In an increasingly polarized and paralyzed world, there is no greater challenge or opportunity than finding ways to work through our most existential conflicts creatively and constructively.

Side3 is a creative and collaborative initiative founded by William Ury, co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and best-selling co-author of Getting to YES. His book, with over fifteen million copies in over 35 languages, is known as a foundational text in negotiation and has played an instrumental role in shifting the collective paradigm from win-lose to win-win.

Over the past 5 years, side3 has worked with Professor Ury to provide critical off-ramps to conflict in North Korea, Venezuela, the US, and Russia-Ukraine. In the process, side3 has helped capture William’s approach in a method that we call The Path to Possible. Over the next three years, side3 plans to offer this method more widely to further address critical conflicts in the world.

We believe that the secret for dealing with the world’s most difficult conflicts is in and around us. Conflict is inevitable, but war is not. That is why side3 equips and empowers a global generation of courageous individuals and teams we call possibilists to create a path to possible in the world’s most impossible-seeming conflicts.

Our vision: world-class teams of skilled negotiators tackling the world’s toughest conflicts and utilizing The Path to Possible to help protect us all from the existential threats that plague us from war to climate change.

Project Director Bios:

William Ury is the co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, author of the international bestsellers Getting to YES and Getting Past NO, and has worked as a negotiation advisor and third party in many international conflicts over four decades, most recently in Colombia as a senior adviser to President Juan Manuel Santos. Ury has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world. Ury received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard.

David Friedman is a Harvard-educated entrepreneur who has, over the past 40 years, created and founded many successful enterprises, most within the arenas of real estate and senior health care. He has served as Chair or Co-Chair of a number of major for-profit and non-profit organizations and has had a lifelong involvement with socially responsible philanthropy. He is a natural team builder and facilitator, and has been involved with side3 since its inception.