Gini Nelson's Engaging Conflicts

“Institutionalization is difficult and presents the challenge of how to tailor principles and processes to fit the institutions and still maintain the integrity of the institutions and conflict management processes. This is really hard work.” — John Lande

John is interviewed in today’s issue of Engaging Conflicts Today. John Lande is Director of the LL.M. Program in Dispute Resolution and Associate Professor at MU. He began mediating in 1982 in California. He teaches courses on Mediation and Non-Binding Methods of Dispute Resolution. His scholarship focuses on institutionalization of mediation in the legal system and how lawyering and mediation practices affect each other. 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 John Lande in the subject line and I’ll email it to you.

I’ve previously posted about John and some of his articles, here, here and here.

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is originated, written, coordinated, and edited since 1995 by Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell. The APOD archive contains the largest collection of annotated astronomical images on the internet.

In real life, Bob and Jerry are two professional astronomers who spend most of their time researching the universe. Bob is a professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA, while Jerry is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland USA.

Today’s picture (which is not the photo above) is an iridescent cloud over Colorado; tomorrow’s is sky lightning.

This just in from Science In the News (reported by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, as a service for its members and the public):

Today’s Headlines – November 21, 2007

Wild Turkeys Invading Suburban U.S.
(from National Geographic News)

The Pilgrims found New England in the 1600s to be well stocked with wild turkeys, which figured into their regular diet, including the original Thanksgiving feast. But by the 1930s the native birds had been hunted to near extinction in North America, numbering only in the tens of thousands.

Today, thanks to reintroduction efforts, there are about seven million wild turkeys, and they are thriving in an urban America that the early English
settlers could not have imagined.

Wild turkeys have been spotted in towns and suburbs across New England -and have even been seen strolling through downtown Manhattan. The turkeys’ ability to take to these urban environments was a surprise to biologists.

To read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071119-wild-
turkeys.html

On a personal note, wild turkey viewing was one of the highlights of this past summer. I was boat camping at Heron Lake (that means sleeping on my small sail boat, anchored in a protected cove on the lake) near the Colorado border. One of the best things about boat camping is that the boat serves as a blind for watching wildlife. One morning, while I was drinking my coffee and taking in the surroundings, there was an amazingly large flock of wild turkey on the shore, possibly 50 or more! (Is “flock” the right term?) They were looking for food, moving up and over a hill, and were, with time, out of sight. I’ve never seen wild turkey at Heron before, so this was particularly surprising, and wonderful.

“Academia enjoys putting disciplines into boxes, and I enjoy thinking out of the box. I now embrace the interdisciplinary nature of my scholarship, and believe that we need more of this kind of thinking to bring the tools of conflict resolution to bear on the tough challenges facing the world in the 21st century.” — Daniel Shapiro

Daniel is Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and is on the faculty at Harvard Law School and in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. He specializes in the psychology of negotiation. He co-authored with Roger Fisher the book Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.

I posted about his articles in The Negotiator’s Fieldbook yesterday.

I’m reviewing The Negotiator’s Fieldbook: The Desk Reference for the Experienced Negotiator, Christopher Honeyman & Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Editors (ABA 2006), through the rest of 2007 and into 2008 (it has 80 chapters, more than 700 pages of substantive text, and something for everyone, from novice to expert!). I’m reviewing the book because it’s hot, hot, hot. More about the book and its editors here.

This week I’m reviewing two chapters both written by Dan Shapiro — his bio is at the end of the reviews of the articles.

Identity: More than Meets the “I”
Daniel L. Shapiro. Here’s the annotation from the book’s Table of Contents:

How can you expect to get good results in a negotiation if you give little thought to who you really are, and to who your counterpart is? Shapiro analyzes the research on identity, showing how you can predict the likely reactions of your counterpart to some kinds of proposals — as well as your own propensity to avoid some kinds of proposals that might be to your advantage. This chapter should be read in close conjunction with the chapters on internal conflict, psychology and perceptions.

Dan introduces us to identity-based negotiation, which recognizes an individual’s 3 levels of identity: (1) intergroup identity, focusing on your group affiliations, beliefs, and shared values; (2) intrapersonal identify, the story you tell yourself about yourself; and interpersonal identity, also known as “relational identity,” the way you conceive of yourself in relation to someone else with whom you are interacting. Read more »

Vickie Pynchon started a good brainstorming on ethics in mediation over at Settle It Now! She invited my comments, which I repeat below. Please read her post and compiled comments for the full context.

ETHICS: FIRST, DO NO HARM

Thank you, Vickie, for writing about this issue and inviting comments directly. This seems a really good way to get some focused brainstorming in!

I have one primary thought/concern about ethics as sometimes practiced in this field (assuming we are a field). My shorthand definition of ethics is: First, do no harm. When we look at short lists of ethics we see this with their emphases on client determination and transparency. This list should be short and it should be clear.

