Prague Mediation Summer Academy 4-8 July 2016
Interested in an International Mediation Certification Program this summer? Come to the Prague Mediation Summer Academy 4-8 July 2016. It will be nothing less than sensational! Read more about it here.
Interested in an International Mediation Certification Program this summer? Come to the Prague Mediation Summer Academy 4-8 July 2016. It will be nothing less than sensational! Read more about it here.
Prof. Nadja Alexander, Academic Director of SIDRA, introduces the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy.
Nadja Alexander, Academic Director of SIDRA (Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy).
This new centre was announced for the first time at the keynote address of the #GPCseries Singapore. Www.Sidra.academy
Posted by The Global Pound Conference Series – GPC on Thursday, March 17, 2016
Exciting news! The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA), was officially announced at first event of The Global Pound Conference Series!
GPC Series Singapore: Final Thoughts on the Drivers of Change …
Final panel at the #GPCseries Singapore: Prof. Nadja Alexander and A/Prof. Joel Lee (Educators), Joephine Hadikusumo and Michael McIlwrath (Users), Aelx Oddy and Joseph Tirado (Advisors), and Michael Hwang and Joanna Kalowski (Providers), were asked by Michael Leathes (IMI) what they saw as the Drivers of Change in #DisputeResolution
Posted by The Global Pound Conference Series – GPC on Friday, March 18, 2016
Lend your voice, shape a legacy!
The Global Pound Conference (GPC) is the place for you to meet like-minded and passionate individuals and stakeholders to discuss the future of dispute resolution and access to justice.
Launching in Singapore in March 2016 and ending in London in 2017, the GPC series will convene all stakeholders in the field of dispute resolution around the world to expound upon key challenges in Appropriate Dispute Resolution (ADR) of interest and relevance to all. Whether you are a dispute resolution user, mediator, lawyer, judge, arbitrator, academic or student, you will not want to miss this golden opportunity!
The exciting 2-day inaugural GPC Singapore 2016 held at the Supreme Court of Singapore from 17 to 18 March 2016 will provoke debate on existing tools and techniques, stimulate new ideas and generate actionable data on the needs of corporate and individual dispute resolution users, both locally and globally.
Come listen to eminent international and local speakers. Join them to shape the future of dispute resolution and improve access to justice by providing your input! You will also attend a diverse range of engaging sessions held concurrently on what matters most to you, be it Court ADR, Arbitration, Online Dispute Resolution or Neuroscience in ADR. There will also be networking opportunities to interact with local and international stakeholders through panel discussions, interactive sessions and informal engagements.
Come and join us now! Please click here to see programme outline.
CDRC Vienna – the IBA-VIAC Mediation and Negotiation Competition will go into its second round from 28 June to 2 July 2016 in Vienna.
The Competition brings together students from around the world who specialize in mediation or negotiation to enable them to prove their skill and strategy to achieve the best deals in simulated legal mediations based on an adapted version of the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot problem.
The 5-day event will include over 50 competition sessions and will be accompanied by daily educational and social events, uniting 200 competitively selected students and experts from over 30 countries.
Practitioners specializing in mediation or negotiation who would like to volunteer as an Expert Assessor for the competition are invited to apply online until 31 March 2016.
For more information please visit www.CDRCVienna.org, stay posted on Facebook or Twitter or contact competition director Claudia Winkler at claudia.winkler@CDRCVienna.org.
Please click here to see the flyer of the event.
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 initiatives around the world with perhaps some exploration of “mediation models” and how they fit into national regulatory frameworks.
I was pleasantly surprised. What ensued was a passionate and deep exploration of some of the very real issues facing our field. Here are some of the questions we grappled with:
1. What mediators actually do and what they think or say they do. We know that self-reporting is not always reliable, so why should it be any different with mediators? Reporting on research Lorig Charkoudian concludes: “It is possible that when mediators are asked to self-report their strategies they report those that they think they use or think they should be using, but are simply unaware of their actual behavior.”
2. Who gets to say what mediation is and what it is not. As John Sturrock asks, “who owns mediation?” Is it a question for national regulation or is it up to the parties?
