Dear friends,
Last night the unthinkable happened: someone hacked my blog, vandalizing my database. Needless to say, this has been very upsetting. I feel sad, and yes, really, really pissed off that someone would target my blog this way, particularly when my work — conflict resolution — is involved in trying to make the world a nicer place to be.
I had thought I had taken the appropriate precautions, but it turns out that the newest version of Wordpress I upgraded to over the weekend may have a vulnerability that someone was able to exploit. Please take care, fellow bloggers.
In the meantime, please bear with me as I try to recover the site and all my hard work over three years.
Help and moral support would be gratefully accepted.
Thanks, friends,
Diane
As a mediator, when it comes to ground rules, what’s your style? Are you a mediation cop who lays down and enforces rules for parties to follow? Or are you a Zen master who responds in the moment to enable parties to generate their own rules of engagement?
My friend Ericka Gray, a leader in the dispute resolution field who has been mediating for more years than she would like me to tell you, has written an article that may convince mediation cops to turn in their badges and try a more nuanced approach in “Resistance Is Futile: Going with the Flow“, published at Mediate.com.
Ericka draws on Lao Tzu for inspiration, along with good old common sense and some real-life anecdotes. Ericka says,
In the spirit of T’ai Chi, meeting challenges with resistance leads only to some degree of injury to both sides. In mediation, this may take the shape of meeting positions with positions or establishing positions (ground rules) at the beginning of the process in order to try to exert some control by the mediator. Lao-Tzu’s prescription of meeting such hardness and force with softness, following the motion and redirecting, could easily have been written for mediation students.
Now stop resisting and go read the article, Grasshopper.
Darn. I guess I can’t avoid it. I’ve been tagged by not just one but two bloggers, Justin Patten and Colin Rule, to participate in the current game of memetag. (A memetag is the blogosphere’s equivalent of a chain letter. It requires an act on the recipient’s part–in this case to recount five things you don’t know about me–and then the recipient must “tag” others to pass it along. Fortunately nothing bad happens if you break the chain.)
Okay, here goes.
1. You probably know that I was a litigator before I became a mediator. What you probably don’t know, however, is that I really, really, really liked being a litigator. I was highly competitive, liked winning, and loved the performance art theatre that was the courtroom. Not only did I have fun writing briefs, but I especially adored oral argument. And you know what? I still miss it. Shhhh. Just don’t tell the other mediators.
2. When my husband Steve and I got married, we ran away to Las Vegas to do it. And no, we were not married by a parachuting Elvis Presley impersonator.
3. I’m a great cook who has entered numerous recipe contests and won cash prizes. My husband’s got the cholesterol level to prove it.
4. There’s a commonly held assumption (and, like most assumptions, wrong) that all American mediators are registered Democrats. I’m not. I’m an independent. (However, I’m still a card-carrying member of the ACLU.)
5. On a dare, I once walked across a 20-foot-long bed of live coals.
I tag Geoff Sharp, Victoria Pynchon, Perry Itkin, Stephanie West Allen, and Christoph Stroyer (just to send this game into the German-speaking part of the blogosphere). No pressure, folks!
Readers, please accept my apologies for the long silence.
A perfect storm of 16-hour-long work days, a severe cold simultaneously afflicting every member of my family including me, and a houseful of relatives on Thanksgiving combined to produce unfavorable blogging conditions.
In any event, it’s good to be back!
It’s election time here in the U.S., and as any American can tell you, politics these days isn’t democracy in action, it’s a blood sport. Not only are politicians having a tough time being civil to each other, so, too, are members of the voting public. Even among my own family, we try to avoid politics and stick with less controversial topics–like religion and sex.
There may be hope, however, for those who long for a better way to debate the important issues of our times.
As reported today on Colin Rule’s Blog at the Center for Internet and Society, the Public Conversations Project seeks participants for RedBlue, an online dialogue project that will bring people on opposite ends of the political spectrum together:
RedBlue will be an interactive Internet application that will provide an exciting yet safe way to engage directly with someone on “the other side” of the political spectrum. This new approach to civic engagement is designed to leave behind the confrontational and polarizing forms of discourse that dominate today’s Red vs. Blue debates and reintroduce Americans to the old-fashioned notion that in matters of public policy, there can be room for reasonable people to disagree.
RedBlue will create a private, one-on-one online dialogue process by matching participants with contrasting views. “Counterparts” will learn about the ground rules of productive dialogue, then engage on a difficult issue by viewing or reading a fictional narrative scenario that frames a front-page issue in personal, rather than theoretical, terms. Their email-style discussion will be monitored by a “virtual facilitator” that will make suggestions, provide feedback, and offer to step in when the heat of the moment threatens to derail the civility of the dialogue.
For more information, visit http://www.redblueus.org/.
