Critique: Supporting Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design Systems
Klein
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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.
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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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