Andrea Schneider at ADR Profs Blog is wondering whether there’s a “Crisis in Dispute Resolution?”

This past weekend, the Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution here at Marquette hosted noted scholar Bernie Mayer. Bernie was mostly speaking about his book, Beyond Neutrality and, on Saturday, was invited in a point-counterpoint format to discuss his arguments with equally well-noted practitioner Howard Bellman. One point of the discussion was about Bernie’s argument, outlined in his book, that the dispute resolution field is marginalized in the most important disputes. In other words, in the biggest crises of the day and over the biggest problems (think war, state of the economy, etc.), the dispute resolution field does not generally have a seat at the table…

Andrea wants to know what the blogosphere makes of all of this:

Are we marginalized? Should dispute resolution professionals be called on more often in public policy and international disputes? Should we just get over ourselves–we are called on when we are needed? Let us know what you think!

Come join me in the discussion and tell Andrea what you think.

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim had a wish that undoubtedly many others share: she wished for world peace. She said, “I think that the first step toward world peace is for people to meet each other”. She envisioned the use of film to create a kind of exchange program to help people around the world truly see and understand each other better.

Out of Noujaim’s wish came Pangea Day, a world-wide celebration of the things that people across the globe have in common:

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

To learn more or to find out how you can take part, visit the Pangea Day web site.

Since I began blogging over three years ago, I’ve been a devotee of Blawg Review, the review of the best in legal blogging hosted each week by a different blogger. I read it regularly, and I’ve even served as host on three occasions (once with fellow blogging mediator Geoff Sharp).

Why do I read Blawg Review? When law is so integral to our political, social, commercial, and civic interactions, never has it been more important to stay informed about the impact the law produces on the way we live and work together.

But it’s more than just the weekly synopsis of the major stories affecting the law that draws me to Blawg Review every Monday. It’s the fact that each week a new host provides another spin, a different viewpoint, on law and justice.

It’s like a box of assorted chocolates. You reach into the box, not knowing what you’ll get until you take a taste. Sometimes it’s a playful caramel in milk chocolate, a sophisticated dark chocolate truffle with a hint of espresso, an angelic praline enrobed in a white chocolate shell, or a tart raspberry edged with bittersweet chocolate. (Of course at times you may encounter a nut or two.) If one is not to your taste, then wait but a week and then sample again.

Consider how different are the most recent two hosts of Blawg Review:

Last week, it was David Harlow hosting Blawg Review #154 at Health Blawg to honor World Health Day 2008, dedicated to protecting health from the effects of climate change.

And this week Greg May at California Blog of Appeal good-naturedly hosts Blawg Review #155 and celebrates (or, some might say, desecrates) National Poetry Month.

And next week will be something entirely different when Virtually Blind, a blog that discusses legal issues impacting virtual worlds, plays host.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

On Tuesday, June 24, 2008, influential thinker and ADR pioneer Albie Davis presents an “Intuition and Creativity Workshop” for mediators at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

Albie enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a true innovator who has made significant contributions to the development and advancement of mediation and conflict resolution during the course of her decades-long career.

From the workshop description:

You tune up your car every few thousand miles. Schedule annual health exams. Is it time for an Intuition and Creativity Tune-up of your mediator readiness? Mediators must think on their feet; use the famed five senses, plus ones with no name; make rapid assessments of the need of parties and momentum of negotiations; be on the lookout for “magical moments,” draw upon theory, research, ethics and personal practice; separate the wheat from the chaff; and more. In this day-long seminar, we will revisit various theories about mediation, negotiation, creativity, change, culture and human behavior. Drawing upon the experience of presenters and participants, we’ll role-play, invent and try new things; be irreverent, if we must. Each person will leave with a self-administered intuition checkup sheet with strengths identified and tips for improving one’s personal best.

