Negotiation

"Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears." Surely some mistake, I thought; shouldn’t it be the other way round? Swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks?…

This is Part 1 of a two-part blogpost. Part 2 will be published in February 2024. This blog explores what narrative means for us in the field of conflict resolution as we navigate an increasingly…

  Mediation has long been used as a method of resolving disputes. Indeed, the practice of combining mediation and arbitration by the same neutral has been traced back to ancient Greece and Ptolemaic…

    As long ago as 1981, in the very first edition of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury proposed the following novel negotiation method:   …

I recently had the pleasure of taking part in a workshop led by William Ury in which small teams of participants were invited to apply his BB3 framework to challenging situations they were…

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog just about mediation practice. Other things always seem more important! However, as I was mediating this week, a thought occurred to me about a rather…

I have been musing about what a mediator might say to President Putin given the opportunity. That led me to compose a letter a few weeks ago, with which I have since tinkered. This is merely a…

"The world is made, not found." (W Barnet Pearce) I had been a mediator for about 10 years before I heard parties' initial words described as their "opening statement." This may surprise some…

It was Thursday, February 24th, 2022. From the morning, I had been mediating a dispute between a grandfather and two of his granddaughters. Then, during the break, I switched on my phone and read…