“The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young” W H Auden, “Law like Love” “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” ― Czesław Miłosz (Polish-American poet, 1911-2004) A couple of months ago, our 15-year old granddaughter,…
“The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering the genesis of hope. . . Conversation – respectful, engaged, reciprocal, calling forth some of our greatest powers of empathy and understanding – is the moral form of a world governed…
Paul Watzlawick’s well-known axiom “you cannot not communicate” has taken on a new relevance in recent months. It means that silence and other non-verbal behaviour are just as much a form of communication as what people say. We cannot switch the communication channel off, at least not if it is analogue – meaning continuous. Take…
“Value will change in the post-covid world. On one level, that’s obvious: valuations in global financial markets have imploded, with many suffering their sharpest declines in decades. More fundamentally, the traditional drivers of value have been shaken, new ones will gain prominence, and there’s a possibility that the gulf between what markets value and what people…
In lock-down it can be a challenge to differentiate one day from the next. We’ve all been a bit less fastidious with our general presentation and dress and we have become very used to the domestic backdrop we observe as we Zoom with colleagues and clients. One of the things I wisely grabbed as we…
I have been thinking about some aspects of listening recently. For quite a long while I have been listening to myself, trying to work out where I stand on the skill of listening, its use and its limits professionally in mediation, conflict management, and coaching, and privately, and also on my own needs to be…
So ended a recent article in the FT by Martin Wolf on the economic response needed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In it he argues that Governments acting in the collective interest must be the buyer of last resort as well as the lender of last resort to prevent the economy imploding as…
For once, I seem to have time. No travel, no trips out, no long walks on the hills. Some zoom mediations, granted, but still much more time. And with that, I find myself reflecting on the significance of time in mediation. Time is a major feature in mediation. Indeed, we ourselves have promoted the process…
Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Kurt Vonnegut God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater…
I hope you are fine. Obviously, I write this blog at home, where I am with my family. We are all healthy, but we try to adapt to this situation, to stay isolated to protect ourselves and those around us. As if the Earth stopped spinning, everyone stopped doing everything and most of all, it…