3. Picking up further on John’s previous post, if mediation is, as Ken Kressel suggests, “highly context dependent”, then to what extent do we (and other stakeholders such as users) desire professional parameters for mediators? And how could we go about setting such parameters?
We seem to be at a turning point for the mediation profession. These are questions that affect all practitioners, and users for that matter. And the good news is, that we can still weigh into the conversation.
After many years of positional posturing about the facilitative—evaluative dichotomy and whether we need mediator accreditation standards at all, there seems to be:
1. a growing acceptance of the need for mediation standards and a healthy debate about what they should be;
2. an emerging recognition that we need to move beyond the facilitative—evaluative distinction; and
3. a subtle yet significant shift in the global mediation discourse towards an increasing, albeit tentative, acceptance of a variety of models of mediation practice.
Let’s focus for a minute on the third point: diversity. It sounds progressive and even politically correct. It also reflects the reality of mediation practice — in both domestic and cross-border settings.
But how meaningful is this diversity? How does it bring us further as a professional field? How is a mediator to define his or her practice? How is a user to know which mediation approach is better for them? Is it really progressive or the beginning of a very slippery slope where anything goes?
In mediation, the quality of the process is very much linked to the quality and skills of the practitioner. This is where the business of formal credentialing or accreditation of mediators comes into play. Mediator accreditation is concerned with who is judged to be competent to mediate and who is not. Accreditation issues reflect the diversity–consistency tension, that is the tension between, on one hand, the motivation to encourage diversity in practice through flexibility and innovation in credentialing matters and, on the other, to establish consistent and reliable measures of quality in mediator competence and practice through regulation. It is a highly controversial topic in the politics of mediation, and the central theme of the debate focuses on the extent to which uniform standards are required and what they should be.
It is about shaping the meaning of mediation and deciding which practices fall within the definition of mediation and which fall outside it. It is about deciding who gets to be in the mediation club and who does not.
This heightened interest in mediation diversity seems to throw up a whole lot of questions that some mediation boards, bodies and organisations, especially those endorsing one specific model, had hoped they had just put to bed. There is, however no time for sleeping now. We must keep watch and keep talking with one another. There is an ongoing need to review and revise accreditation and practice standards in a way that is both responsive and responsible. Yes, if you thought it was all over, I’m afraid it may be time for a new committee☺
Frivolity aside, with a greater acceptance of diversity come new challenges. One is this: the need for a real relationship between mediation standards and their corresponding practices. How can we design standards to reflect a broader and deeper range of practice?
As a starting point, let’s look to the notion of clarity of purpose in mediation. Joe Folger explains that “no tool is ever free from the purpose to which it is put” and provides numerous examples to illustrate his point such as the various purposes for which active listening, caucus and other mediator interventions can be used. So, what is the underlying purpose behind mediation practice? Of course, the answer varies among mediators, users, institutions, models of practice and cultures. So let’s start with you. What is your purpose in mediation? Whether you are a mediator, professional representative or party user, you will have a purpose. What is your goal in participating in mediation? What do you hope to achieve in the process?
Mediation community members and institutions need to deeply and collectively reflect on why they do what they do and what values and assumptions they bring to the mediation table. No mediator is completely neutral in the sense that he/she is free of assumptions, and personal and professional values. Where mediation values are not made explicit in codes of conduct, accreditation standards or other norms, then the way mediation is likely to be practised will be a reflection of the implicit worldviews and personal beliefs and assumptions of mediators themselves. So if you describe yourself as a facilitative mediator, what does that mean in terms of the purpose of, and the values that underpin, the facilitative model?
Greater diversity in “accredited” mediation models will likely characterise the next wave of development in the professionalisation of mediation and mediators. Institutions such as the International Mediation Institute (IMI) are leading the way in this regard. IMI’s world-wide mediator certification scheme expressly recognises that mediators approach their craft in different ways and may be informed by different goals, values and assumptions in a variety of cultural settings. As professional training and education in mediation develops in sophistication, so too will offerings that challenge the standard Western facilitative dogma. So before you click out of this post, ask yourself:
1. Are you clear about the purpose of every mediation you do?
2. Are you able to articulate the values that inform your practice?
3. Where you find yourself in a tricky situation in a mediation where you are required to make a judgement call, are you able to explain your choice of intervention according the values you have previously articulated?
