In my experience, one of the most persistent sources of interpersonal conflict is the inability to own up to and correct mistakes. Our first impulse may be to conceal an error, or to deny it exists. We may try to shift the fault and blame it on the negligence of others. We may be paralyzed by embarrassment, shame or a sense of personal failure. Or, perhaps, we just don’t know what to do.

Dumb Little Man presents a remarkable story of one lawyer’s workplace error — missing a critical filing deadline, every attorney’s nightmare — and describes the courageous steps she took to make things right in “How to Recover from a (Big) Mistake at Work“. While avoiding mistakes in the first place is important, it’s a mark of character and rare ingenuity to fix one — making her the kind of lawyer I’d want to hire.

This is probably way more information than any of us really needs to know, but here goes.

Poop For Peace Day (do not click if you possess a low tolerance level for the scatological) is based on the notion that #2 is the best way to solve the world’s #1 problem:

Poop For Peace Day is not a day of protest. Pooping for peace is not a left-wing or right-wing activity. Pooping for peace is an act of unity. It’s not about religion or politics. Rather, it’s about the simple truth: underlying our religions and our politics are universal needs, wants and desires. To poop for peace is to transcend arbitrary divisions and embrace that which makes us human. Only from starting at such a fundamental truism can we hope to expand our understandings and solve our differences.

If you say so.

Via Kottke.org.

This weekend I finished reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. A recounting of nineteenth-century London’s battle with cholera, it proved to be one of those books so riveting I could not bear to put it down.

It is at bottom an etiology of error — uncovering how mistaken beliefs about the causes of disease take hold, thrive, and persist, with disastrous consequences for public health. It considers important questions:

The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on the breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline — the sociology of error.

This book delivers as well a message of optimism about intellectual courage and unblinkered vision — how two men struggled to cast off bad ideas and pursue better ones — ideas that ultimately led to the defeat of a deadly disease.

For anyone fascinated by human judgment and cognition, this book offers a reminder, rooted in history, of the importance of the second glance, of the ability to see anew.

Hic sunt dracones — here be dragons — is an old cartographer’s phrase to indicate unknown or dangerous territory.

It’s also the premise behind RottenNeighbor.com, a web site that enables registered users to map the locations of bad neighbors and air neighborhood gripes, putting prospective buyers and renters on notice:

Whether you’re moving down the street or across the country, we want you to be aware of bad neighbors before you relocate. Buying a home is one of the biggest investments you will make, and we are here to provide more peace of mind. Real estate agents can also use RottenNeighbor as a tool to market their services and feel more secure about the homes they show to their clients.

While in theory at least this seems like a good idea, practice proves different. So far this site promises little more than an opportunity for the spiteful to post allegations of sexual misconduct or criminal activity or simply malicious comments about people they don’t much like. Like some real-world neighborhoods, parts of this site are unpleasant to venture into.  Be warned — there indeed be dragons.

(Via Boing Boing.)

In this election year, everyone’s paying a lot of attention to the negotiation styles of the presidential contenders, as I pointed out in a recent post.

The most recent commentary comes from the blog Daily Kos (thanks to fellow blogger Victoria Pynchon for the link), which discusses the substantive differences in the negotiation styles of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

By engaging all parties in negotiations, and reaching a collective agreement about how much weight to give to each variable, it is possible to provide some benefit to each party, although no-one [sic] gets exactly what he or she wants. This is integrative bargaining. I have a strong hunch that Senator Obama learned about this in law school, and applied it during his work as a community organizer. When he talks about having all parties sit down to negotiate about health care, this is what he has in mind. When Senator Clinton talks about defeating the enemies of her health care plan, she is talking about zero-sum bargaining. The 50% + 1 approach to winning elections is zero-sum. Her argument that she will break the glass ceiling by being elected president is also zero-sum; for a woman to win, a man has to lose.

Give me a break. It’s Daily Kos that’s created the zero-sum game, one which Clinton can’t possibly win. You’re either a value-creating negotiator (good), or you’re a value-claiming one (bad). There’s not a lot of room here for nuance. Indeed, this kind of reasoning evokes Orwell’s doomed sheep bleating, “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

The truth is that life — and negotiation — are never that simple.

Personally, for a change, I’d like to see the White House inhabited by a president who is skilled in many styles of negotiating. Someone who possesses the flexibility, sophistication, and wit to deploy the appropriate negotiation strategy, or indeed as many strategies as are necessary. Not every negotiation merits a collaborative approach. And sometimes getting to yes is a really bad idea.

No matter what, there is one negotiating style in particular the next administration should practice: what Bargaining for Advantage author G. Richard Shell calls “information-based bargaining”. A common-sense approach, it focuses on “solid planning and preparation before you start, careful listening so you can find out what the other side really wants, and attending to the ’signals’ the other party sends through his or her conduct once bargaining gets underway.”

We could all do with a lot more solid planning and a whole lot more careful listening by our elected leaders.