I am proud to say that Albie Davis recently joined my firm, OptionBridge, as an affiliate, and my partners and I are deeply honored to be able to offer this program to our colleagues in the mediation community in June. To register, visit the OptionBridge web site, or for more information click here to download the flyer in PDF.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Forty years ago today Robert F. Kennedy spoke those inspiring words as he announced the tragic death of Martin Luther King, Jr., to an African-American audience gathered in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Forty years later these words remain relevant. If you’ve never heard this speech before, or long to hear it again, read it or listen to it now.

Women don’t ask.

That was the premise — and the title — of a book published in 2003 by Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and successful writer and editor Sara Laschever.

Women Don’t Ask explored the uncomfortable truths about gender and negotiation and exposed the obstacles that keep women from negotiating effectively for themselves. While men seem to have no trouble negotiating and asking for what they need, women hesitate or fail to ask at all.

Social conditioning and cultural expectations are among the causes of these gendered differences. Tragically these differences produce well-documented economic costs for women, haunting them over the course of a lifetime. For example, according to the Women Don’t Ask web site, “By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60 — and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.”

This book touched a raw nerve for the many women who read it; indeed, so overwhelming was the response to Women Don’t Ask that Babcock and Laschever went to work on a sequel.

The result is Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, a book filled with practical advice; real-world negotiation stories from the authors, the women who have contacted them as a result of their work, and Babcock’s students; and a detailed four-phase program with exercises for preparing for and succeeding in life’s negotiations.

Phase One teaches women to recognize that “Everything Is Negotiable”. As anyone knows, the toughest negotiation can be with yourself, and the authors help readers begin by asking questions of themselves to identify and clarify their professional and personal goals. Phase Two teaches readers how to “Lay the Groundwork”, reviewing the skills and concepts of basic negotiation strategy. Among the most important lessons? Information is power — and the authors explain how and where to get it to strengthen your bargaining position.

Phase Three, “Get Ready”, pushes women to aim high when it comes to negotiating. It covers cooperative bargaining; ascertaining your worth; using logrolling or trade-offs to get past jams and build value; and how to make the first offer. Best of all, it even comes equipped with a “Negotiation Gym” — a six-week program of increasingly difficult negotiation exercises that will help women build negotiation muscles and develop stamina and strength in preparation for tougher negotiation challenges. No one will ever kick sand in your face again.

Phase Four shows how women can “Put It All Together” — to practice in advance by role playing with a friend, to avoid making concessions prematurely, to create the right impression to influence your counterpart at the table, and, finally, to close the deal.

An appendix helpfully provides a detailed worksheet to help women prepare for negotiations, along with a link to the web site where readers can download a PDF version.

Ask for It recounts numerous stories of women facing negotiations at work and in their lives, across a range of industries and professions, which bring the lessons to memorable life. However, as convincing as these anecdotes may be, I would have welcomed more examples of negotiations in blue-collar settings, my one quibble with an otherwise excellent book.

What makes this book a must-read for men, too, and not just for women are its unpleasant revelations about the realities of hidden bias against women at the negotiation table. The authors exhort readers to take responsibility themselves for combating gender bias, not just that of others but particularly their own. They remind readers that all of us regardless of gender possess assumptions and unexamined beliefs about women in negotiation. They point to studies that indicate that while aggression earns men points at the negotiation table, it punishes women with backlash and disapproval. And, while the authors fiercely advocate for women at the negotiation table, the chapter on “Likability” with its insistence that women avoid aggressive tactics and “be nice” while bargaining, will no doubt leave some readers bristling. However, until the world changes how it views women in negotiation, it’s hard to argue with the studies the authors cite.

There is much to admire about this gutsy book with its commitment to helping women really succeed at negotiating. Even the title itself serves as a defiant call to action. Babcock and Laschever explain in the forward that the title represents a deliberate effort to reclaim a phrase weighted with negative meaning for women and instead assert it as an emblem of power:

For centuries the phrase “asking for it” has been used as an accusing finger to point at women. A woman who’d been sexually assault was “asking for it”. A woman who’d been the victim of spousal abuse must have provoked her partner — she “asked for it”.

Our goal is to help women ask for and get the things they — we — really want, to claim the phrase “asking for it” as our own and transform it into a dynamic tool for increasing our happiness and pursuing our dreams.

