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Please use your personal and professional experience to complete the following sentence:

Recently I had an experience that reinforced for me the importance of understanding the differences between finite and infinite games when we consider our roles in establishing and sharing relationship with others.

“It’s supposed to be uncomfortable,” my cycling instructor told me. “That’s how you build muscle. Add a little more tension during each training session,” she continued.

It is a great day! You have a new job, in a new industry, and a new city. You show up the first day, and from the time you step through the door, you are in a whole new world. You search for the familiar in everything that is new.

What happened to the civil public discourse we knew in the last century? It has gone the way of the buggy whip, and I am glad. The conditions for that polite engagement were simple: Privileged people talked to other privileged people about things they held in common. The rules were clear, the membership was limited, and the conversation remained in the hands of those with power and money.

It is easy to get discouraged. Political wrangling. Corruption. Violence. Hunger. These are patterns of disaster or disappointment that fill the news and challenge hope. We can see the patterns, name them, and analyze them in many different ways. We can prioritize and strategize, report and evaluate, but the patterns persist.

We think of conflict as a pattern of human interaction that emerges as similarities, differences, and connections among people as they live, work, and play together. To expand this HSD perspective, think about conflict as a complex pattern that exhibits certain characteristics.