What Does Cross-Discipline Have to Do With It?
Among the benefits of the "meme tag" game is cross-disciplinary learning. See Switch! - Cross-Disciplinary Learning at the Eide Neurolearning Blog, the one degree of separation between us and the Thinking Blogger Award.
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And check out the Creative Generalist while you're at it.
First, the excerpt from Eide Neurolearning:
The best way to have fun in science is to do something you are not trained for. - Seymour Benzer
Any student of creativity or innovation knows that changing disciplines seems to be a way of keeping 'fresh' and getting new ideas. Louis Pasteur got his start in crystallography, but then started solving problems in fermentation when a student of his brought him a factory problem. When a devastation of silkworms happened in Europe, they called Pasteur who exclaimed, "But I know nothing of silkworms." Nevertheless, he ended up solving the problem of silkworms by crossing over into the fields of microbiology and immunology.
In Root-Berstein's study of innovators, he found '[i]n every case that I have been able to examine, researchers who continued to be productive past middle age changed fields regularly. In effect they periodically returned to the state of a novice by taking up a new subject. They broke out of the patterns of work and thought to which they had become accustomed.'
For the remainder of the Eide's post, scroll down to Switch! here.
A Brief Comment on the Era of Legal Specialization
Attorneys entered the realm of specialization about twenty years ago. Because novel legal problems are generally resolved for entire industries in fifteen or twenty years (i.e., how a Comprehensive General Liability Policy should be interpreted in response to a claim against an oil company for production-related environmental contamination) attorney-specialists are forced to change specialties at least once, if not two or three times during their working lives.
At one of the intersections between the end of one specialty (environmental insurance coverage) and my search for another, I began defending consumer class actions. Although I'd once prosecuted a commercial class action against a Japanese car manufacturer, that one case was the only experience I had in litigating class actions.
In addition to not knowing what I should do in negotiating a settlement of my client's "fair share" of potential liability I also had no idea what I shouldn't do. As a result, the settlement I negotiated was better than any achieved by the dozens of other similar companies who were my co-defendants.
One afternoon, I received a call from senior counsel to the defendant who'd had the greatest potential liability exposure and who likely paid the most to settle the case.
"How in the world did you get them to agree to an injunction-only settlement?" she asked. "I've never seen anybody do that before."
"Thanks," I said. "I guess I managed to do it because I didn't know that I couldn't."
What Does Being a Generalist Have to Do with Negotiation and Mediation?
As I recently said in a moment of naked self-promotion, it's good to have a mediator who is "inside the other guy's decision cycle," i.e., someone familiar with the industry and the legal specialty involved.
"The day of the generalist mediator is over," I'm told, just as I was told the "day of the legal generalist is over" sometime in the late '80s.
But here's the exception to the rule. Negotiator or mediator, the parties will teach you the critical facts and the lawyers will hip you to the law necessary to resolve the dispute even if you don't know bupkus about either.
Often, the more you know, the less likely you will be open to innovative solutions to intractable problems.
I suppose the best of both worlds would be to practice (and negotiate) in your specialty while at the same time maintaining what Buddhists call a "beginner's mind."
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." - Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi from the Beginners Mind Blog.
No matter how much you know or think you know, set aside your pre-conceptions and pre-judgments as much as you are able. Avoid "we've always done it this way" thinking. Then, whether you're in a new field or an old one, you will surprise yourself and your bargaining partner with the high degree of creativity you are able to bring to the same old problems.
Did I also say it's lots more fun to do something new everyday? And that conflict resolution -- whether you're judge or jury, advocate or negotiator, mediator or arbitrator -- is waaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too hard unless you're having fun doing it.