This is not simply a book about changing the way women negotiate. Instead, Babcock and Laschever have ambitiously set out to change women’s lives.

Any of us can join the revolution — all we have to do is ask.

Two years ago I introduced readers to the web site ChangeThis, which I described as

a web site born of a radical and hopeful idealism: to virally transmit ideas through a culture medium of community, respect, and dialogue.

Recognizing that “the best discussions in science, medicine, business and politics have always been the civil ones”, ChangeThis publishes what it calls manifestos — proposals for change which serve as “a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts”. The goal is to provide a forum for “the rational and thoughtful arguments that help people change their minds to a more productive point of view.” In the egalitarian spirit with which ChangeThis was founded, anyone is welcome to submit ideas for a manifesto.

This online experiment in changing minds has thrived, amassing in the past two years a considerable inventory of innovative thinking, and consequently I continue to stop by in search of ideas to invigorate my work.

On a recent visit to the site I was struck by the premise of a newly published manifesto, “Questionating“, by business consultant Corinne Miller. Miller celebrates the power of the question and its role in creativity and fresh thinking:

Questions have been the enablers of innovation for centuries. As Albert Einstein said, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science”…

Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions. The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.

Despite the role of the question in stimulating discoveries and advancements, Miller observes that people seem to lose the willingness to ask questions as they grow older:

As we age, we disengage… from asking questions. Questions decrease as aging increases. Think about it. Why does the typical 5-year old ask about 65 questions a day, while the typical 40-something asks only about 6 questions a day? Why is it that the older we get, the fewer questions we ask? We’ve found that the most popular answers to this question have been: asking a question makes one look stupid; asking a question is a sign of weakness; and people think they know the answer so they don’t feel the need to ask.

What a sad state that we have created a business culture where asking questions is seen as a weakness. Shouldn’t it be the opposite, where not asking questions is a weakness?

How can we change this?

Indeed. How can we change this? What can any of us do to challenge the notion that asking questions displays weakness or even disrespect? What can we do to make it safe to ask questions of our institutions, of our leaders, of each other? Questions reflect, reveal, resolve; they shine light into the dark corners. Most importantly, questions give us the ability to see the world afresh. As Bertrand Russell once said, “In many affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

Fans of Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging, get a two-fer this week thanks to host George M. Wallace, a lawyer in Pasadena, California.

George hoists the Jolly Roger at the pirate-themed Blawg Review #153 at Declarations & Exclusions, warning readers with these ominous words:

But tell me true now: It be Blawg Review ye’ve really come seekin’, eh? Thought as much.Well, yer appeal’s been heard and ye’ve come to the proper place. And properly warned ye be, sez I.

But here ye’ll find no more o’ yer namby-pamby “Blawg Review,” savvy?

No, matey, that be fer the lace and waistcoat gentry, an’ the lords o’ the Admiralty an’ such-like luckless landlocked lumpers, wi’ their clerks an’ their cubicles an’ their quills an’ their copiers.

No, me hearty: for the likes o’ us — bold ‘n’ dangerous sorts that we be, don’cha know — hencefor’rd this be . . .Blarrgh Review!

Meanwhile, for landlubbers, George has produced a second edition of Blawg Review, in the form of an April Fool’s Day appendix at his other blog, A Fool in the Forest.

Highlights from these editions of Blawg Review include a look at how many innocent people remain behind bars, tips on negotiating with sociopaths, discussion of a check written on toilet paper, and a revealing glimpse into the sexual fantasies of lawyers (hint: it involves bargaining).

Perhaps the greatest gift that blogging has brought me has been the fellowship of fellow bloggers. Mediator and lawyer Stephanie West Allen, one of those remarkable bloggers I am privileged to count as friend, has just marked a milestone: the second anniversary of her blog Idealawg, which celebrates the artistry of the lawyer’s craft and honors the lawyer’s role as healer, not instigator, of disputes.

