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…
‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake is a fascinating look into the role that fungi play in making the natural world what it is. From the impact on humans to the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and trees. The relationship between humans, plants and fungi is also the focus of the Welcome Collection’s current exhibition ‘Rooted…
Mr Rimsky Yuen GBM SC JP was appointed as the Secretary for Justice of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (“Hong Kong Government”) on 1 July 2012. Prior to July 2012, Rimsky practised as a barrister primarily in different areas of commercial law. Apart from acting as advocate in court or arbitral proceedings, he…
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…
For readers who are new, the “Neuro-Linguist’s Toolbox” series is an ongoing series focused on using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) in our practice of amicable dispute resolution. The first section focused on rapport (the first of which can be found here). The second section focuses on matters of self-care and personal improvement for mediators (the first…
This month´s article was written together with Emmanuela Cipriano, University Professor and Doctoral Student at the University of Fortaleza, Collaborative Lawyer and Conflict Mediator Talking about a Culture of Peace nowadays is a challenge and implementing a culture of peace in different spaces is essential to reduce the escalation of conflicts, we are faced with…
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…
Most people’s experience of artificial intelligence (AI) is limited to interacting with a chat bot on their bank’s website. These bots are unimpressive, dispensing trivial and mostly unhelpful answers. Don’t be misled into thinking that unhelpful chat bots represent the state of the art in AI, though. The cutting edge of AI research has moved…
The world of mediation today is far from the embryonic world I joined in the late 1980s. It has been wonderful to be part of the journey. From time to time there are major ‘disruptions’ – the exploration of mandatory mediation in some jurisdictions; the debates over definitions and enforceability and most recently the impact…
