Effective mediation techniques
May 28, 2019
Psychologists tell us that humans prize harmony between their actions and beliefs. Accordingly, when we act contrary to a strong belief, alarm bells go off in the brain, and we feel mental discomfort, or “dissonance.” To eliminate this tension, we can either abandon the belief or change the behavior. To..
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Tags:May 24, 2019
The use of high-low agreements is a familiar mediation technique. In a nutshell, a high-low agreement represents a “partial” settlement of a dispute under which the parties to a mediation agree to a minimum recovery for the plaintiff, and a maximum payout by the defendant, and then proceed towards final..
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Tags:May 16, 2019
“Expanding the pie” is a mediation technique that expands resolution of a dispute beyond purely distributive issues (i.e., how much money A pays to B) to other exchanges of value that create “win-win” solutions for the parties. “Pie expansion” works because, in most conflicts, it’s usually never “just about the..
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Tags:May 10, 2019
With nearly 30 years of experience mediating business conflicts, it remains my firm conviction that to consistently reach mutually beneficial settlements of commercial disputes, the mediation process must be structured to enable business decision makers to address the underlying business interests of the dispute. One of the expectations emerging from..
Tags:May 9, 2019
For the inaugural post on the Merge Mediation Group blog, I’d like to briefly discuss the role of empathy in mediating disputes where there is a strong emotional component. That is, in disputes where emotions play a central role, what strategies can mediators employ to encourage disputants to step into..
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