Stephanie shares the results of her intellectual inquisitiveness with readers by artfully covering topics ranging from idea productivity to life after law to conflict resolution.

Happy anniversary, Idealawg.

In poignant tribute to the U.S. service members who have lost their lives in the Iraq war, the New York Times has created a graphic that literally puts a face to the numbers who have perished.

Each face that appears is made up of many small squares, each representing another face. Click on any square to see another face appear, with information about that person displayed to the right. The squares are ordered by date of death, the most recent deaths appearing in the upper left corner of the image. You can also search by last name, home state, or home town.

(With thanks to ICT4Peace. Please read Sanjana Hattotuwa’s observations, including his thoughts on those who are missing from this moving depiction of the human cost of war.)

This may ultimately create more disputes than it resolves, but the DNA testing laboratory INDENTIGENE is selling at-home paternity tests.

For only $29.99 (and $119 for the lab fee), you can find out once and for all who’s your daddy.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing Gadgets.)

In “Settlement Demands Have Their Risks,” Simple Justice reports that a New Hampshire jury found a recently admitted attorney guilty of theft by extortion for threatening to sue a hair salon over gender-based differences in prices of services and demanding payment of $1,000 to avoid a lawsuit. He apparently sent demand letters to approximately 19 salons in the Granite State. The attorney, who had claimed that the difference in pricing caused him stress and mental anguish (despite the fact that men were charged less than women), argued that the conviction violated his First Amendment rights and plans to appeal.

In considering the lawyer’s conviction, Simple Justice asks,

Where do we draw the line? People often feel the “lawyer letter,” that demand that you pay money “or else” or stop doing something “or else,” is extortionate. After all, the express threat is “pay me or pay to go to court and then pay me.” There’s certainly something extortionate there.

The question deepens when it’s no longer a matter of threatening to take someone to court if they don’t settle a claim, but when it reaches the point of becoming a crime. Does it turn on the lawyer’s good faith? Does it turn on whether the claim has a reasonable basis in law?

Bear in mind that there are claims brought to lawyers that ultimately turn out to be frivolous or baseless, but lawyers pursue them because they seem colorable at the time. There’s a huge difference between the claim being shot out of the water for being frivolous and the lawyer being convicted of a crime for pursuing it.

Well said. I agree that these are important questions to raise. However, my own line of inquiry differs, since this case leaves me uneasy for additional reasons. I have to wonder what this young lawyer was thinking. I am struck by his statement, reported in the Concord Monitor, about why he pursued this path:

Asked why he sent letters to salons instead of contacting the [New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights] directly, Hynes said lawyers often settle out of court.

“I believe it’s more appropriate to attempt as amicable a resolution as possible,” he said.

What did this lawyer learn in law school? What lessons did his professors impart of settlement and negotiation, of the resolution of disputes? Who taught him that such action, in a case like this, constitutes effort to effect an “amicable resolution”?

Ironically, had he involved the Commission for Human Rights, he might have had the opportunity to mediate his concerns. How sad that this ill-conceived attempt at settlement leaves no winners in its wake.

Issue #215 of the Mediate.com newsletter is now available.

Highlights include “Ten Questions on Leadership for Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama“, “Sincere Opening Statements Bring Best Mediation Results“, and “Film Review: “John Adams” - The Reluctant Revolutionary and the Negotiation of the Declaration of Independence. There’s also a round-up of great blog posts.

To subscribe to the Mediate.com newsletter, go to the Mediate.com web site, scroll down to the subscription widget in the left sidebar, and enter your email address to get the latest news and ideas affecting the ADR field delivered to your inbox weekly.

I’ve just added two new blogs to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, my ongoing project to track and catalog ADR and negotiation blogs around the globe. Allow me to introduce them to you:

• Arabulucu Blog, a Turkish language blog, bears the distinction of being Turkey’s first and only blog about mediation and negotiation. It is published by mediator Samil Demir, who is based in Ankara.
• dominique.lopez-eychenie is the eponymous blog of French lawyer and mediator Dominique Lopez-Eychenie who practices in Lille. In addition to her many other professional accomplishments, Dominique is the Vice President and founding member of Nord Mediation. She blogs about mediation, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, and collaborative law.

