Decision making

The Olympics have come and gone with all of the emotion and inspiration they bring. In our recent, fully-subscribed, residential Summer School on mediation skills for leaders, we reflected on the…

  Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by the whole Brexit affair. I'm not talking about the result of the vote itself, but about the referendum process, the behaviour it engendered, and its…

"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar" "Traveller, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk." Antonio Machado, as quoted and translated in Daring Greatly, Brene Brown Those…

I begin with two poetic images. One is from an 8th century Taoist poem - I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said, "The master's gone alone Herb-picking somewhere on the mount, Cloud-hidden,…

“Stand by your devices”; or “Access through the [virtual] looking glass” I take the first phrase of this blog title from a throw-away line in one of the recent comments by a student in my current…

To the extent that a mediator’s job involves listening to people complain and engage in negative behaviour, mediators face a serious mental health hazard. Research shows that listening to ongoing…

 With the summer going on, many mediation practitioners are enjoying well deserved holidays. Yet for some of them, even this period of year is time for some pondering over dispute resolution. Should…

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.” The Devil's Disciple, Act II (1901). G B Shaw I ended my previous…

John Nash died this week, in a tragic car accident. John Nash was the Nobel-prize winning mathematician whose theory of non-cooperative games published in 1950 has been described as one of the top…