“Patients don’t expect doctors to be perfect. They do expect them to strive for perfection by opening up their work to scrutiny” Atul Gawande, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 6/12/15. A bit of a treat for me last week, when four of my favourite academics came to Edinburgh. They were keynotes at Mediate Scotland…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am exercised by the question of justice in mediation. I test the concept on people I meet; responses range from “that’s an interesting idea” to “it has nothing whatever to do with it”. At a conference earlier this year a senior lawyer claimed he could count…

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…

Interesting ripples on the interweb about mediator ‘styles’ – (see the LinkedIn group ‘ADR, Conflict Resolution and Mediation Exchange’). One discussion thread was prompted by a nice ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ question: can a mediator have any style or does the style vary from situation to situation? The discussion has ranged from styles to models, with…

After a recent conversation in Singapore with Joel Lee, one of our colleagues from our Blog I had a chance to meet there, I find interesting to briefly mention what is the famous “Fiutak Mediation Circle” that we use as model in our mediation training at Groupement Pro-Mediation (“GPM”) in the French speaking-part of Switzerland…

Like many of us I am constantly torn between simplicity and complexity. The world is complex: that’s a given. But a beautiful morning or a lover’s kiss is simplicity itself, and it’s a fool who overcomplicates it. And so with mediation, the profession/activity/vocation that has grown on me like a skin these last nineteen years….

I like the Christmas season. It marks a very happy time in the year for me and I’m afraid, it makes me a bit silly. In that spirit, I hope readers will forgive that I start off with an Elephant story… I recently had the need to think about the various models of mediation that…