There is an Internet meme that goes “Somewhere, there is a 21 year old in a 50 year old’s body going ‘What the hell happened?’”. I try not to think about age generally; and more specifically, my age. In part because I can’t count that high. And if I wanted to count that high, I…
Another teaching year has ended and the last session’s review and goal setting for the future has thrown up the same questions it does every year, or indeed as does the end of every mediation training course. Many of these start with what if? What if I…do something wrong…make a mess of it…go blank…say the…
I’ve just returned from a week in Vientiane, the capital of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and that week away gives me both a [slight] excuse for a late blog entry and a couple of reflections on the outsider/observer role of both mediator and tourist. I should say, too, at this outset, that this is…
Three recent mediations in three jurisdictions raised some interesting issues. Each mediation was different. One involved a claim for professional negligence against a firm of solicitors for (allegedly) incorrectly including an occupied building in the sale of a large piece of land. The sellers were unhappy that many years had elapsed since the transaction, a number of them passing while…
Ok. Let me come clean. This is going to be one of my occasional funky entries. To the left-brain, conventional, conservative readers of this blog, please skip this entry. It may only serve to aggravate you and disrupt your structured and certain world. If you are still reading, thank you. This month’s entry is a…
“You cannot direct a living system; you can only disturb it”1 When mediators join a conflict, they enter a living system. Realise it or not, that system is instantly changed by their arrival. Change may be for the better, and we hope our influence is benign, but nothing is the same again. It therefore makes…
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…
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…
This week, I have had the genuine privilege of contributing one of the key note addresses at the Annual Conference of the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand (AMINZ) in Wellington. It has been a terrific conference, superbly organized by the indefatigable Deborah Hart. The standard of the many and diverse sessions has been…
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…
