“Historically, CRS has played a significant role in facilitating dialogue, developing constructive relationships, and reducing the possibility of violence.
There aren’t many benefits to being in a bad mood, even if that’s your reliable, long-standing default mode. Being in a bad mood can make you less effective, less open to creative solutions, and due to stress, it can affect your health. Most peoples’ jobs have a degree of stress, some much more than others.
Chances are you heard this wise advice from your Mom when she reminded you that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Mediation can be hard. Often, the parties start out a great distance apart, work towards narrowing the gap, but occasionally can’t quite straddle the gulf to come to an agreement in a single day. Last week, I gave my final lesson to my students at Pepperdine on sophisticated steps for breaking an impasse. I told them that it was a matter of both skill and faith.
There are better and worse ways to do it. The Muse’s article on delivering bad news to your boss has lessons for talking to clients and colleagues too.
Join us in Chicago for an international forum to exchange ideas among experienced mediators and advocates practicing in all areas of mediation including family, commercial, tort, community, employment and international mediation.
“In ‘litigation as usual,’ settlement often comes only after adversarial posturing, the original conflict escalates, the relationships deteriorate, the process takes too long and costs too much, and nobody is really happy with the resolution
I would say all of those cases were ripe for mediation at the time I was asked to mediate them. How can that be? Simple. In each case, the attorneys/parties had the right information, and a strong enough desire to settle, in order to make good decisions. Could those cases, which were further into the judicial process, have been resolved sooner? Possibly. But in retrospect, I don’t think they were ready until we mediated them.
Under the common law approach used in the United States, there is generally no duty to negotiate in good faith, and negotiators can exercise their BATNA power unless they decide to assume the good faith duty.
OFOI Tim Hedeen described the following class exercise about the nature of negotiation, which can easily be adapted in many ways. (If you want to give students even more of a run for their money, you might assign students to read the short piece on the definition of negotiation that Andrea Schneider, Noam Ebner, David Matz, and I wrote).