Evaluative Mediation

Like all businesses, mediation ultimately depends upon (and needs to reflect) what the users want from it. That doesn’t of course mean that theirs in the only relevant perspective – mediators also…

Greg Bond's recent post on mediation cultures reminded me of an encounter I had with a group of mediators several years ago. Allow me to share with you my recollection of what happened. I was…

Last week I spent some time with a European mediation organisation looking to review its mediator accreditation and practice standards. Somehow I expected a discussion about various accreditation…

My wife and I recently spent a very convivial evening at the beautiful home in Sydney of leading Australian mediator Alan Limbury and his wife, Dr. Rosemary Howell, who coaches a team from the…

  This post is unlikely to win me friends on America's West Coast and it may even see my US mediation teaching visa withdrawn, however when the issue even has its own Facebook group called Save the…

I have never been a great fan of mediator's proposals. I took the view that the mediator's job, done well, was to help the parties to come to a solution themselves. Party autonomy and all that…

At the risk of being accused of being too much of a purist, I just have to have a little grumble about the latest misappropriation of the term mediation. All involved in promoting and encouraging the…

Mediators deal in words – not exclusively, but a great deal (and perhaps sometimes too much, but that's another blog). So it pays for us to think carefully about what words really mean. A couple of…

Recently I have noticed mediators using a label to describe other people's practice. It is rarely a compliment. That label is "evaluative"; as in "she takes rather an evaluative approach" or "his…