At a lunch at Globe House, Temple Place in London in early 2006 on a balcony overlooking the Thames, the host, Michael Leathes, then an in-house corporate counsel with some years of user experience in mediation and the arb-med hybrid, asked me and the others present – Jeremy Lack, Tina Monberg, Miryana Nešić and Irena…

money

Twice today I’ve found myself responding to mediator reflections in these terms: the money’s not about the money. Both cases involved financial negotiation, even haggling, but that’s deceptive. The key to settlement lay not in the realm of calculation and rationality but in the more opaque social world of face, punishment, justice and emotion. In…

Holidays are a wonderful thing. Not only are they a great opportunity to step outside the obligations and scheduling of daily life, they open the space where the bigger picture lives. And so it was for me in my lovely apartment at the top of the cliff in Riomaggiore on the Cinque Terre in Italy….

Mediators should speak up confidently for mediation. In this post I will consider some reasons why this might be difficult, and others why it is so necessary. It is not only that mediation is not sufficiently known. It can also be intimidating, and it is our job to explain it. Shortly after I had finished…

I have recently been approached to enrol myself in an investor-state mediation training programme and also to speak at one of the sessions. That triggers off my deeper thoughts on the topic of investor-state mediation and related issues. This blog is an attempt to share my thoughts so that fellow mediation practitioners may consider whether…

This post written by Greg Wood and Constantin Adi Gavrilă. Is about the values of shadowing based on our shadowing experience that allowed reflections and lessons learned, we’d like to share. Greg, a Los Angeles based mediator with special expertise in resolving intellectual property disputes, received a letter of thanks from a US. District Court…

Law of Georgia on Mediation was adopted by the Parliament of Georgia on September 18, 2019 with 93 votes in favor and 0 against. A little over a month before adoption of the Law, on August 7, Georgia signed the Singapore Mediation Convention, being one of few countries from the region, or even the continent,…

Mediation is certainly featuring in the international news right now. This week Giuseppe De Palo posted an enthusiastic message about workplace conflict resolution. He congratulated the Office of the Ombudsman for UN Funds and Programmes as it prepares to establish a world-wide panel of mediators to make mediation “the first, natural step to take in…

I have been looking into matters of self-care and personal improvement for mediators recently and was surprised to find that, even though there has been some writing on this, there isn’t a lot. So, I would like to focus my next section of blog entries in the “Neuro-Linguist’s Toolbox” series. For readers who are new,…

Values drive practice

(I first wrote about mediation’s values 12 years ago at the tail end of a Masters in Conflict Resolution and Mediation Studies.(1) Two years of study had convinced me that it is our values, rather than the techniques we learn, that tell us what to do and say when when mediating. The intervening years haven’t…