Otherwise, once again, we’ll end up with less than we bargained for.

Jim Melamed, co-founder of Mediate.com, arguably the ADR field’s best known and most influential online resource, has published “Obama’s Message: Mediation’s Political Triumph“, an impassioned and compelling panegyric to a presidential candidate and the influence on politics and culture of the mediation movement.

Online misunderstandings flare up easily, but there’s a way to prevent them.

For a crash course on internet etiquette, view “How To Behave On An Internet Forum“, created in old-school-style, 8-bit animation.

(Spotted on Boing Boing.)

David Levy, artificial intelligence expert and author of Love and Sex with Robots (no, I’m not making that up), in a recent interview with Scientific American predicts that humans one day will marry robots.

One observation about the need for disagreement in relationships caught my attention:

[Journalist:] Would people really want a robot that agreed with everything you wanted or were completely predictable?

[Levy:] I do think there is often a need for friction in relationships. You wouldn’t actually want a robot that does everything you want. Most people might want robots that sometimes say, “I don’t really want to do that,” that rejects certain requests from time to time. So you could program that in, the level of disagreement you want.

Which leaves me wondering how those disagreements will be handled. Do you simply reboot your partner? (Be honest now — how many of you have wished you could do that?)

The peace symbol — an enduring emblem of protest recognized around the world — celebrates its 50th birthday this year.

Visit the Happy Birthday Peace web site to learn what you can do to make love, not war.

Two different sources — one approvingly, one not — report that a growing number of doctors are asking patients to enter into agreements to arbitrate malpractice claims and waive their right to trial by jury.

Both sources link to “Arbitration a growing trend in health care“, a story appearing earlier this month in the Philadelphia Inquirer :

Michael Cohen was handed an arbitration agreement when he visited his longtime primary-care doctor in Bucks County. Cohen said he was not the suing kind, but the thought of being asked to give up his right to sue “stopped me in my tracks.” He said no, and his doctor saw him anyway.

Then Hedy Cohen, who has had a kidney transplant, was mailed a similar form by a group of kidney specialists she planned to see for the first time. The form from Hypertension-Nephrology Associates in Willow Grove insisted on binding arbitration and said she would have to pay the doctors’ legal fees if she filed a complaint and lost.

Hedy Cohen said no and was told to find another nephrologist.

That was fine with Cohen, a nurse with a master’s degree in health-care administration. “I couldn’t have a relationship with this person because they had already set the tone,” she said. “We’re adversaries before we even know each other.”

You can count me in the camp that considers such agreements a really bad idea. Never mind all of the usual arguments against mandatory arbitration agreements — they go without saying. The chief problem I see is the message it conveys — it says plainly, “I care more about my own self-interest than I do about the quality of my relationship with my patients.” What impact does that have on a patient’s trust? What does it say about the physician’s priorities? His or her sense of duty to that patient? What does it convey about that physician’s commitment to providing good patient care — what is at bottom good customer service? It would tell me as a patient all I need to know — to seek medical care somewhere else.

What if instead a physician asked a patient to enter into a very different kind of understanding? An understanding premised on trust, mutual respect, and a willingness to communicate?

It’s not so far-fetched. Listen to “Medical Apologies“, which aired recently on Radio Boston. It describes what happens when health care professionals actually talk to patients when medical procedures go wrong. It means fewer lawsuits, not more, when doctors apologize to patients for medical errors. And it represents a healthier direction for the health care field and for patients than the mandatory arbitration trend.

Throughout this election season here in the US, there’s been a lot of talk about the candidates and their skills in, or positions on, negotiating.

Barack Obama took heat for saying he’d talk with Iran, as Republican contenders insisted they wouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, while Hillary kept changing her mind whether she would or not.

Meanwhile from the mediation community we’ve heard Robert Benjamin’s views as a hard core negotiator on one of the candidates, countered by a deft parry from conflict management professor Darrell Puls.

With so much at stake here in the U.S. presidential elections — jobs, the economy, health care, foreign relations, national security, the war in Iraq, civil liberties, education, the environment, you name it — it’s surprising that no one’s talking about the negotiation skills of the one person who matters most here: the American voter. That’s the person we should be most concerned with, since it is this person who will ultimately determine (dodgy electronic voting machines and Florida recounts aside) who will occupy the White House in 2009.

What kind of negotiator is this person? How prepared are they for the negotiation in the voting booth? That’s what I want to know.

I therefore propose three negotiation tips for voters to aid them as they decide which political candidate to pull the lever for come November.

Negotiation Tip No. 1: Be prepared.

Many negotiators agree on the importance of preparation. The more you ask questions, the more you listen, the more you learn, the more you’ve taken time to understand the interests at stake and evaluate the options available, the better the position you’re in to negotiate. An election’s no different. Knowledge is power, both at the negotiation table and in the voting booth.

