Another blog has joined the conflict resolution conversation and the World Directory of ADR Blogs.

The Storyteller and the Listener Online, edited by Holly Stevens of Oak Ridge, North Carolina, publishes two guest essays each month which explore, in its editor’s words, “the role of story and narrative in peacemaking, healing, bridge building and reconciliation processes in communities around the world.”

Readers are thoughtfully offered two versions: full graphics and text only. Archived essays may be found in the left sidebar of the full graphics edition.

I hope you’ll take time to listen to this creative and compelling new voice.

Remember, if you wish to add your blog or someone else’s to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, please let me know. It’s a completely commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and submission guidelines.

Technorati tags: alternative dispute resolution, blogging, mediation, mediation blogs, conflict resolution

Blogger and innovative thinker Matt Homann, who seems to have a nose for articles on brainstorming, has found another good one, this one via BusinessWeek Online.

“Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming” provide plenty of common sense advice for brainstormers and serve as a reminder why a good facilitator can be your best guarantee of a productive brainstorming session.

The latest edition of the Complete Lawyer, an online magazine that examines “best practices in personal and professional development that impact every lawyer’s success and satisfaction”, asks, “Are You a Healthy Lawyer?”

Among the excellent collection of essays that explore this question is an interview with ADR pioneer Leonard Riskin, “How Meditation, Yes Meditation, Can Improve Your Performance And Enhance Your Satisfaction With Work“.

Mediators and negotiators will want to see an earlier edition of the Complete Lawyer, which focuses on “Resolving Conflict“, and includes articles like “How to Master Crucial Conversations” and “The Human Side of Negotiation“.

(My deepest appreciation to my friend Stephanie West Allen, author of the weblog Idealawg, for introducing me to the Complete Lawyer and for so kindly sharing with me Len Riskin’s interview. )

According to the most recent edition (in PDF) of the Bond University Dispute Resolution Centre newsletter, Australia has taken a major step forward toward establishment of a national system of mediator accreditation as the result of the system’s endorsement by delegates at Australia’s National Mediation Conference in May 2006.

The system, which at this time features but one level of mediator accreditation and for general practice only, would ultimately result in a national register of accredited mediators. The system may be adapted later on to create accreditation for specializations within mediation practice, such as family, workplace, and personal injury, as well as advanced practitioner levels. Participation by mediators in this system would be voluntary and not compulsory.

Further information about Australia’s National Accreditation Standards for Mediators may be found at the National Mediation Conference web site. The final draft of the report to the Conference is available for downloading in Word format.

Unfortunately here in the U.S., momentum has stalled on the mediation certification project which the Association for Conflict Resolution undertook in conjunction with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution. The two groups worked together to establish a Mediator Certification Task Force which recommended the creation of a Mediator Certification Program, and in early 2005 a Mediator Certification Feasibility Study (PDF) was conducted to invite input from stakeholders.

The word on the street now is that the ACR has quietly decided to leave this project on hold and commit its resources elsewhere, leaving many mediators feeling frustrated and angry that a project launched with so much fanfare has now been placed on standby.

It’s disappointing that while Australia moves forward into the future with national accreditation for mediators, we continue to lag behind here. But in the meantime we can watch and learn from Australia’s experience as the mediation community down under prepares for the system’s official launch.

American mediators looking to relocate where need for their services will be greatest will want to read “How Angry Is Your City?“, an article by Men’s Health magazine that ranks the 100 angriest U.S. cities.

Factors considered include percentage of men with high blood pressure, rates of aggravated assaults, statistics on workplace violence, and road rage.

My own city, Boston, renowned for its hot-tempered motorists, ranked far lower than I anticipated, at #39 (due perhaps to the high percentage of practicing mediators within city limits).

Those of you on the lookout for innovation tools and trends will want to pay a visit to the Innovation Weblog.

This blog, in a post titled “New tool for innovation team design: Innovation Styles Online“, links to a free Innovation Styles Profiler (available through 10/31/06) at Innovation Styles Online which allows you to discover your own personal innovation style.

I’m an explorer. What are you?

(Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy for the link.)

This post constitutes Part 3 of a series of essays on blogging for the conflict resolution community.

The series began earlier this summer with Part 1, “Getting to yes with alternative dispute resolution blogs: time for ADR practitioners to join the conversation” and continued with Part 2, “Getting in touch with the whole world through blogging“.

What can you do then to influence what the Internet has to say about you and to make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd?

Think blogs.

Take my own case. Unlike, say, “Bob Smith”, “Diane Levin” is not an especially common first name/last name combination. So I was surprised to learn that I am not the only Diane Levin out there. There are in fact quite a few of us on the web.

There is of course me, the Diane Levin who is an attorney and mediator. There is also Diane Levin, a well known professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College. There is also Diane Levin the Texas Holdem champion–who frankly sounds like a way more fun Diane Levin than I am–and a Diane Levin in the wholesale fashion business. There’s even a Diane Levin who is vice president of a Great Dane club in Minnesota (definitely not me, I have a yorkie).

