Question How long it takes before your average mediation is concluded? You may have experience with the mediation process as a mediator, party, advisor, or referral. Or not, and you may simply wonder how much time is needed for a mediation process to be concluded. Theory and practice It’s interesting if we think about the…
(This is a ‘letter to self’ about court ADR research sent from the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Conference, San Francisco, April 2017.) Do Litigants Know Their Options? It’s always fascinating to come to a country where mediation is business as usual. There are some downsides to this, but the upside that immediately strikes a…
It was fifty years ago at the end of May that the Beatles launched the album (or LP as it was then called) “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on the world – and the world was changed forever. 1967 was quite a year. It was the “Summer of Love”. Revolution was in the air…
Have you ever wondered who mediators are helping? The parties, obviously! Well, not so obvious to our critics. In this blog I consider worries about mediation’s approach to manifest injustice before making the case for understanding the mediator as co-creator, with the parties, of outcomes. I argue that co-creation enhances the prospects for justice. Stories…
Morton Deutsch, the great social psychologist of common sense, explained the difference between competition and cooperation thus: “if you’re positively linked with another, then you sink or swim together; with negative linkage, if the other sinks, you swim, and if the other swims, you sink.”[1]Cooperation and Competition. In M. Deutsch, P. T. Coleman, & E….
I am at my desk, an hour after the conclusion of a really fascinating event here in Edinburgh, in which my colleague, Charlie Woods, and I acted as mediators in a simulation of a mediated process involving 10 delegations representing different interests in the current Brexit negotiations. With over 50 participants, allocated randomly to one…
“Whilst I am grateful to counsel and solicitors for their presentation and assistance in this matter, the legal battles raging between these two brothers are unedifying, unpleasant and exceptionally wasteful. They must obviously be inflicting pain and harm on others, as well as themselves. I urge them on both sides, with the assistance of their…
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.” These words of Voltaire are as apt today as they were when he wrote them in the 18th century. I don’t know about you but this year seems to be a curious mixture where some people purport to deal in apparent certainties, which…
An apology can be given on many levels from a general acknowledgement at one end of the spectrum to a profound apology at the other end. The profound apology requires a number of essential ingredients. The first, and most important, is preparation. For both the person giving the apology and the one receiving it, time…
John and David Sturrock 1. Introduction Several years ago, while travelling back with my son David to Oxford where he was studying as an undergraduate, we discussed my work as a mediator and his study of economics, particularly the learning for us both from Game Theory. I (John) had been familiar with The Prisoners’ Dilemma…
