In 2006, the Hong Kong Government introduced a scheme that marriages can be officiated by civil celebrants at a time and a venue chosen by the couple. Since then, I have been practising as a civil celebrant along with my other areas of practice. At the time of becoming a civil celebrant, I thought officiating…
This article was prepared by Christian-Radu Chereji and Constantin-Adi Gavrilă. Peter Drucker once famously said, “the only definition of a leader is someone who has followers“. While we do agree that Peter Drucker is a magnificent thinker and writer, his definition sounds a bit too simplistic. The followers are an important “ingredient” to leadership, but…
At a recent Global Ethical Finance Initiative event Katherine Trebeck of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance discussed her book ‘The Economics of Arrival’. The book explores the contribution of economic growth to wellbeing, particularly in the context of developed economies who could be considered to have ‘arrived’. It makes the argument that beyond a certain threshold,…
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…
Dear Young Mediation Enthusiast, Thank you for writing to me again. Time really flies as my last letter to you was written ten months ago on 2 December 2021. It is most encouraging to hear that you have been doing mediation cases of different nature and you find the work as a family mediator most…
The consultation phase of the independent review of the Australian National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS Review 2020-22) was completed in May and Findings and Recommendations are now available. The NMAS has been reviewed twice since its implementation in 2008. The Mediator Standards Board(MSB) share on their website that the most recent review was led by…
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 former British politician (and leadership contender when the Conservative Party was choosing Boris Johnson), Rory Stewart, is making a mark as an even more independent thinker than he was in the British Parliament. Recently, he hosted a three-part series on BBC Radio 4 entitled A Long History of Argument. It is worth listening to…
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…
Back in 2020, just before the world changed, I wrote a blog post on this site suggesting the establishment of the World Mediators’ Alliance on Climate Change. My argument was that mediation offers a much more sustainable way to resolve disputes than many other processes. We could also do a lot to reduce our carbon…
