I "don't know" and I'm going to run with that

  I felt crappy even before the face-to-face mediation began, this week.  Fighting some seasonal bug, I was hoping the mediation would be a short one, no matter the outcome, and I would soon be on my way home, to a hot apple cider and a bed. It was not a short one.  Yet, what […]

The Cloud and Mobile are the Mediator's future office

I mediated a trans-national business dispute last week.  The mediation took place over several days, and was conducted online, over the Internet.  There was zero physical paper exchanged.  I worked from my laptop, from my home office.  Essentially, all the software I used was based in the “Cloud”, and either free or low-cost.   I’m grateful. […]

It's a mediator's world

I spent yesterday in Vancouver, at an all-day gathering with my court mediation colleagues.  Part information sharing, part community building, always a learning experience… these types of get-together I really enjoy. There were a number of presenters during the day.  I was one of them, on the topic of Collaborating on Business Development.  That was […]

Diversity: A pathway to connection, common ground and innovation

Diversity is a hallmark of innovative teams.  One of the best ways to expand your own problem-solving capabilities is to diversify; apply a different lens, different perspective, to the problem. Traditional pathways If you’re a facilitator, you know how to build bridges between people’s differences, find common ground, as a stepping stone to joint solutions […]

Grandmothers and Collaborative Learning

[Note: I originally wrote this post, and had it posted a couple of months back, as a guest blogger on Lorie Vela’s excellent Collaboration Ideas blog.  Thanks Lorie.  With children shortly returning to school, and parents, and others, occupied by thoughts of “good learning”, I thought it might be timely to post it again, here.] […]