“I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.” Mark Kingwell, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age, [Rowman & Littlefield, 2000] A recent email from a US-based group that specialises in facilitating public dialogues in difficult cases noted…
Quite often, we hear mediators and mediation trainers using the fable of “Blind Men and an Elephant”, which is a story about several blind persons describing an elephant differently out of their own experience by way of their respective touches of the different parts of the same elephant, to illustrate that a party’s own interpretation…
(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published). Thanks to Martin Svatos, for pointing out in his recent blog a number of cases where mediators or would-be mediators feature in popular films. That set me thinking … A few years ago, I offered a workshop on mediation based on…
Bloomberg (not my usual reading fodder, I confess) carried an interesting piece a couple of months ago, entitled “Meet the Real Force Behind the Brexit Talks”. Yes, it was about Brexit (yawn) but it was about an unseen side of the negotiations. Opening with the line “In every negotiation the most important work is done…
Mediators need to remember stuff – lots of stuff. Sure, it helps to have a flush mentality – as my very first, and now long gone, boss used to tell me. Mr. Dalgety would come back to the office after a hearing, raise his hand beside his head and pull an imaginary chain before moving to…
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (2011: 390) This blog arises from my recent reading of Dr Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End (2014). This might…
(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published). I want to use this month’s blog to riff off Greg Bond’s recent insightful blog, because he’s touched on core issues of language, making sense and personal reflection. That post arrived almost in the wake of an email quoting jazz pianist…
This entry is an ongoing series focused on using Neuro-Linguistic Programming in our practice of amicable dispute resolution. For ease of reference and the convenience of readers, I will list in this and subsequent entries the series and links to it. 1. A Neuro-Linguist’s Toolbox – A Starting Point and Building Rapport 2. A Neuro-Linguist’s…
Today I want to talk about why mediators should care about EVO Moment #37. For those of you new to the eSports (“electronic sports”) scene, there is an annual tournament, the Evolution Championship Series (“EVO”), that focuses exclusively on fighting games. Such games typically have players battle each other with unique characters, with the first…
This entry is an ongoing series focused on using Neuro-Linguistic Programming in our practice of amicable dispute resolution. For ease of reference and the convenience of readers, I will list in this and subsequent entries the series and links to it. 1. A Neuro-Linguist’s Toolbox – A Starting Point and Building Rapport 2. A Neuro-Linguist’s…