Before I started blogging, and despite the fact that I had a pretty healthy web presence, with my own business web site, online articles, and listings in any number of web-based directories, anyone looking for me on the web would have had a very hard time figuring out which Diane Levin was in fact me.

When people searched online for my name, search engines often mixed us all up together or, worse, gave first-page ranking to another Diane Levin, even if the search combined “Diane Levin” with “mediation”. It was enough to give even a self-confident mediator an identity crisis.

What made things confusing, too, was the fact that the Wheelock College professor Diane Levin lives and works in Massachusetts like me. To make things even more confusing, much of her work concerns conflict resolution and violence prevention, not so different from the work I do as a mediator. People were always mixing us up.

Being confused with that Diane Levin, however, wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. She is a nationally respected authority on the effects of violence in the media on children who has testified before the U.S. Congress–who wouldn’t enjoy some of that celebrity?

But it was soon apparent that people were confusing me with other Diane Levins as well. I knew that I was in trouble the day a client asked about the secret to my success at poker tournaments.

People were definitely getting the wrong impression.

The fact is that we all google each other. It’s an easy way of doing a fast background check. Employers do it before making an offer to that prospective new hire. Clients and customers do it before hiring a consultant or a service provider. Savvy competitors google each other. So, too, do colleagues.

Blogging can give you control over what the Internet has to say about you. It allows you to shape the impression the world has of you and to create and market your own personal brand.

Today, largely thanks to this blog, when someone googles me, there is no mistaking me with anyone else. What’s cool, too, is that my blog posts enjoy favorable search engine rankings for search phrases relating to topics in my practice area. My work is much easier to find, and along with it, me.

For a series of articles on blogging’s benefits for ADR professionals, visit my friend Tammy Lenski’s blog, Mediator Tech.

At any rate, thanks to blogging, it’s nice to know that my little identity crisis is behind me.

(Although I sure wouldn’t mind just once winning a Texas Holdem jackpot.)

My eagerly awaited copy of the Summer 2006 edition of the Association for Conflict Resolution’s quarterly magazine, ACResolution, arrived just the other day.

It was eagerly awaited primarily because it contains ACResolution’s first-ever article on blogging, which, I am proud to say, I wrote.

This article, “Three Reasons ADR Professionals Should Be Blogging”, while unfortunately not available online, can be glimpsed in an earlier draft, “Five reasons why ADR professionals should be blogging“, published here on this blog last year.

The editor was kind enough to add a sidebar with a list of ADR blogs (Negotiating Tip of the Week, Florida Mediator, and Mediation Mensch among them) as well as resources for bloggers, together with a nice screenshot of the World Directory of ADR Blogs.

This could be a sign that the ADR world is finally starting to pay attention to blogging. Hey, a girl can hope.

Travel advisory: this post has nothing to do with mediation, negotiation, or the practice of law. It concerns itself solely with the peculiarities of the latest U.S. Transportation Security Administration regulations regarding carry-on items–which I got to see first hand during business travel earlier this week.

Mediators are keen observers of human behavior. We know from our observations that humans are rarely consistent. In fact, paradoxically, if there’s one factor that remains consistent from one conflict to the next, it’s that you can generally count on people to consistently behave in inconsistent ways.

Which may explain the current TSA regulations.

Now that Britain has foiled the latest terrorist plot, U.S. air travelers are adapting once again to brand-new security protocols, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration.

Frequent fliers will be heartened to learn that at least as of today, August 24, 2006, meat cleavers, sabers, and ice picks continue to be prohibited items in carry-on luggage, even for travelers wishing to wield them in self-defense against freedom-hating terrorists. The same is true for firearms, cattle prods, brass knuckles, and dynamite. No surprises there.

There are, however, some anomalies. Corkscrews and knitting needles, which could certainly put someone’s eye out, remain permitted. Permitted also are pointed metal scissors with blades shorter than 4 inches in length–still long enough, if you ask me, to do some damage in the hands of any determined psychopath–along with screwdrivers that are seven inches or shorter.

Meanwhile, even though smoking has been banned on domestic flights for many years now, cigar cutters are permitted (although matches and lighters are not).

In addition, all liquids, gels, pastes, and lotions are now prohibited items in carry-on luggage here in the U.S. That means no beverages, Jello, or yogurt. And no shampoo, toothpaste, or perfume. (Which makes it all the more peculiar that corkscrews remain a permitted item. If you can’t bring on board that cheeky Merlot, what on earth do you need that corkscrew for?)

Personal lubricants (up to 4 ounces), however, are permitted (perhaps as a courtesy to members of the Mile High Club?).

So, feeling safer yet?

(A P.S. to the security screeners at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport–while I am grateful for your care in screening my shoes for chemical explosive residue, we both missed the tube of toothpaste that I’d forgotten to take out of my briefcase. I discovered it at 30,000 feet on the plane back to Boston. Oops.)

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the deterioration of public discourse and the suppression of dissent that has become so commonplace here in the U.S. It’s hard not to, given how prevalent its symptoms are.

