1) Start out by saying something that you know the other person will find insulting, offensive, or just plain outrageous. 2) Do whatever you want and ignore everyone else. 3) Try to get the mediator on your side. 4) Refuse to listen to the other person’s point of view…
We’re living in a time of angry conversations, especially on social media. Especially if the topic is politics, conversations quickly degrade into insults, ad hominem attacks, and lordly assertions that “I’m done, have a nice day!” Here are five steps to having civil conversations…
Whether you support President Trump or not, you can see that he frequently makes statements that aren’t true and that can’t possibly be true, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s probably using what I’m going to call “performance speech acts”…
I’m taking my facilitation and mediation skills to the Scrum because: 1) Scrum emphasizes empiricism. 2) Scrum teams self organize. 3) SMs facilitate…
If you’re white, and you think that you can resolve disputes or clear up misunderstandings with someone who isn’t white just by “keeping an open mind,” you’ll never be effective. What you really need is experience around people who are different from you, to learn in your heart how different their experiences can be. Here’s how…
If I could tell people one thing from my years as a mediator, it would be this: choosing mediation doesn’t mean that you’ve failed. It means that you’re strong, principled, and fair; that you’re working to get what you really need; you know it’s never too late to…
Everyone has something they need. My guiding principle as a mediator is to help people figure out what they need and how to get it, in the most fair, honorable, and respectful way possible. I help them resolve the dispute, but more importantly…