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Peace In Our Time

Introduction

Peace In Our Time has had important historic significance as a term and as a public policy goal because it was the anchor for a very public statement made by a British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who did a deal with Germany just prior to World War II that he claimed would create exactly that outcome for the world he lived in for the foreseeable future.

He was wrong. 

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Chapter One

Chapter One ~ My Personal Learning Process And Journey Have Helped Me Understand Both Instincts And Myself

My learning process about how groups of people interact with one another has been a fascinating journey — and it gets more interesting for me every single day and year.

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Chapter Two

Chapter Two ~ Becoming Successfully Diverse Tends To Follow Fairly Predictable Patterns

One of my major goals in my work settings going back nearly 40 years has been to do what I could do to make those work settings more diverse.

I love and value diversity. I believe — from years of practical experience — that we are all smarter collectively than we are smart individually — and I believe that our collective smartness improves when we are more diverse.

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Chapter Three

Chapter Three ~ Some Work Sites, Schools, And Community Settings Tribalize, Hurt Themselves, And Feel Right Doing It

My work sites have all been working laboratories for the study of instinctive behaviors. I have worked in a number of settings — and each setting has given me a rich array of instinctive interactions to experiment with and study.

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Chapter Four

Chapter Four ~ We Need To Reach Out To Other People Without Feeling Guilt And Achieve Interpersonal Understanding And Trust

If we want to achieve intergroup Peace in our worksites, schools, organizations, communities, and other relevant settings, we need to very intentionally expand our sense of who is “us” in each setting and we need to decrease the sense that other people in our relevant setting are “Them.”

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Chapter Five

Chapter Five ~ An Instinct Perception Of Racism As A Reality

It was particularly useful for me when I was working in Jamaica to learn to see people as people and not as categories of people or as stereotyped examples of people. The fact that I could more easily see people as people helped me understand more clearly the reality of being Black in America and it helped as well in understanding the realities that result from being any other minority group in America.

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Chapter Six

Chapter Six ~ We Have Discriminated As A Country Based On Who Is “Us” And Who Is “Them”

We all need to understand where we have been as a country in order to understand where we need to go next as a country.

We all need to have a clearer understanding of our history of intergroup interactions — and we particularly need to understand how our basic sets of instinctive behaviors have given us the history we share today.

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Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven ~ Six Basic Alignment Triggers Can Get People To Form Groups In Almost Any Setting

When people in any setting are internally divided — aligned in various ways as separate groups of people inside the setting — it can be very difficult to get people in that setting to work together in cooperative and collaborative ways as a group.

 

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Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight ~ We Used The Six-Step Alignment Pyramid To Organize Groups In Uganda And Jamaica

The basic alignment approaches and alignment triggers have been field tested in a number of settings — both in our country and abroad.

I used those six alignment triggers that were described in the prior chapter of this book in several other countries as well as using them in our own country and for the organizations that I personally served as CEO, Chair, or equivalent leadership roles and assignmentsThose six alignment triggers have worked very consistently everywhere that I have used them.

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Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine — Our Cultures Shape Our Behaviors — So We Need To Shape Our Cultures

Our instincts have two primary tools that they use to shape and influence our behaviors. The first tool is our emotions — and that tool can have its own wide range of obvious connections to what we do.

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Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten ~ Discrimination Against Women Has Been Painfully Universal For A Very Long Time

Building small, locally run health plans in rural villages in Uganda was a fascinating learning experience for me at multiple levels. I learned a lot about both care delivery and community activism in those settings. 

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Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven ~ Women In Business And Society Are Creating Major Successes At Multiple Levels

The relative status for women in this country has not reached the point where discrimination has ended in all areas, but we have made huge progress in many areas that we should celebrate and endorse.

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Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve — America the Vulnerable

As I have been looking at the impact of our us/them instincts on our behaviors, it has been discouraging and even depressing to see how many other countries in the world are actually at war with themselves today. People in Chechnya, Syria, Sri Lanka, and an amazing number of other countries have armed groups of people who are killing other people in internal intergroup conflicts today. 

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Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen ~ We Need To Communicate Honestly About Our Key Issues

We need to create trust by earning trust. We need to do things for each other that prove good intent in all settings and we need to communicate in open and honest ways with each other about key issues.

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Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen — Peace In Our Time

We are poised on the cusp of major success as a people and as a country. If we do all of the things that we need to do to make this country as inclusive as it needs to be, I believe that we will succeed at multiple levels and that we can and will be a country at Peace with itself in every key setting and every key way.

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