I distinguish ethics from professional obligations, which might be shorthanded as “then, do good.” I am concerned about the blurring of lines between the two. Do we really want it an ethicial issue whether or how one advances the field? For example, I oppose mandatory “pro bono”, whether it’s in mediation or in the practice of law. In law, at least in New Mexico, we are not ethically required to provide pro bono services, but it is our professional obligation to aspire to provide them. That leaves it to the attorney to consider what she can afford in terms of time, money and energy. Yet, I’ve sat in meetings with a combination of practicing attorneys, practicing mediators, state bar staff, court staff, and a judge where it has been stated there is a requirement that the attorney provide pro bono services. When the people who set up programs misunderstand an aspiration as an ethical obligation, they can also then more easily set up mandatory pro bono within their programs. In New Mexico, most state and city, government and judicial ADR programs require mandatory pro bono from their mediators. I understand the budgetary constraints programs work with, and that this is the primary reason they don’t want to pay for all services rendered. At the same time, I believe a confusion of a professional aspiration for pro bono with an ethical obligation helps program designers appear to justify their nonpayment for services. I believe it harms the solo practitioner who seldom can afford the same scale of pro bono that larger or richer offices can handle, and harms the field by demeaning the value of its services. (This confusion also perhaps helps fuel some of the intolerance of other forms of practice that Diane writes about!)

Remember the Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) allows you to manage tasks quickly and easily. Using maps, to-do lists, reminders and more, you can easily manage all of your work right from your computer. Never forget the milk (or anything else) again!

Who says reading science reports isn’t fun? This reported this week by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, as a service for its members and the public:

Chocolate Inventors Were Trying for Beer [from the Times (London)]

Humanity’s love affair with chocolate began at least 500 years earlier than was thought previously, scientists have discovered.

Chemical residues found in pottery vessels from what is now Honduras have revealed that the ancient peoples of Central America were drinking chocolate beverages as long ago as 1150BC, probably to celebrate occasions such as births and weddings. The evidence suggests that they were alcoholic
drinks made from fermented pulp of cacao fruit.

The frothy, chocolate-flavoured drink made from cacao seeds that is known to have been important in the culture of the Aztecs and the Maya did not emerge until later. The findings, from a team led by John Henderson, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University in New York State, push back the origins of chocolate consumption by at least half a millennium.

To read more:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2859190.ece
Or: http://tinyurl.com/24fs8w\

“The other advice is from a book that I read entitled “The Way of Man” by Martin Buber in which he stated that all conflict comes from within and it is up to the person in conflict to straighten him or herself out first and then be capable of dealing with the situation in a creative and generative way.” — Richard Millen

Richard is interviewed in today’s issue of Engaging Conflicts Today. Half lawyer, half entrepreneur, and always, dedicated family man, Millen was admitted to the California bar in June 1949. After a few years as a research and litigation associate, government lawyer and house counsel for a corporation, he started his career as a transactional lawyer and operating officer for a group of Wall Street investment bankers. During this time, while involved in their varied ventures, he also became “of Counsel” to the law firm of Schwartz & Alschuler, now known as Alschuler, Grossman, Stein & Kahan, and remained there for 17 years. Always a dealmaker, Millen finally found a “home in the practice of mediation in 1986. 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 Richard Millen in the subject line and I’ll email it to you.

Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant have an article (which could be subtitled “Social Change Without Borders”) recently published at ChangeThis, described thusly:

Using Habitat for Humanity as a dynamic example,
authors of Forces for Good, Crutchfield and Grant, present this manifesto on what high-impact nonprofits do to achieve wide-scale social change. These methods are insightful for all organizations, including for-profits and individuals. You may just want to pick up a hammer and take a swing at changing the world.

They studied 12 highly-successful nonprofit organizations for their forthcoming book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. Their findings are overviewed in this article, which you can download at the end of this post.

These are the 6 things these highly-successful nonprofit organizations did extraordinariy well:

1. Advocate and serve. They realize that they cannot achieve wide scale systemic change through service delivery alone, so they add advocacy to access government resources or to change legislation, as contrasted to nonprofits that only provide direct services and avoid politics.
2. Make markets work. Use the power of self-interest and the laws of economics which are far more effective than appealing to pure altruism and avoiding engaging with business or capitalism.
3. Inspire evangelists. Volunteers are recognized as much more than a source of free labor or membership dues, and are engaged in meaningful experiences to build long-term relationships.
4. Nurture nonprofit networks. True collaboration, not merely lip service to it and seeing fellow nonprofits as “competitors”.
5. Master the art of adaptation. Nonprofits must listen, learn, and modify their strategies based on external cues and internal evaluation, instead of becoming mired in bureaucracy or overwhelmed with too many ideas.
6. Share leadership. Others must be empowered to take action, instead of maintaining a command-and-control hierarchy with the CEO as the “hero”.

You can download a copy of the article by clicking here:

Change the Way You Change the World: A Model for Wide-Scale Social Change