This same administrator, however, was being confronted by angry citizens who would come to him with their passionate concerns and leave dissatisfied for not having been heard. Some of these citizens later confided to me, “When you go to his office, he gives you a bunch of facts, but you never know whether he’s heard you first. When that happens, you start to distrust his facts.” Paraphrasing tends to save, rather than waste, time. Studies in labor-management negotiations demonstrate that the time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees, before
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Yeah this seems like best practice for almost any conflict. Like Rappaport's rules, I feel like it's the best clearly-definable and doable psychosocial technique out there... I wish more people would do it.
