I blogged recently on the importance in mediation of not forgetting what is happening in the other room. It’s an easy mistake to make. Here’s another one that is easy to make. “Assumed motivation”. A lot of stuff happens both in conflicts and the process of their resolution. Things are said and done by each…

Introduction “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” William James Whether as mediators, advisors or parties in dispute, we consider ourselves rational, open minded thinkers. We make decisions in an objective, non-biased fashion, don’t we? Sadly, not often. We are all susceptible to a swarm of cognitive…

Early in the morning, I got a call from a lawyer representing one of the parties in cross border mediation. “Would you consider changing the venue for our meeting?”, he asked. Usually not a surprising demand. This time an expected one. We were about to meet in Milan, Italy which at the time being had…

Mediation has taken me to many places – professionally, physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Last week I was so fortunate to be doing six days of training in Tbilisi, Georgia, at New Vision University. Three days with students learning the skills of mediation and three days with young professionals reflecting on appropriate communication and challenging conversations…

“Hi, I’m Rick. I’m your mediator for today. I can’t decide what happens in this dumb dispute or how you resolve issues. My job is just to help people who are incapable of resolving conflict, like yourselves, find areas that you can agree on. That means I get to control what appears in the messages,…

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…

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…