For colleagues

One of the challenges we face is the seeming overwhelming complexity of complexity, and the seeming commonplace simplicity, of what we do. If we do our work well, and help parties get obstacles out of the way, clear emotional and behavioral pathways, and open space for new frameworks or shift the existing ones, and then elegantly step back and let them solve their own conflicts, in fact, if we are really, really good at what we do -- it can seem effortless to the

This one goes out to mediators and conflict resolvers and conflict transformers. The core message is: we need to own our depth of knowledge. Many years ago, (and we can hope that the field has changed enough that this wouldn’t happen today), I was the head of a mediation center and was asked to visit a mediation training at a nearby law school. The training was run by an outside trainer brought in by a law school professor. So, the first question is, naturally,