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…

The world of mediation today is far from the embryonic world I joined in the late 1980s. It has been wonderful to be part of the journey. From time to time there are major ‘disruptions’ – the exploration of mandatory mediation in some jurisdictions; the debates over definitions and enforceability and most recently the impact…

One of the great joys of being part of the world-wide mediation community is the  opportunity to learn and keep learning from professionals whose practice is far from homogeneous. The generosity in sharing thoughts, ideas and even intellectual property is remarkable. Despite this, there is still a lot about the practice of mediation that is…

  The Daily Blogpost from the Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON) is always a great way to start the day. A quick read, it often turns something that I have been processing at the back of my mind into a more solid idea I can inspect and explore. This week, a particularly relevant post about…

On the first day of this year the international mediation community lost a wonderful friend and colleague. The memorial page established by his family shows just how wide and deep the affection reaches. He provided memorable experiences to so many of us. And whilst we both certainly remember (and enjoyed) his joie de vivre, the…

Reading Alan Limbury’s post last week on the value of the partisan challenged my thinking. Like all good challenges it provoked scrutiny of what I do as a mediator and where I consider I add value. As Alan’s partner in life and work it was particularly valuable to debrief his experience with him in greater…

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard (PON) sends to subscribers a daily blogpost of interesting negotiation thoughts and analyses. It regularly visits the negotiation styles of world leaders with the idea that ‘by studying the negotiation styles of famous leaders, we can identify what to emulate and what to abandon’. Unsurprisingly it has shone a…