Gini Nelson’s Engaging Conflicts

Happy Holidays and best wishes for the new year!

“Now that the current Conflict Resolution movement as a cultural virus has run its course and become institutionalized, what now?” - Doug Yarn

Engaging Conflicts Today interviews Doug Yarn who is Executive Director of the Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and Professor of Law at Georgia State University. Formerly inhouse for the AAA, he is an experienced practitioner and has trained mediators and public entities. His publications include The Dictionary of Conflict Resolution (Jossey-Bass 1999), two state practice treatises, and numerous book chapters and articles. He holds degrees from Duke University, University of Georgia, and Cambridge University, England. In his spare time, he plays Uilleann pipes in a traditional Irish ceili band.

If you would like a copy of his interview, and are not signed up for the newsletter (which you can do in the sidebar on the right!), email me this week at engagingconflicts@gmail.com with Doug Yarn in the subject line and I’ll email it to you.

This is part of on ongoing series reviewing Robert Cialdini’s new book, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. I write more about the series on the page called “Ways to Be Persuasive”. The book lists 50 strategies, and I will be reviewing each from time to time. Of course I’m not the first or only mediation blogger to write about this book! Nancy Hudgins, a San Francisco attorney-mediator and blogger posted about the book here.

Way to Be Persuasive #1.
How can inconveniencing your audience increase your persuasiveness?

This is my shorthand note to myself for this chapter: Bandwagon and social proof. Join countless others in doing this; if operators are busy, please call again. Inconvenience demonstrates social proof of “others are doing this.”

People’s ability to understand what affects their behavior is surprisingly poor. When they are not sure what to do, they tend to look around to see what other people like themselves are doing to guide their own decisions and actions. Concerning call centers, the thought process can go like this: If you get through immediately, are too few others calling in? If you have to wait [note: but not too much], doesn’t that mean lots of other people think it’s a good idea to call? Another example: hotel guests asked to help the environment by recycling their towels did increase towel recycling, but hotel guests told that the majority of other guests recycled their towels increased towel recycling even more.

I love this Jane Brody Personal Health review Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions published today at the online New York Times. As I have said before, I embraced coffee as my drug of choice when I started law school, having survived graduate school’s all nighters with it. But for a VERY brief flirtation with green tea (which I NEVER liked — an authority had stated that if you only cut out coffee, you would lose 10 pounds over the course of a year and I HAD to try that — I only lasted about 1 month, if I recall — it wasn’t going to be worth it even if true), I remain committed to coffee. Here’s an excerpt from Jane’s article:

[A]s with any product used to excess, consumers often wonder about the health consequences. And researchers readily oblige. Hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes. Coffee and tea, after all, are complex mixtures of chemicals, several of which may independently affect health.

Here are some stats provided with the article to keep in mind:

Here are links to my earlier posts about coffee art, and about super coffee.

Image from http://www.pachd.com/free-images/food-images.html

Vickie Pynchon is the most prolific ADR blogger I know, and she writes LOTS more than her main ADR blog, Settle It Now Negotiation Blog. This week, she is hosting Blawg Review #179 at her Intellectual Property ADR Blog.

Here’s her opener:

If intellectual property had a theme song it would have to be “Like a Virgin.”

Why?

Because IP is all about “the very first time,” the “aha” moment, the creative spark that gives rise to previously undreamed imaginings.The restrictions of “how we’ve always done things” fall away and the numbing repetition of days become vibrant. The rest, of course, is work. Trial and error. Success. Failure. Rearranging the disaligned. Completion.

Then the suits arrive. That’s us, the lawyers.

In honor of the moment of creation at the root of every intellectual property dispute, this week’s Blawg Review No. 171 gives you the great virgins of history.

To kick off the “virgin” IP ADR Blawg Review, we’re linking you to Kate Monro’s brilliant and (in)famous blog The Virginity Project and giving you a tantilizing excerpt:

Here’s the link for more ….

It’s enormously challenging to write a Blawg Review. Bravo, Vickie!

Back in April I posted Part One of a series on use of the MBTI in professional practices (and personal life). I expanded greatly on it in an article just published in the ABA’s Law Trends & News. This newsletter is introduced by its editor thusly:

Below is the third issue of Law Trends for the 2007–08 bar year. As always, this is a very exciting issue, and I am very happy to present it to you. As with prior issues, this e-newsletter includes articles, checklists, and other valuable practice information and practical tips, all from each of our substantive practice areas in the General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division. This issue also highlights some emerging areas, some interesting checklists, and much more.

