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Critique: Supporting Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design Systems
Klein *

      I fail to see how Brown's Failure Handler is very different from what Klein proposes. There are preconditions that match a class of conflict and advice to resolve conflict for each class. Isn't this very similar to having a Failure Handler for specialists, tasks and steps? Granted the scope to which Klein is applying his ideas is more broad than that of routine design.

      Near the beginning, the focus on human design team participants in this area of research was cited as a limitation. Focus should be on the general nature of conflict resolution. Later when answering the question of what conflict resolution expertise is, the source of the answer is the experience *people* have accumulated working as a member of a design team. This seems very in line with studying the psychology of people working in teams and working through conflict so that all members can agree on a course of action.

      Despite my difficultly with some parts of this paper, I understood Klein's concluding remarks remarkably better than what came before it. Had I read the conclusion first, my interest in the first three attempts I made at reading this piece would have been far greater, if not unnecessary. Most likely my problem stems from thinking I had grasped the earlier work referred to and not seeing the shortcomings in it so obvious to Klein. He really did seem to attack the earlier research in the introduction. Innocent me, I thought we were to stand on the shoulders of those that came before us, not rip them down... even if they were mistaken at times.


* Klein, Cooperative Conflict Resolution M. Klein, Supporting Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design Systems. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol. 21, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1991, pp. 1379-1390.
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by: Keith A. Pray
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