mediation

  (This is the second of three parts of a keynote address to the YMCA Conference “From Reactions to Relations” in Burton on Trent on 20 November 2014) Last month I wrote in this blog about the fact…

(This is the first of three parts of a keynote address to the YMCA Conference “From Reactions to Relations” in Burton on Trent on 20 November 2014) Here's an interesting phenomenon. When asked to…

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…

  On emerging from a rather taxing meeting a phrase popped into my mind which has done so regularly since I started mediating. It runs “a soft answer turns away wrath” and it is to be found in the…

  Five days from now Scotland may be on its way to becoming the world’s newest country. Or it may not. Just over four million of us will vote on September 18th to determine future political…

  I have written before on this blog about ‘mediating from the neck up’: my conviction that I was taught (and teach) a rationalistic, even cerebral, process that privileges thought over emotion and…

I am interested in convergence – of ideas, of behaviour, of trends, of different disciplines. The more I read, the more common themes I discern in the arts, science, spirituality, leadership and in…

  Intellectual life is beset by ‘gap’ problems. Philosophers wrestle with the ‘mind-body problem’: the gap between material and non-material aspects of human existence. All science can be construed…

I have been reflecting recently on the individual and collective professional journeys we all undertake – and on the different stages we reach. My reading has taken me to a thought-provoking book by…