While this is written explicitly for lawyers, whether mediators or not, the same principles apply to mediators who are not attorneys, in terms of the value of applying its principles. I believe strongly that mediators who are not attorneys will have statistically relevant differences in their type characteristics from attorneys, so if you are not an attorney, please keep that in mind in reading the statistics about type in lawyers. Read more »

If you did not see it at the time, it is well worth viewing Randy Pausch’s “last lecture”. He died last Friday, July 25, 2008.

I thought I had posted about it at the time, when the YouTube film circulated, but I do not find it in the Engaging Conflicts archives. I think I have “technical difficulties” about embedding YouTube videos, and never got around to fixing the problem.
Here’s the link to the YouTube, which is introduced this way:

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation …

Here’s a link to the article announcing his death [New York Times (free subscription might be required)]; and here’s a Flickr site set up by his friends.
To give you a small sense of the man — I laughed out loud several times during the talk at his humor — here are some quotes from his lecture:

“My dad said, if there’s an elephant in the room, introduce him!” [about the fact that he was recently diagnosed with fast-killing pancreatic cancer]

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt; just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed and morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you!”

Truly, it was and is an inspiring talk about living, about attaining and helping others to attain childhood dreams, and about what’s important in life.

My condolences to his family and friends; my gratitude to have benefited some small piece from his personal generosity and courage.

I posted here announcing the premier edition of my column at the work-life online magazine The Complete Lawyer, distributed to some 300,000 attorneys nation-wide. The column is co-written with Vickie Pynchon, Diane Levin, and Stephanie West Allen.

The theme of this issue of The Complete Lawyer (Vol. 4, No. 4) is “What’s Your Exit Strategy?”Here’s the newest installment of “The Human Factor,” what we have learned from mediation and negotiation that can have very broad application in your life and work.

Here’s the link to the previous column on how we came to be mediators.

Some of you have asked, and I thank you for that. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for a while. I’m okay — I’ve had to prioritize getting my law practice back up and running. I had let it drop to almost nothing for several years while I prioritized Engaging Conflicts. I’ve had a real learning curve as I changed my market niche from family law (which I still do it by referral), to bankruptcy and bankruptcy avoidance. It’s been challenging and rewarding — there’s a lot to learn, and a great need for good attorneys here, and I am enjoying it. (Although it’s not always fun being on steep learning curves! It’s been quite a ride!)

Also, I was doing articles for both the ABA Law Trends online newsletter (here’s my recent article) and the online magazine The Complete Lawyer, where I coauthor the The Human Factor column with Vickie Pynchon, Diane Levin and Stephanie West Allen (see the post tomorrow about the newest column). I also now write an occasional column on use of online, social media over at TCL, starting with the Sept./Oct. issue. Overall, I am writing more for attorneys, and not only for mediators.

Wheh!

I am happy that I have gotten the law practice up and running, and I am enjoying more interaction with lawyers again. I am also very happy I am going to be able to add Engaging Conflicts back into my regular life!

This just announced (well, last night) by ChangeThis:

Beginning [today, July 25], and running through August 4th, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Macmillan Audio will be offering the audio edition of Thomas Friedman’s THE WORLD IS FLAT for free. Listeners will receive the audiobook in three easy-to-download sections, and soon after that, as an added bonus, will also receive an exclusive prepublication audio excerpt of Friedman’s HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: WHY WE NEED A GREEN REVOLUTION AND HOW IT CAN RENEW AMERICA. The book itself will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 8th.

Jeff Seroy, Senior Vice President of marketing and publicity at FSG, said the purpose of this audio giveaway is to “celebrate Friedman’s enormous influence on our lives and times. And in preparation for the release of his new book, a green manifesto and a continuation in many ways of his thinking in THE WORLD IS FLAT, we want to enable anyone who hasn’t already read THE WORLD IS FLAT to catch up with Friedman’s argument and vision for the future.”

If you’d like to receive these free audio downloads, sign up at the address below:

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/giveaway

Enjoy!