in the first place, but if it is built, that we prevent it from being detonated. I like his allegory because it puts it into pretty simplistic and easily digestible