One of my favorite exercises to conduct in negotiation or conflict resolution training consists of showing my audience the famous gorilla video, created by the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I tell the audience that they will observe two teams of people playing basketball, one in white shirts and the other in black, and tell them to count the number of times the team wearing white t-shirts bounces the ball.

So focused are most audience members on accurately counting the number of times the ball bounces, they fail to observe the person in a gorilla costume who strolls through the players, stops in front of the camera to thump its chest, and then exits the scene.

After asking them to tell me what number they counted to, I ask if anyone noticed anything unusual. On average, across the many times I have played that video, only one third of the audience will have noticed the gorilla. On rare occasions, only two people out of an audience of, say, 50, will have seen the gorilla. And the ones that didn’t see the gorilla can’t believe their eyes when I replay the video to show them that the gorilla really was there after all. That’s a lot of people who didn’t see the gorilla.

It serves as a potent reminder of how easily our attention to one thing can blind us to seeing what is literally in front of our eyes — and that in every situation where lives or livelihoods are at stake, where relationships or choices matter — whether resolving a conflict, making an important decision, or pulling the lever in the voting booth — a gorilla may be present, hiding in the open, right in plain view.

Before we can talk about the gorilla, we have to know he’s there.

The World Directory of ADR Blogs has just added a new entry to its catalog: Resolving Conflict in Teams, published by American conflict resolution specialist Guy Harris, who describes himself as a “recovering engineer”. Guy explains:

I completed both a BS and MS in Chemical Engineering, and I served as a Nuclear trained submarine officer in the US Navy.

As my career progressed through various leadership roles, I began to realize that my biggest problems were with people and not with equipment. So, I started to study and apply “people skills” to get better at my job. I eventually grew to love the study of leadership, communication, and conflict resolution principles. Now, I am a Conflict Resolution Specialist. I specialize in helping teams resolve conflicts so that they can get better results.

On this new blog, Guy shares his insights in posts like “Are You at War or at Peace?“, which describes how your heart affects the way you perceive others in conflict.

Welcome, Guy, to the ADR blogosphere.

I get emails all the time from mediators, lawyers, and other professionals asking for link exchanges from this blog. It’s nice that they perceive me as an authoritative source for ADR and negotiation and that an outbound link from MediationChannel.com counts for something. Unfortunately all too often these folks are missing the point.

I got an email the other day from a web designer writing on behalf of the client the web designer had just built a site for. The designer wanted my help in improving the web site’s search rank and to that end asked me to add the client’s static, non-blog web site to my — and this is what blew me away — my blogroll. My blogroll! You know, the place on my web site where I list the blogs I’m reading — blogs where I routinely find great content and informative articles about issues that affect me and my work. Blogs that are written by creative, intelligent, inspiring people, many of whom I have gotten to know and also happen to like and respect a great deal. Blogs that are listed here because they may be of interest to the people I really care about — my readers.

I wanted to ask, “What part of blogroll don’t you understand?”

So, as a public service message, here’s a blogger’s friendly advice to mediators and others who want to improve their site’s rank with the help of blogs:

1. Don’t expect a blogger to link to your static site. Don’t even bother to ask — not unless you have great content there that will be of interest to the blogger and her readers — like well-crafted articles you’ve written, cool online tools and games you’ve created, productivity tips you’ve invented, or training and teaching materials you want to share. In my case, I may be willing (but no guarantees) to publish a post about your site and link to that terrific content. But please don’t expect me to add a link to your site from my sidebar. My blog is not here to provide free advertising for your business.
2. Don’t ask a blogger to add a static site to a blogroll. A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs. By definition, it’s for blogs only. It’s that simple. In addition, see above #1.
3. To really improve your site’s page rank with the help of a blog, exercise a little self-help. Either forget about regular web sites and launch a blog yourself in place of a static web site, or add a blog to your existing site. Reach out to other bloggers, build relationships with them, create good content that will keep readers returning (very important) and that bloggers will be delighted to link to, and the visitors to your site — along with the improved visibility on search engines — will come.

In fact, if you’ve got an ADR blog, tell me about it. I can add it to the World Directory of ADR Blogs at ADRblogs.com.

First they tried to take our beer.

Now they’ve taken over Blawg Review.

For the past three weeks, Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging, has been hosted by [gasp] foreign bloggers.

First there was the Irish legal blog, cearta.ie, beguiling our hearts with Blawg Review #164, a literary tribute to Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce and his masterwork, Ulysses.

Then last week, faster than you could say “freedom fries“, French-law.net deployed Gallic sophistication and charm to seduce us with Blawg Review #165.

And now, smashing into Blawg Review like a nuclear blast or a particle beam death ray, comes Blawg Review #166, detonated by an anonymous English barrister known only as GeekLawyer. Replete with foul language and links to pornographic images, Blawg Review #166 recalls to mind the words uttered to redbaiting U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The reign of terror ends this coming Monday, July 7, when control of Blawg Review is restored to American hands and Jonathan Frieden hosts Blawg Review #167 at E-Commerce Law.

Whether we get to keep our beer, however, remains to be seen.