Agile Workshop by Clarke Ching

Last night went to an excellent free meeting at the Yorkshire Extreme programming Club given by Clarke Ching entitled :

Programmers may be from Mars, Customers may be from Venus ...
but why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus?

From the title I was unsure of the content, other than it would be about project management. It turned out to be a workshop on using formal conflict resolution techniques to dig into problems in projects to find solutions and to expose underlying patterns - very interesting. This is set of techniques I had come across (I did got to Bradford University which has a well know Peace Studies department that studies just this area) but had not considered their use in project management.

My only concern is that like all techniques unless used in good faith by all it could be just another tool to allow people to prove whatever they intend to prove. However, is his not the type of problems that this technique is intend to be used to avoid (maybe it has to be used recursively).

Certainly warrants a further look as another tool in the project management arsenal.