I’d like to wish both these bloggers the best of success and to offer them a warm welcome to the ADR blogosphere.

I’m always on the look-out for blogs to add to the World Directory. If you publish or know of a blog that you’d like me to add, please let me know. It’s a commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and some simple submission guidelines.

(With thanks to Negotiation Guru Jens Thang for kindly introducing me to Dominique and her blog.)

Technolawyer (”all the legal technology and practice management news that’s fit to blog”) hosts Blawg Review #152, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging.

Highlights of this week’s Blawg Review include the most shocking court transcript of the year starring a bad-ass court reporter, pointers on strong marketing in a weak economy, and the 20 worst Beatles songs as proof that “no-one [sic] ever achieves a consistently high standard.”

Five years ago Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever published Women Don’t Ask, a book that ripped the lid off of one of negotiation’s most intractable problems: the challenges that women face in negotiating successfully. They examined the barriers — institutional, cultural, and social — that hold women back and provided strategies to help women conquer the gender divide at the negotiation table to ask for and get what they want.

Women Don’t Ask touched a responsive chord in women nationally and internationally, many of whom had encountered these barriers up close. Many women contacted the authors to thank them for writing a book that opened up their eyes to negotiation’s possibilities and to ask for help with their own negotiations. This enthusiastic response motivated Babcock and Laschever to write a second book, the recently published Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.

I plan to post a review of this book later this week, but one thing I can tell you right now is that it may be one of the best books on negotiation I’ve ever read. What Tammy Lenski recently did for mediation marketing, Ask for It does for real women facing real-world negotiations — women who want practical, common sense advice and tools for being effective negotiators. The advice is so good though and the revelations about gender issues at the negotiation table so disturbing that men should read it, too — not just to learn better ways to negotiate but to find out how any of us can battle gender bias in negotiation.

The Ask for It web site provides support for negotiating women, everything from downloadable worksheets and information to links to online resources, including Babcock’s work helping girls learn to negotiate.

There’s even (be still my heart) a blog. Although the blog is new with just three posts so far, if “Scary Monster(.com)” and “Cut Throat Bitch“, with their gutsy commentary on negotiation and gender, are any indication of what’s to come, this is one negotiation blog you’ll want to follow.

On television, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the billboards we speed past, images fill our visual landscape.

But what effect do the images that appear in the media have on us? How do they influence our judgments, our economic choices, and our assumptions about ourselves and each other? To what extent do they hold up a mirror to cultural values about gender, race, authority, sex, or violence? How do we decode their messages to separate what’s false from what’s not? And how can we immunize ourselves against their effects?

These are questions that media critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, teachers, parents, and others have struggled with. But it is up to all of us to confront and examine these images for ourselves. One blog, Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing, provides images for discussion in sociology and other classes — or for anyone interested in coming face to face with the images that bombard us daily. Visitors can browse the categories of images this blog has collected, which include violence, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and many more. A word of caution — not all images are workplace safe and some may give offense.

Seeing Is Believing offers a fascinating — and at times disturbing — foray into the world of media images. Presented with minimal text, these images at once provoke and invite us to decipher their messages about society and ourselves.

Far be it from me, a mediator, to encourage conflict, but this sounds like good, clean, wacky fun.

On Saturday, March 22, people will be gathering in cities all around the world (including my own, Boston, in Copley Square) to take part in a pillow fight in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Instructions and rules of engagement are available for starting your own public pillow fight.

What are the benefits? According to the Pillow Fight Day web site,

people will make new friends, re-unite with old ones, meet future lovers, and revel in the blissful one-ness of a free, fun, social gathering.

And who knows? If this a sign of things to come, perhaps in the not-too-distant future there’ll be an International Food Fight Day. In anticipation, you can order yourself one of these spring-loaded catapult spoons.

(Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri.)

(Hat tip to the Atlantic Review.)