Golden bridging and bonding

Sun Tzu advised leaders to build a golden bridge over which your opponent can retreat. In other words, make any option except retreat seem inadvisable and unattractive. Corner your adversary so that even a modest gain can seem preferable to massive loss. Do not make them fight to the death; do not make them choose between losing face or experiencing massive loss. The sense of an honorable "negotiated" outcome is a way to tie up the conflict faster and make the outcome more sustainable. A home on the French Riviera for the dictator is a small price to end a brutal war. 

The other common use of bridge in our social science lexicon was most popularized by Robert Putnam in his germinal volume, Bowling Alone. Putnam's exegesis called the relational development within a community "bonding" and the relational development between a community and an external party "bridging." 

For example, a community that is in a food desert is approached by a grocery chain specializing in health foods and it buys the building first, only eventually announcing their plans. They are resisted by the community and eventually give up, sell the building, and move somewhere else.

A good community organizer might have worked on the bridging possibilities to get the external party to develop a relationship first, discuss advantages to the community, and to ask the community to help plan its move, and to just generally listen. That bridging can be a golden bridge bringing advantages back and forth to both the external investor and to the community. 

Build more golden bridges...