I was therefore intrigued (and amused) to discover via the Law & Society Blog a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries (make sure your pop-up blockers are fully activated unless you want to be inundated with Ann Coulter ads), chosen by a specially selected panel of conservative scholars and public policy leaders at Human Events, a right-wing publication.

In descending order of their degree of harmfulness, these books are:

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (The Kinsey Report), Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietschze
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

Books that didn’t make the short list but earned honorable mentions were:

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America, Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

Apart from the couple of titles authored by homicidal dictators, the selection of these books is baffling (Unsafe at Any Speed? Silent Spring? You’re kidding, right?).

What exactly makes these books so harmful? By whose standard? And so now what? Are we now to banish these books from college syllabi? Slap parental advisory stickers on them? Burn them?

(Given the scorn which some conservatives delight to heap upon conflict resolution, it is surprising that Getting to Yes failed to receive even an honorable mention.)

One can only hope that the fact that these books have been labeled as “Most Harmful” will produce a delightfully ironic and unintended effect: make these books an alluring forbidden fruit to entice a whole new generation of young minds to read works like On Liberty, The Origin of Species, and The Feminine Mystique.

And, of course, to weigh for themselves the intrinsic worth of the ideas contained within.

(Book collectors take note. Setting aside the notion of a free marketplace of ideas, these books have worth in a different kind of marketplace: first editions of these works are not only rare but highly valuable.)

Riverhouse ePress, founded by Ron Kraybill, a trainer and advisor in conflict transformation and peacebuilding since 1979 and an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at Eastern Mennonite University, announces the release of free review copies of Style Matters: The Kraybill Conflict Style Inventory.

The inventory is a recently developed five-styles-of-conflict inventory used by business managers, organizational consultants, and conflict resolution trainers worldwide to teach personal conflict management skills. What makes this inventory unique is its ability to recognize cultural diversity among its users.

The 22-page instrument sells for $3.95 per copy in quantities of one hundred or more. A free trainer’s guide is available on the publisher’s website. Trainers and consultants may request a free review copy in PDF form, by sending an email indicating their organizational affiliation to StyleMattersOffer@RiverhouseEpress.com. A PDF file will immediately be forwarded.

For more information, you can visit the Riverhouse ePress web site.

Riverhouse ePress’s founder also publishes the latest addition to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, Paxblog: Alternative Perspectives on Security and Peace, which reflects blogger Ron Kraybill’s 25 years of experience in international peacebuilding efforts.

(Fans of personality tests should visit these earlier posts from Online Guide to Mediation: “Test of character: using instruments to probe conflict styles and moral intuition“, “Hidden agenda: online test reveals conscious and subconscious bias“, “Let’s face it: testing your understanding of facial expressions“, and “New world order: new web site promotes ‘culturosity’“.)

Several months ago I reported that the Boston Bar Association (BBA) had announced that it had drafted a proposed amendment to the Massachusetts statute protecting mediation confidentiality.

Now another group is forging off in a new direction. The Massachusetts Uniform Mediation Act Working Group (MassUMA) has extended an open invitation to mediation organizations and private practitioners to explore the feasibility of replacing the Massachusetts mediation confidentiality statute with an adapted version of the Uniform Mediation Act.

The first meeting will be held on Friday, September 8, 2006, at Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts from 9:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. in the 4th Floor Faculty Dining Room. Please RSVP with Israela Brill-Cass by email or by phone at 617-439-4700 no later than Friday, September 1, 2006.

More information about MassUMA is available at its web site at www.MassUMA.com.

I am glad to announce my return to blogging with two additions to the World Directory of ADR Blogs. The first of these is one I am sorry I hadn’t thought to include sooner, since its author supports ADR and has been a source of friendly encouragement to me and to many other bloggers. These two additions are:

What About Clients? shares the creative energies and insights of attorney J. Daniel Hull “on servicing business clients as valued customers in American law firms”–a message which applies equally to mediators and other conflict resolution professionals. This blog also explores issues confronting the American legal profession and cultural aspects of international law practice. Its sidebar contains a directory of non-U.S. law blogs (which includes some names familiar to readers of Online Guide to Mediation–Geoff Sharp and Stephen Raymond) together with international law resources, bringing a welcome global perspective to law bloggers and readers alike. (Mediators will be delighted to see the title of one of Dan’s recent posts: “First-Rate Mediators Are Worth Their Weight In Gold“–as indeed they are.)

Gini Nelson, an attorney, consultant, and coach in Santa Fe, New Mexico, recently launched the eponymous Gini Nelson’s Engaging Conflicts, a blog that explores, in Gini’s words, “what the converging disciplines of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and anthropology can tell us about conflict, business success, and spirituality.”

It’s a pleasure to welcome Gini to the community of conflict resolution bloggers. It’s good to know that more voices continue to join our conversation.

Remember, if you publish an alternative dispute resolution blog (or one that is ADR-friendly) and would like to be added to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, please let me know. It’s a completely commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and submission guidelines.

Technorati tags: alternative dispute resolution, blogging, mediation, mediation blogs