Cafe Mediate is the latest brainchild of mediation marketing and conflict resolution expert Tammy Lenski, who publishes two popular blogs, Conflict Zen and Making Mediation Your Day Job. Cafe Mediate (motto: “where conversation not caffeine is the stimulant”), a new monthly podcast series, will feature lively discussion among ADR professionals about topics relevant to practitioners, from the pragmatic to the provocative.
The inaugural session just aired. This transatlantic conversation brought together me, Tammy, and international business mediator Amanda Bucklow, who is based in England and blogs at the top-drawer Mediation Times, to talk about an issue of great interest to conflict resolution professionals: value billing.
Listen in to the podcast at “Value-based fees in the mediation and ADR world“. If you use an RSS reader (for further instructions, see this video Tammy helpfully created), you can subscribe to alerts at CafeMediate’s main page.
Thanks to Tammy for inviting me to join in and to the extraordinary Amanda as well – I enjoyed the conversation and am already looking forward to the next one.
Four times each year, the American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution publishes Dispute Resolution Magazine, covering trends and news that affect ADR practitioners and scholars. An article I wrote about blogging appeared in the Summer 2009 issue. The folks on the magazine’s editorial board have kindly given me permission to upload it to share it here with you.
This article, “Only Connect: The Impact of Blogging on the Field of ADR“, describes how blogging has changed the way ADR professionals do business, share and debate ideas, and build meaningful personal connections across (and despite) time zones.
Here’s an excerpt:
In his 2006 book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, author Stephen Miller evoked a golden age of discourse that England enjoyed in the 18th century. The seat of that renaissance of conversation was the coffeehouse, where wit and aphorism flourished. Men gathered to warm themselves with a dish of coffee, transact business, gather news, enjoy the latest gossip, and of course converse.
Although the British coffeehouse has largely faded from public memory, a spiritual descendant has emerged possessing many of its ancestor’s most distinctive attributes: the blog. Like its 18th century predecessor, the blog is simultaneously marketplace, library, and public square, with a wealth of views and ideas clamoring for consideration, attracting businesspeople, scholars, thinkers, writers, celebrities, and ordinary citizens.
ADR professionals and scholars perhaps would have felt at home in the 18th-century coffeehouse. We and the coffeehouse share similar virtues: ours is a field that promotes and pursues the exchange of ideas and information. It is fundamentally about conversation. And, like England in the 18th century, the ADR field is enjoying its own renaissance in discourse, one that flowers lushly online, thanks to the phenomenon of blogging, drawn to its capacity for bringing people and fresh thinking together…
For ADR bloggers and our readers, the phenomenon of blogging has dramatically affected us and the way we practice in three key areas: the business of ADR, the dissemination and discussion of information and ideas, and professional networking. I invite you to explore them with me…
The article also names some essential blogs to follow. Space constrained me, preventing me from adding all that I would. Here’s a far more comprehensive list of 24 outstanding alternative dispute resolution blogs to read regularly.
Sometimes I wonder how I lived without the internet, that seemingly endless flow of news and ideas, which, loaves-and-fishes style, miraculously replenishes itself with every visit.
While the quality of content can be uneven and its reliability sometimes suspect, the web is nonetheless a lush hunting ground for discerning information seekers. The best part of course is that so much of it is free.
Michelle Golden, who blogs at Golden Practices, has uncovered one of those gems that internet hunts can yield: a free guide to “Basic Facilitation Skills” (in PDF) available for downloading from the web site of the International Association of Facilitators.
This free 32-page booklet provides step-by-step guidelines for organizing and running productive meetings. There are sample forms to adapt for your own meeting, as well as tips for keeping meetings on track with suggested interventions for dealing with everything from personal attacks to sidebar discussions.
Several months ago, a former student of mine, about to sit for the bar, asked me to write for him the letter of recommendation his application package required. Although at that time my schedule was hectic, I was happy to do so and accommodated his request, completing the letter and mailing it off to him well in advance of the bar deadline. I emailed him to let him know it was on its way.
Several weeks passed, and I heard nothing at all from my former student — not an email or phone call to let me know he’d received my letter. I grew concerned that the letter had gone astray and he had failed to receive it. Then, as the days passed, I became annoyed that he hadn’t acknowledged an effort undertaken on his behalf and at his request. At last I emailed him to ask if the letter had reached him. Yes, he wrote back, it came. And then, as an afterthought, he added, by the way, thanks.
His casual response disappointed me. I had taken time to reflect on my personal knowledge of him and his character and then draft with care a letter to help him achieve an important professional goal. Yet it never occurred to him to contact me to reassure me that my letter reached its destination and that he appreciated my help.
Expressing appreciation requires little effort yet means so much to the recipient. You can pick up the phone, send an email, even write a note. Yet failure to do so results in great cost. It saddens me that my former student has unthinkingly burned a bridge. It is unlikely now that I will ever send a client or business opportunity his way.
His carelessness made me think a lot about what “thank you” really means. It is not simply expressing gratitude for the extra mile, the care, the thought. “Thank you” is also about renewing or building relationships. “Thank you” honors a past deed. “Thank you” affirms hope for the future.
If someone gave you advice you asked for, put you in touch with people who could help you, referred you business, linked to your web site, made available resources so you could get something done, or otherwise did you a good deed, thank them. Although some (like gratitude’s fiercest champions, attorneys Dan Hull and Holden Oliver) would suggest a hand-written note (preferably on Crane’s stationery), others like me would say the message itself matters more than the medium in which it is delivered.
Just say it. Right now.
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.”
