we respect your privacy

Our Privacy Policy

Who we are

This website is owned and managed by The Change Forum ABN 52074816470 whose executive director is Bill Cropper – consultant, coach and facilitator – based in Queensland Australia.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

We collect statistical information through our website, including the number of visitors to the site, the time, duration and pages visited, to help us understand the interests and priorities of our users so we can improve the site, our services, products and information we offer. Information collected may include:

  • Your network routing information and Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, which may also identify your general geographic location or company.
  • Your computer and connection information such as browser type, version, time zone setting and operating system.
  • Your name, email address, WordPress user name and any personal data you provide us when you send us an email or complete our online subscription and enquiry forms.
Contact forms

When you subscribe to obtain access to resource downloads or our newsletter, apply to become a member, make an enquiry for information about our services, register for a workshop, coaching services or a learning program, or make a purchase through our online store, you complete a form that will collect some essential personal information.

This data is gathered only for the purpose of delivering services and products we offer, collecting statistical information to help understand our subscribers and customers better, and for helping to improve the functionality of our website.

The Change Forum respects each individual’s right to personal privacy and treats all information collected as confidential.  We do not divulge personal information to any other person or organisation.  We do not publish comments or other information provided by individuals without their prior written consent. We do not knowingly pass on any information about any individual or group of individuals to any other person, organisation or website.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If we upload images to the website obtained with participant approval from any of our workshops or other in-person services, we remove any embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. If you are invited to upload images to our website you should first remove any embedded location data (EXIF GPS) that may be included. If visitors to the website are able to download images from the website, location data may be exposed.

Cookies

We do not employ banner advertising or knowingly employ any malicious cookies on our website. Cookies that may be used are designed to enhance your use of our site including:

  • If you leave a comment you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment.
  • If you have a membership account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
  • When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
  • Third party cookies are cookies sent to your terminal from a computer or domain that is not managed by us, but by another entity that processes data obtained through cookies. For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to measure the traffic in our Website and Keap, Vbout or Mailerlite cookies to see the openings and clicks of our Newsletter emails.
Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

The Change Forum may share user information between its internal subsites in a private multisite environment to better deliver our multiple services to our customers.

We also may pass user profile data to The Change Forum’s contact management service (Keap/Vbout), email software service (Vbout/MailerLite), accounting software service (Quickbooks) or payment gateway service (Stripe or Paypal) for the purpose of providing services and operating an online business. These services are believed to be hosted in SSL protected secure environments and the privacy policies of those services apply.

We do not not offer to share or intentionally expose any personal user information with any other person, organisation or external website for any other purpose.

How long we retain your data

For users that register on our website (if any), we store the personal information they provide in their user profile until they unsubscribe or cancel membership. All users can personally see, edit, or delete their own personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). The Change Forum website administrators can also see and edit that information.

We may also retain user profile and activity information off-site in our contact management database indefinitely to provide us with information that can assist with our delivery of services and ehance our interactions with you as a customer as you continue or resume using our services.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org. You may delete all cookies that are already in your computer and you may set most browsers to prevent cookies from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work. Browser manufacturers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox provide help for cookie management in their products.

Security

We take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect Personal Data from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction, taking into account the risks involved in the processing and the nature of the Personal Data. If a security breach causes an unauthorized intrusion into our system that materially affects you, then we will notify you as soon as possible (in the event of a breach being detected, The Change Forum undertakes to inform users within 72 hours) and later report the action we took in response.

All online payments for services are processed externally through Stripe and PayPal which employ Verisign SSL Certificates and use security measures to protect your information both during the transaction and after its completion.

We only use service providers that enter into agreements with us whereby the service provider commits to take the appropriate measures to protect Personal Data and be compliant with GDPR.

Rev 30/06/2023 Site Admin

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High Tension Encounters

High Tension Encounters (HTEs) happen regularly in any workplace – offices, schools, hospitals, councils, work-sites, factories… 

The negative impact of poorly-handled HTEs on colleagues, customers, patients and work-teams is well-attested. Whether it’s toxic personalities, inveterate arguers, belligerent bosses or conflict-ridden contrarians, HTE’s distract from productive work focus, detract from good results, debilitate teams, distress and unsettle us, and create caustic cultures in the long term…

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  • The frequency of HTEs has been measured in several settings. For example, one study found 85% of us experienced chronic conflict in our work-lives, with 30% saying it was always or highly frequent. 
  • In schools, principals on average say they have five difficult encounters a day, while another study of operating theatres reported at least 1 and up to 4 HTEs among surgical teams per operation. 
  • Another study reported 64% said they were dealing with a toxic personality in their current work environment and 94% said they’d worked with someone toxic at some time. 
  • Other studies reveal that school principals are abused on a regular basis by parents and 91% of nurses reported verbal abuse from physicians or patients, with 10% saying they witnessed disruptive physician behaviour daily. 
  • The ongoing impact of these HTEs exact a significant emotional toll, with one study suggesting negative encounters affected people five times more strongly than positive ones.

The customary line is that conflict is beneficial – it clarifies, corrects, changes and leads to better solutions and decisions.

Yet another line of thought suggests something quite different: that it has prolonged negative consequences that undermine relationships, trust and collaboration as well as distracting from task-focus and wasting resources in prolonged conflict mediation processes that largely don’t work.… 

So, whether or not it is sporadically constructive, in many instances conflict it seems is damaging, harmful and linked to high stress and staff turnover. 

Building conversational capability to better deal with difficult HTEs may not reduce their frequency but it can help us to handle them better, have more constructive confrontations and mitigate some of the negative consequences that follow on the heels of unregulated conflict.

© Bill Cropper – The Change Forum 2023

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