Writers Note: Despite its whimsical title, I’m afraid this blog entry is not. Do not read if you are not in a good mental or emotional place. Dear Santa, It’s been a few years since I last wrote. Many things have happened in between; some good, some bad. But November 2015 was hard. The Paris…
I would like to do something a little different from the usual monthly blog entry. I have in previous entries (July 2012 and July 2013) written about a peer mediation initiative that was the brainchild of my friend Aloysius Goh. The general idea is to teach 13-16 year olds how to resolve conflicts amicably in…
In February 2015, the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution organized and ran the Asia Pacific International Mediation Summit in New Delhi, India. I had the honour of presenting at a number of sessions at the summit and I would like to explore one of those sessions in this month’s entry. I was part…
Mediation Awareness Week in Ireland! 19th -23rd October 2015 In most jurisdictions, when people find themselves dispute, they think “I’ll phone my lawyer”. This is certainly the case in Ireland. When faced with marriage breakdown, a breach of contract, an employment issue, the default port of call is still legal proceedings, and people make an…
It is the beginning of the school term at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, where in this semester, I teach a Negotiation Workshop. In our first class yesterday, we played a pricing game based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There are many versions of this pricing game and it essentially introduces participants to…
I like mediating. I also like running marathons. What this says about my sanity is a question for another day, but the more I do both the more similarities I identify between the two disciplines. A recent week of particularly arduous mediation brought these similarities to mind more than usual. Preparation, of course, is the…
Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane I had expected that this blog would be a report on the annual conference of the Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ (AMINZ) held in Wellington last week. This would have been a great chance to catch up with colleagues from New Zealand and elsewhere (including this…
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” The Devil’s Disciple, Act II (1901). G B Shaw I ended my previous blog post [http://kluwermediationblog.com/2015/05/26/the-mediator-as-ethicist/] by saying that there were a couple of aspects of ethics and mediation – beyond the…
I recently had the opportunity to co-facilitate a training workshop with Tom Schaub of CMPartners and re-acquainted myself with a model of challenges that face leaders today. This is a model that was created by Ronald Heifezt and is captured in the book “Leadership Without Easy Answers”. I don’t pretend to be an expert on…
It’s not always easy to spot trends. But one that I have noticed over the last year or two is an increase in the number of cases I am being asked to mediate in which litigation or arbitration proceedings have not yet been issued. This produces different challenges. On the upside: • The parties have…
