Does the admonition my mother gave me during my childhood still ring true in an era of refugees, immigration and fears? Natural boundaries have existed since the dawn of human existence to separate “them” from “us” and, once Dunbar’s Number kicked in at scale, political boundaries existed as stories that Read more…
Yes. But it requires you to engage and be active, rather than passive. How many people do you know that are passive participants in their own lives? How many of them are in conflict with others? Stuff doesn’t just “happen”(no matter what the bumper sticker may tell you) and active Read more…
Wisdom and behaving ethically often overlap. But most often not always. In a mediation, arbitration, facilitation or when having a transformative moment with a transgressing client, ethics can go out the window for the professional peace builder. This is because facilitators, mediators, arbitrators—peace builders all—are human. There is the idea among Read more…
Poltergeists can present a problem, whether they are intending to come through your television or spin straw into gold. Poltergeists these days come through social media, offering multiple spinning wheels, promising to turn the straw of engagement and trust, into the gold of long lasting revenues. For mediation professionals, Read more…
80% of the conflicts in your organization will be solved by 20% of the people in your organization. And, not all of those people will have positional titles, effective job descriptions, or even work in “traditional” departments that “are supposed to” address conflicts. Pushing the frontier of who gets what, Read more…
There are veiled threats, open threats, unspoken threats and curbed threats. Threats come about when people are frustrated, feel as though they are powerless, or when they know that they have the power. Power, of course, is influence and control of events. But the weird thing about power is that Read more…
ADR professionals are asked to where many hats, and are often called to wear them all with excellence. There is much debate over whether it’s good enough to be good enough anymore, or if we all have to be excellence, but in the space of ADR, arête is important. Arête Read more…
Innovation is the “hot” word among all the business thought leaders as we kick off 2015… There’s “dark-side” innovation, “game changing” innovation and even “shark jumping” innovation, as a recent search of LinkedIn thought influencer posts recently revealed. But there’s very little talk about organizational innovation focused on the greatest—and Read more…
For many organizations, the 21st century has proven to be pretty much the same as the 20th century. People still get hired and fired in much the same ways that they did 20 years ago. Organizations and businesses still do the core processes of their businesses—sales, finance, marketing, accounting—in the Read more…
What is self-determination? It is an individual and personal equation, involving a combination of autonomy, intrinsic motivation, understanding of cause and effect and the intellect and character to make empathetic choices. Preserving client self-determination in conflict resolution is the purview of ‘the experts”: People who are more educated than the Read more…