Frank Blechman

Private Consultant, Formerly at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003

This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

What I did as a professor was to try to push people past some of the existing techniques to a belief that they were entirely capable of creating new ones. That is certainly how I practice myself, is to look at situations and say what is missing here? What is it that I could add that might change the dynamic? Sometimes what I'm adding is a soothing quality or a third party perspective. But most of the time what I'm adding is actually a bad role model, which encourages other people then in counterpoint to behave better. I would like to think that what I've done certainly as a facilitator in public processes is to amplify the good intentions of the parties.