It is no secret that the time I spent studying and working with the Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON) was the start of a love affair that has endured.The material from Fisher and Ury’s ‘Getting to Yes’, which evolved into the Seven Elements, is constantly useful as a strategic thinking tool. Addressing my group of…
Dispute resolution competitions are a rich learning space for students. My 15+ years coaching teams from my university to compete internationally were a rich experience for me and I enjoy continuing opportunities to be part of the competition community nationally and internationally. It has also been my great good fortune to observe and judge hundreds…
For the past 2 weeks I have been teaching an intensive postgraduate class on interest-based negotiation. Most of the group were international students who, until now, had been undertaking their studies online and in their own countries. Despite this country’s reputation as a safe place many were finding Australia and Australian ways difficult…
Insomnia drove me to a late-night television binge recently and I watched a rerun of Pretty Woman, the 1990 movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. For those of you yet to see this movie, its great strength is that it offers lines that are useful for almost every moment of your life. ‘You must…
Repetition works. It is a passive, effective tool of persuasion. It features heavily in the online marketing of programs for business leaders and, (as I am reminded as I endure another round of parliamentary elections in my country) in the fear-inducing speeches of politicians desperate to avoid an election loss. A Google search of ‘The…
This week the facilitator of a conflict resolution group to which I belong posed this question: ‘What is the greatest challenge currently facing us?’ My answer came quickly – the threat of hyper-polarization in an increasingly dangerous world. It was not particularly original or insightful of me – hyper-polarization seems to feature constantly in…
In the famous story of Noah’s Ark, Noah questions God about how he will find the animals he has been instructed to put in the ark. God replies, ‘If you build it, they will come’. The consistent repetition of this quotation throughout history (think of Kevin Costner’s movie Field of Dreams ) has created something…
One of the great professional satisfactions of being part of the mediation community is that it sits within a much wider cluster of non-adjudicative processes. This proximity to a broader cluster represents an opportunity for learning, experiment and the exercise of curiosity and investigation. In Australia, the cluster of which mediation is a part includes…
The work of Daniel Kahneman continues to provide a powerful lens for scrutinising human behaviour – useful for our human interactions in general and our life as mediators in particular. His work, with his late colleague Amos Tversky, gave us the field of behavioural economics and Kahneman the Nobel Prize in economics. I have…
In the beginning … Back in the 1976 Pound Conference called “Proceedings of the National Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice”, Harvard…
