Finding New Ground: Beyond Conflict to Consensus

Conflict is at the heart of life. It impacts relationships of the heart, the home, the community, and at work.

Most flee from it, some embrace it, but few learn how to master conflict and productively transform it into a consensus. Author Robert Chadwick is one of those few. For over forty years, he has been helping individuals and communities experience and learn how to best address their personal, interpersonal, and intergroup conflicts.

In Finding New Ground, he shares his insights and a process from his storied career as a conflict resolution manager. He shows readers how to apply these insights and the process in their own life situations, finding new ground in their relationships, creating a path to a way of being that changes everyone around them. The author’s purpose is to help you experience, learn, and understand a process for addressing and resolving conflicts and building consensus with 100 percent agreement. The book informs readers on how people define conflict, their feelings about it, what causes it, the arenas in which it occurs, and why conflict must always be confronted. It demonstrates why people avoid resolving their conflicts. It demonstrates what a true consensus is and why it is always possible.

A central section of the book explores an intergroup conflict that erupts over the use of a fictional river basin in the American West. This fictional account is based on Chadwick’s real-life experience, providing a context for learning about the process in a real way.

Chadwick, Robert J. Finding New Ground. CreateSpace, 2013.