Understanding mediation

As the global mediation community anxiously awaits the annual ICC mediation competition to be held in Paris next week, many students from universities around the world will be putting the finishing…

At a recent excellent conference hosted by Professor Ulla Glaesser at Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder), one of the workshop sessions focussed on the extent to which mediators can or should…

  (This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published). Studying and teaching with Professor Frank E.A. Sander at Harvard in the late 80’s was life changing. The…

“I’ve been trying to tell you, but you didn’t listen. You’ve got to go down more deeply and take more time, you’re rushing it and it’s too superficial. You’re hardly disturbing the surface. You’ll…

Much has been said and written about the demise of the joint meeting in mediation. In my experience, such a view is premature and, I fear, is potentially wasteful of the power that mediation brings…

This post was inspired by conversations with a group of people that I’ve joined last weekend for an amazing field trip in Southern Carpathians. In addition to breath-taking landscapes, mountains are…

It's not easy to blog once a month, even on a subject I love. Often I sit down to write with no real ideas or inspiration. Sometimes I end up that way too (as you may have noticed!). It becomes easy…

As Chip and Dan Heath describe in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, we are rational beings with a “Rider” that logically analyzes our surroundings. Our Rider tries to…

Try this thought experiment: imagine a mediator without empathy. How and what would they do? Would there be drawbacks? Benefits? The response to these questions probably depends on our own…