If you are unclear or unsure in any of your responses, it’s probably time for reflection and discussion with colleagues. In fact, this would be a terrific conversation to have with mediators, mediation advocates, referrers and users at Singapore’s inaugural Global Pound Conference in March this year.
You see, if we want to embrace diversity in mediation practice, we must be prepared to be accountable for it. It is time to ask ourselves hard questions about the theories behind our practices. We owe it not just to ourselves and the quality of our practice; we owe it to our clients and to the future of the mediation profession.
This training course will be held in Paris on 30 & 31 May 2016!
Please click on the brochure for more detail.
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 negativity impairs the brain function of the listener. Yes! Listening can be bad for you if you have a whinging party in the room, and it’s even worse if you have two or more.
Trevor Blake writes about this phenomenon in his book, Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life. While Blake is not specifically thinking about mediators, the potential implications for the mental health of mediation professionals is alarming.
Apparently being exposed to too much complaining can have a dumbing down effect. Exposure to 30 minutes or more of complaining destroys neurons in the brain’s hippocampus – a part of the brain that is used in problem-solving and decision-making. In other words, our capacity for problem-solving decreases the more we are exposed to complaining and conflict. Yet, as mediators, our job is to listen to exactly this type of non-productive negative blah blah in order to support parties to make a shift towards positive problem-solving. Could it be that while we are enhancing their capacity for problem-solving, we are decreasing ours? What sort of impact could this potentially have on our mediation style and even our professional abilities over time?
You may laugh. Yes, perhaps it’s seems an unlikely scenario now. But science is moving much faster than most of us realize. As neuro-scientific findings become more accessible, there will be implications for all aspects of our professional and personal lives. Scientific findings such as these may even affect our professional indemnity insurance premiums.
So what can we as mediators do to inhibit the depletion of neurons by complaining parties and in doing so protect our problem-solving capacity? For it’s not exposure to conflict that is potentially detrimental to our brains but the lack of constructive engagement with it.
Here are three thoughts:
1. Introducing some distance between the mediator and the parties can be helpful. For example, factoring in breaks for our own mental health is important. Often we are so focussed on the parties that we forget about ourselves and our own ability to be influenced, especially on an unconscious level. So breaks, food, water, and fresh air – not just for the parties and their lawyers but also for mediators – are an essential component of designing the structure of mediation processes.
2. Move from ADR to ODR. Now some of you might be cleverly thinking that you can create some distance by introducing online aspects into your practice and placing the parties at the other end of a cyberlink. Yes, an interesting idea. Does it make a difference? Possibly … but probably not. The research shows that exposure to negativity via TV is just as bad.
3. Charge more money for whinging clients. So even if your brain is the worse for wear, your wallet will be better off.
Now, that made you smile, right?
On that note, let me say thank you for staying tuned in 2015. Stay posted for exciting things in 2016 at the Kluwer Mediation Blog.
For original article, please click here.
Is it true that as we get older, we tend to forget things more easily? Or is it that some things are just less important?
As negotiators and mediators, we often deal with complex layers of information that appear all too much for any one person to recall. So we enter the negotiation room burdened with our big folders or sporting our slim iPads laden with mega data containing all the information that we might possibly need. I wonder though, if we sometimes rely too much on the documents when we could be structuring and presenting information and issues in ways that would maximise the negotiation experience — for everyone.
Let’s start with an overview of memory. From my reading there seem to be three types of memory: immediate, short term and long term. Immediate memory can take in a massive amount of information, but only for a couple of seconds. Some of this information passes into short-term memory, which works as a kind of central processor for the brain. We can think of it as our working memory. Certain information from our short-term memory will eventually establish itself in our long-term memory.
Of course some male readers might be brave enough to suggest that much conflict would be prevented if information destined for a woman’s immediate memory remained there rather than finding its way into her long-term memory – but let’s not go there today. I want to focus on the short term memory and how we can make the most use of it in negotiation.