In fact, you owe it to yourself to seek your information from sources that are as reliable and as objective as possible. Forget what the candidates, your favorite radio station, or your Uncle Dave tell you. Visit sites like The Fact Checker, FactCheck.org, or PolitiFact.com to learn what the spin-doctors don’t want you to know. As The Who once said, “Won’t get fooled again.” Let that be your anthem.

Negotiation Tip No. 2: Watch out for cognitive biases.

As humans, we all fall prey to cognitive errors — the mistakes our minds commit as we make decisions or form judgments. In fact, here’s a whole list of them to guard against. In particular, watch out for confirmation bias — the tendency to seek out information that supports your position.

Negotiation Tip No. 3: Arm yourself against the weapons of influence.

In his classic work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini details our susceptibility to the manipulations of others. He warns of how easily we succumb to influence, what he calls the click, whirr of human behavior. Click, the behavioral trigger is activated. Whirr, we irresistibly respond. For example, researchers have documented how effective authority can be for influencing everything from consumer purchasing decisions (consider the controversy over Dr. Robert Jarvik’s endorsement of Lipitor) to support for a political candidate (think Chuck Norris or Oprah Winfrey).

For a description of the strategies of influence at work, Victoria Pynchon writing at Settle It Now Negotiation Blog lists six basic principles of persuasion that you may already be at the mercy of.

* * * * * * * * * *

With these three tips, you’ll be ready for anything that the pundits and the pols dish out. Just remember, even if you don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists, at least be willing to negotiate with yourself before you vote.

On Valentine’s Day, romance is in the air.

But not for Charleston, West Virginia radio station WKLC. It’s holding a Valentine’s Day contest to give away a free divorce to one lucky couple.

There’s just a couple of problems. That free divorce — surprise, surprise — doesn’t include the services of a divorce mediator. And it may not be so free — the winner of the contest instead will only get 10 free hours of an attorney’s time.

Ten hours may only be enough to just get you started — especially if you consider the study the Boston Law Collaborative conducted of 199 divorce cases. It found that for divorcing couples, “[m]ediation was by far the least expensive option, with a median cost of $6,600, compared to $19,723 for a collaborative divorce, $26,830 for settlements negotiated by rival lawyers, and $77,746 for full-scale litigation.”

Tonight ABC news anchor Charles Gibson eulogized a colleague and friend, retired journalist John McWethy, who died yesterday in a ski accident.

Gibson spoke movingly of McWethy’s commitment to objective reporting and to uncovering the facts: “Jack believed that the most important word, the most powerful word, in the English language is why.”

Those words queued up a film clip of McWethy speaking at a DePauw University graduation ceremony:

All institutions, all endeavors, all relationships, are improved by a good scrubbing, using the word “why”. In democracy it is the question we must all constantly be asking our government and our leaders. It is not unpatriotic to question the government. It is unpatriotic not to.

Before kids become as scared of dispute resolution professionals as they are of clowns, I think it’s high time I stepped in to clear up a pernicious rumor buzzing among the elementary and preschool crowd.

Law blogger Denise Howell’s son, like plenty of other little kids, thinks that mediators wiped out the dinosaurs.

For the record, it was arbitrators.

People always get us confused.

I will remember always the pride I felt the day I was sworn in as a member of the bar.

I was the first woman in my family to go to college, to get an advanced degree, and now, to become a lawyer. It was an important achievement for me and for my whole family.

It meant a great deal, this formal commitment to the courts and to the law that courts serve — to become a member of a profession dedicated to principles so lofty that when you speak their names out loud, you can hear the capital letters ring out:

Justice. Liberty. Equality. Rights.

Such is the romanticism of youth.

A week or so after the ceremony, something unexpected happened to crush my youthful idealism.

I can no longer remember what mission the partner who was supervising me had sent me on, but for the first time I walked into a courtroom as a lawyer. I wore a brand-new suit and carried a leather briefcase (also new). I walked past the gleaming wood rail that marked the area where the general public waited, entered the lawyers’ bullpen, and proudly sat down.

A few minutes later, two attorneys, men in their late sixties, approached my row, caught sight of me, and then glared at me. They stood for a moment, and I had the impression that they were about to ask me to move. Instead, they glanced meaningfully at each other and then sat down directly behind me.

They began whispering to each other, just loudly enough that I could hear every word. “It’s an outrage what’s happened to the legal profession. People these days evidently don’t know their place,” said one. “Looks like anyone can be a lawyer these days,” said the other, “they’ve certainly lowered the bar.” There was more along those lines.

Nothing in my law school career had prepared me for that. I had no idea what to do. I could feel my face burning. I felt sick to my stomach. And really, really angry. The attorney sitting next to me rolled his eyes in disgust. “Ignore it,” he whispered, “and don’t let it get to you. Dinosaurs like that are on their way out.”

As it turns out, his prediction was wrong.

Sexism is alive and well and living in the comments section of an article in the ABA Journal’s Law News Now about a woman who contacts an advice columnist to get some help with a toxic workplace — specifically, the law firm that employs her.

Go see for yourself that dinosaurs still walk the earth.