I think that one of the best questions is about the problems that participants experience in their work. This is a great question to ask at the beginning of a program because it can help presenters relate the material throughout the event to participants’ own experiences.
Virtually everyone in our field knows about the wonderful book, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. It focuses on everyday conversations and not just crystalized disputes.
“Historically, CRS has played a significant role in facilitating dialogue, developing constructive relationships, and reducing the possibility of violence.
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).
Forgiveness can help people restore themselves as morally acceptable members of society as seen by themselves and others.
This will likely be of most interest to scholars writing in this area. In the final analysis, I think John’s original complaint that we are using BATNA “wrong” may be better directed at WATNA. I do think that many of us—myself included—have not been particularly clear about what we mean by WATNA, and in this sense may be using the term incorrectly.