The capacity of our Short Term Memory has been the subject of significant neurological and psychological research over the last 60 years.
The first seminal study on Short Term Memory capacity was conducted by Millar (1956). He famously argued that our Short Term Memory can only hold 7 (+/– 2) pieces or ‘chunks’ of information at any given time, and so was coined the “Magical number 7” for Short Term Memory. While Millar’s was an early seminal study in the field, more recent research has expanded on these early findings. Recent studies continue to show that our Short Term Memories do have a limited capacity, and that ‘chunking’ is critical to the amount of information we can hold in in our Short Term Memory. So this means that information needs to be presented in chunks both verbally and visually with the aim that negotiators at the table will be able to recall the chunks, rather than the detail. (You can look up your suitably-chunked iPad for detail).
At the same time, these studies show a lot of individual difference in the amount and type of information that we can retain.
For example, some researchers posit that Short Term Memory is more likely to be the ‘Magical number 4’ than 7, and that other processes are important in influencing our Short Term Memory limits. Factors that can affect our Short Term Memory abilities may include:
• our level of rehearsal of the information in our Short Term Memory (e.g. practising in front of the mirror before going into a negotiation),
• our level of attention,
• the amount of time elapsed before we must recall the information,
• the amount of interference we encounter, and
• our memories’ overall ability to recall information when needed.
Further, certain types of information may be easier than others to ‘chunk’ and so seemingly increase their Short Term Memory capacity.
From a negotiation standpoint, the capacity of our Short Term Memory is important as this information is used by our executive functions for decision making. So if we are unable to take in enough, or the right kinds of, information, this will have a direct impact on the quality of decisions that we make.
A negotiator’s initial psychological state is important as certain negative states can reduce the amount of information we are able to hold in our Short Term Memory. For example, anxious individuals absorb and recall less information in our Short Term Memory then non-anxious individuals. This means if negotiators are anxious at the commencement of the negotiation process, they will be more likely to miss key information or more regularly need information to be repeated (particularly following breaks) as they may have trouble holding and recalling multiple pieces of information at any given time. Essentially, the calmer participants feel during negotiation, the more likely they are to absorb the required information. If you notice that some parties seem to be mis-recalling or missing key information, it could be related to their Short Term Memory and the way in which they process information.
The good news is that neuroscientific research suggests that we can influence how our Short Term Memory serves us as negotiators. Through pre-negotiation stress-reducing and focus-building mindfulness activities, we can reduce sources of interference and raise our magic number. Here it’s important to pay attention to how much information we can hold at any given time and whether we have a preference for how we like to receive information.
For example, when someone reads a news story aloud to you, do you find yourself asking to read it afterwards? If so, you may prefer to ‘chunk’ visual information. How do you cope with ‘interference’ during an actual negotiation such as interruptions, breaks, managing the process while also retaining and using key information? Recently I attended a negotiation with my 14 month old daughter in tow. although she was well-behaved (by baby standards, that is) one of the lawyers at the table was completely thrown. (And, no it wasn’t a tactic, just an unavoidable situation.) So, depending upon your Short Term Memory strengths and weaknesses, you may need to adjust aspects the negotiation process. For example, you may choose to use checklists, note-taking, visualisations or you may ask to sit far away from the baby.
Consider taking steps to accommodate different communication preferences in your negotiations. Think about using multi-modal methods of communication such as visual and verbal summaries and physically walking around the proposed site of your join venture development. This will help all negotiators to better absorb, process and understand information. Also keep breaks relatively short so as not to ‘interfere’ with the effective communication of key information from the session.
For original article, please click here.
The regulation of mediation is a topic that has the potential to excite and enthuse each and every one of us. Never before in regulatory history have so many people like you and I been involved in shaping mediation regulatory policy. Whether we like it or not, we cannot not influence how mediation practice is regulated. We are living and breathing regulatory stakeholders.
So what can we do about it then? How can we use our position of ‘regulatory’ influence intelligently and have fun at the same time?
Audience members had the opportunity to design their own personal regulatory plan for mediation.
Photos of the event below:
