I mediate and arbitrate complex commercial disputes, the former with ADR Services, Inc. in Century City and the latter with...
The 33 cent wage and income gap is unacceptable and unnecessary. So is the cliché glass ceiling. Bottom line, our...
I'm asked about Restorative Justice from time to time. It's all about accountability, amends and reconciliation. Powerful stuff. Take a look. Here's my own article on Restorative Justice practices, which I compare to recovery in a 12-step community.
Below, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu on The Forgiveness Project.
I would not ordinarily post a power point presentation that is someone else's marketing vehicle. Nor would I generally post a power point that is meant solely for the benefit of one side of any dispute (here, plaintiffs' personal injury attorneys). I read though the entire lengthy presentation, however, and thought it contained some good tips over a broad range of issues that could well be useful to attorneys, clients and mediators in settling personal injury litigation involving the use of structured financial products. So with all disclaimers considered given (not my opinions; don't vouch for accuracy, etc.) I uploaded the below presentation for anyone who might find it a useful jumping off point in this complex arena (i.e., it invovles arithmetic if not actually mathematics!)
If you learn this single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person... until you consider things from his point of view.
Sir?
Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
To Kill a Mockingbird (from the screenplay)
Best summary of the 140 page majority opinion (.pdf of opinion here) in Reading the Decision at the Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. This opinion eviscerates and then upholds Proposition 8 as constitutionally inoffensive.
John Culhane parses the prop 8 ruling:
The majority went on for almost 140 pages. In brief, their points — which I’ll next explore in somewhat greater depth — are these: (1) The California Constitution is easy to amend, and that’s not something we can change: (2) The deprivation of rights isn’t that big a deal, really, because all that’s been removed by Prop 8 is the word “marriage” rather than the rights that go with it; (3) Based on precedent and constitutional history, Prop 8 is a permissible amendment to the state’s constitution — not a more substantial revision, which would require prior submission to the legislatures (and a 2/3 approval) before going to the voters; (4) There’s no separation of powers problem here: Everyone’s doing their constitutional job; and (5) The Attorney General’s “novel” argument that certain rights are “inalienable” and therefore immune from the vagaries of majority rule, has no traction.
It sounds like a reasonable judgment to me. The job of supporters of equality is now to make the case for real substantive equality - in name as well as form. And to take that argument to the people of California.
The most important questions every negotiator must ask herself in maximizing the opportunity to make a deal that satisfies all parties' interests simultaneously are: why do you want what you want and how do you think we might satisfy your desires and mine at the same time.
Of course some demands are non-negotiable. "Separate but equal" was not an acceptable option for African Americans in the South at the mid-point of the twentieth century and substantive marital rights without the word "marriage" is not an acceptable option for the gay community at the beginning of the 21st. On the other hand, supporters of Prop 8 waged a misleading campaign suggesting that in the absence of Prop 8 the State would interfere with religious activities by requiring churches to sanctify marriages their religion does not permit. The LDS and other churches' freedom to exercise their own religious practices free from interference by the state and gays' rights to civil marital rights (the only type of rights a secular society is permitted to grant) can be simultaneously satisfied. And yet we raise money to fight on.
To reiterate: yesterday's California Supreme Court opinion upheld Proposition 8 only to the extent that it bars the use of the term "marriage." Because the Court held that Proposition 8 could not bar our gay and Lesbian citizens from any substantive marital right given to our heterosexual citizens, there is a not-yet-celebrated victory on one side and a not-yet-experienced defeat on the other.
And so, the messy business of democracy in a country guaranteeing liberty moves one step forward and one step back in a dance that wouldn't be nearly so rich in the absence of gay contributions to American culture.
See also this analysis from The Complex Litigator Blog ("everyone will be unhappy with the opinion").
The Existing Differences in California's Domestic Partnership Laws and Marital Rights Which Differences Should Now Be Considered Unconstitutional (I do not vouch for the accuracy of this analysis; I am not an expert in family law):
While domestic partners receive most of the benefits of marriage, several differences remain. These differences include, in part:
Couples seeking domestic partnership must already share a residence, married couples may be married without living together.
Couples seeking domestic partnership must be 18 or older, minors can be married before the age of 18 with the consent of their parents.
California permits married couples the option of confidential marriage, there is no equivalent institution for domestic partnerships. In confidential marriages, no witnesses are required and the marriage license is not a matter of public record.
Married partners of state employees are eligible for the CalPERS long-term care insurance plan, domestic partners are not.
There is, at least according to one appellate ruling, no equivalent of the Putative Spouse Doctrine for domestic partnerships. [3]
In addition to these differences specific to state law, should the Defense of Marriage Act be found unconstitutional or repealed, married persons in California might enjoy all the federal benefits of marriage, including Constitutionally-required recognition of their relationships as marriages in the rest of the United States under the Full Faith and Credit Clause.
See also the Constitutional Law Prof blog comment on the Prop 8 opinion, particularly notingthe dissent of Justice Carlos Moreno
"based on his interpretation of California's equal protection clause, which is not only distinct from the Fourteenth Amendment, but also
Check out Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters -- Negotiations Today Could Haunt You Tomorrow, once again confirming that the human interaction during the negotiation is more important to long term satisfaction with the deal than the raw economic benefit achieved. As Mehta explains, a recent study reported Curhan, J., Elfenbein, H., Kilduff, G. Getting Off on the Right Foot: Subjective Value Versus Economic Value in Predicting Longitudial Job Outcomes From Job Offer Negotiations in the Journal of Applied Pyschology, 2009, V. 94, No. 2, 524-534 (.pdf)
found that the satisfaction with the experience the employees had during their job offer negotiations significantly predicted compensation satisfaction, job satisfaction, and turnover intention one year later. By contrast, the actual economic value – meaning the value of the compensation package — achieved in the negotiation had no association with job attitudes or intentions to leave.
Interests In Employment Litigation
Just as the quality of the pre-employment relationship colors the entire workplace experience, so will a negative termination color the employee's retrospective view of the employment experience, thereby increasing the incidence of litigation.
Check out Balkinization's Why is Empathy Controversial? or Liberal, an excellent analysis of empathic wisdom (and blind spots) on the Bench in the wake of a noted Republican's vow to filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who might commit the (liberal?) sin of empathizing from the Bench.
Emotion terms are notoriously slippery. But if we understand empathy as the ability to take the perspective of another, it ought to be uncontroversial that empathy is an important component of judicial judgment. Empathy, so understood, is a basic and necessary tool for making sense of the intentions and actions of others.
So, as Mark Graber asks, who could be against empathy? And more particularly, why is empathy liberal, if we all use it? Perhaps because empathy goes by another name when it comes easily—for example, when Supreme Court justices take the perspective of those from similar backgrounds or with similar worldviews. This sort of empathy looks neutral and natural, not ideological or partial. It tends to be portrayed as garden-variety judicial reasoning.
We all use empathy, and despite our best intentions, it is always selective and riddled with blind spots. We can try to correct for this partiality if we are self-aware. But those who study cognitive psychology and decision-making find that we aren’t all that good at identifying and critiquing our own background assumptions. A better way to encourage this sort of correction is through debate with others who hold differing viewpoints. Judges, like the rest of us, make better decisions when forced to examine and articulate their premises.
According to a recent article in the New Yorker (voice of the effete empathizing liberal east-coast establishment) we owe our conscious mind -- that which makes us human -- to the mirror neurons that give rise to to empathy (because we could "feel" the mind of another, at some point we turned that thought back against ourselves and consciousness was born).
And let's not forget that some brain researchers believe it is impossible to make any choices whatsoever in the absence of emotion (the "pure" logical mind will make endless pro and con lists absent the "gut" response that finally permits us to decide).
What does this have to do with negotiation? Anyone who continues to believe that decisions are (or could potentially be) the product of a solely rational process are losing the benefit of the emotional sway every great negotiator exercises over his or her bargaining partner.
Geesh, even George Bush professed compassion (so long as the government wasn't providing it). Does the Republican Party really wish to become the home of Darth Vadar? /1
________________
1/ Perhaps Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show described coverage of the pairing best. The show aired a clip of The Weekly Standard's William Kristol saying of the back-to-back speeches, "Just going to be fun, don't you think? Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know? And I want to say that I was always on Darth Vader's side." Stewart retorted, "Now you tell us. You know, as one of the main intellectual forces behind the Iraq war, that's kind of a weird thing to admit. You might have wanted to mention, 'Oh, quick caveat to my plan on a new American century: I'm on the Darth Vader side.' "
From "Fear of Closing Gitmo" at the Daily Kos
Police: Woman hit, bit court mediator
PORTSMOUTH — After a session of marital mediation in the district court's family division, Elizabeth Loveday threatened to kill her estranged mate, then hit and bit the mediator, police allege.
Loveday, of 27 Perkins Ave., Hampton, is charged with two counts of simple assault, a criminal threatening charge and a count of violating a protective order.
Police prosecutor Karl Durand said Loveday was exiting a courthouse meeting room when she shouted to her ex, "I will kill you." Shortly after, in a courthouse hallway, Loveday swung at, struck, then bit the mediator on her forearm, police allege.
For remainder of article, click here.
Hat tip to mediator Steve Mehta in my LinkedIn Network.
Announcement: MBB Seeks Acting Executive Director
Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB) is a non-profit, humanitarian organization established to partner with communities worldwide to build their conflict resolution capacity for preventing, resolving and healing from conflict.
MBB is accepting applications for the position of Acting Executive Director to assist the organization with strategic planning, fund development, project coordination and operations. The position is unpaid and for a 6 month term. Location is flexible. The position will commence by September 1, 2009.
To apply, please send the following materials by June 30, 2009 to melissambb@gmail.com:
1. Letter of Interest (indicating qualifications, interest and availability)
2. CV or Resume
3. References List (should contain three professional references)
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Selection will be made by the MBB Board of Directors and all applicants will receive notification by August 1, 2009.
Changing Minds Is Easier to Do When Yours Is Open
.jpg){kind=small}
FORUM COLUMN Los Angeles Daily Journal May 19. 2009
By Victoria Pynchon
It was hot, really hot, trudging the blacktop separating dozens of apartment buildings in Henderson, Nev., the day before the election. We volunteers had lists of people who were probable Obama supporters, but many of whom wavered back and forth between him and McCain. If the person at the door said he or she was voting for McCain, I wished their candidate luck and moved on. We were getting supporters out to vote, not trying to convince McCain voters to change their minds.
I probably looked pretty disheveled and blown out from the heat when, shortly after noon, I knocked on the door of Building 12. A gray‐haired Caucasian 60‐something woman in a faded house coat opened the door; an African‐American boy around 10 clinging to her side.
"I just decided last night to vote for McCain," she said, but she didn't close the door. I was about to wish her candidate "good luck" when she added, "my son keeps trying to talk me into voting for Obama but he scares me." She didn't appear to be asking me to go away.
"Are you worried about national security?" I asked, as the kid drifted back to the television set in the darkened living room.
"No, no," she laughed, "I just think he must hate America. I'm concerned about health care and education ‐ you know ‐ I was a foster child from the time I was 2 years old ‐ but that Michelle, she seems like a radical to me."
May 2009 |
Here is the interview:
Question: How will Mediate.com's certification program work?
The Mediate.com certification program allows interested mediators to have their training, experience and professional information reviewed to see if they meet the stated Mediate.com certification standards. A critical component of the Mediate.com program is that we require all this submitted information to be transparently provided to the public. So, we don’t just review the qualifying information, we make everything we review publicly available. Needless to say, confidential information is neither requested nor disclosed.
Question: What are the benefits for the public? For the profession?
The primary benefits to the public include motivating mediators to provide comprehensive information conveniently online; having this information systematically presented to the largest possible audience; and Mediate.com offering the value-add service of taking a close look at the mediator’s provided information to ensure that it is comprehensive, congruent and satisfies the stated certification standards. Presumably, the Mediate.com Certification Program will be one of a number of factors helping people to make mediator selection decisions. For good reason, this program will elevate the confidence of many mediator selection decisions.
Still, let’s be clear, one does not need to be a Mediate.com Certified Mediator to mediate. For example, we have over 3,000 mediators in our directory and only about 500 are seemingly qualified or even apply for Mediate.com Certification. We believe in all cases that the right mediator for a particular situation is the one that participants want.
The benefits to the profession are: making it abundantly clear what it is that distinguishes mediation and insisting on these qualities; elevating standards for mediator information disclosure; providing a path for mediator development not based upon profession of origin nor advanced degrees; and, in the Internet age, satisfying consumer expectations in terms of transparency and disclosure. Mediate.com seeks to respond to these elevated information expectations.
Question: On what basis does the proposed certification rest?
Perhaps the greatest rationale for Mediate.com acting is that we believe acting is better than not acting.
For decades, the mediation field has, as a matter of policy, committed itself to “skills based assessment” and, later, to a “paper and pencil test,” none of which has yet been effectively developed or implemented. This is in spite of nearly two decades and millions of dollars of grant money being applied to these issues. The cost of this development and deployment of a true skills-based system would be enormous, if possible at all (we really do not know what makes an effective mediator in each practice area); so costly by my estimate that it is simply not going to happen, at least not for “all mediation,” over the next years.
The world of mediation is also breaking into niche mediation industries, each with its own culture and practice expectations. This is both good and challenging from a quality assurance perspective. For example, the behavior and skills that will be effective for a commercial mediator in a law firm conference room may be very different from the behavior and skills that will be effective in resolving a gang dispute, custody battle or workplace departmental battle. Still, we also simultaneously think that there is something to say for a system that brings all mediation and mediators together, if only to protect the good name of “mediation.”
We are thus emphasizing these qualities to the consuming public:
· Participation in mediation negotiations is voluntary
· Participants have complete decision-making power
· The mediator is to be impartial between the participants
· Mediation communications are confidential unless understood otherwise
· Mediation allows for optimized solutions
· Mediation does not preclude any other process
· If participants do not reach agreement in mediation, their legal rights should not be prejudiced.
Now, to some, all of this is “obvious.” And we say, “of course.” But I will suggest that many state and federal agencies and court systems do not necessarily see things this way. They are far more interested in disputes being resolved and dockets cleared than in protecting the mediation process or in empowering participants to be at their best.
The world has also changed. Importantly, the Internet is now available as a source for the immediate delivery of unlimited information and comprehensive disclosure. In the context of empowering consumers and participants to “self-determine,” we think it is worthwhile to reward (with our mediation certification) those mediators that demonstrate substantial training, experience, clear commitment, and comprehensive information disclosure and transparency.
(image from and link to last week's This American Life episode, No Map)
What do these two stories -- the first hilarious; the second infuriating -- have to do with negotiation?
First, listen to the introduction and first story in last week's brilliant episode of This American Life, No Map (podcast here).
The full chimp story (chimpanzee in red sweat-shirt, jeans and shoes causes the police to "un-arrest" his owner) is an hilarious example of a lose-lose negotiation impasse. Lesson: as the 12-step people caution: "you can't save your face and your ass at the same time."
The other, more sober tale, reveals the competing interests keeping American banks from pursuing the win-win solution that would permit "upside down" homeowners to remain in their houses and continue paying at least part of their debt. Why? Among other reasons, renegotiating loans secured by deeds of trust would require banks to carry a toxic assets on their balance sheets today rather than next year.
Other impediments include the more practical road-blocks that impede efficient management of all organizations -- a lack of preparedness -- in this case, an inability to get mortgage renegotiation service centers up and running fast enough to keep up with the crisis. We're hoping that the President's economic advisors already know this, or are still finding the time to download This American Life to their iPods or Blackberries.
Well worth a listen!
Excerpt from the Loree Reinsurance and Arbitration Law Forum blog:
In our case, two of the three retroceded claims made up most of the $5MM. In the original joint cession, the Retrocessionaire had alleged improper, accommodation underwriting of serious medical issues. Since the parties’ prior achievements had built a spirit of cooperation and trust, Retrocedent C agreed to immediately retrieve from both its and Reinsurer B’s files additional underwriting and claims records which were shared with both the mediator and Retrocessionaire D. Through additional caucuses, the mediator helped the parties and counsel translate the substantive assessment of such records into rational, realistic and reasonable adjustments to the $5MM claim, narrowing the once “$5MM vs. rescission” gap to within $500,000.
For the full post documenting how the parties reached this stage and how the delta between the two parties was closed, read Mediating Reinsurance Disputes here, based on an article that appeared in issue 108 of JTW News - September 2006. If you have any questions or comments concerning this post, please use the comments feature provided or email the author at peter@conflictresolved.com. Copyright 2009, Peter A. Scarpato, Conflict Resolved (www.conflictresolved.com)
If you're worried about your law job becoming -- as they say in Britain - "redundant" or if you've already been laid off due to the recession, join Lawyer Connection which was born today as the result of a twitter conversation I had with Gwynne Monahan (who you can follow @econwriter).
Here's an exploration of what a mutual aid group is from the viewpoint of a social worker -- which speaks to me because I lived through my first husband's MSW in Social Work studies before he lived through my Law School experience (an eventual relationship-killer).
From Andrew Cicchetti's Mutual Aid Based Group Work blog:
Mutual aid as group work technology can be understood as an exchange of help wherein the group member is both the provider as well as the recipient of help in service of achieving common group and individual goals (Borkman, 1999; Gitterman, 2006; Lieberman, 1983; Northen & Kurland, 2001; Schwartz, 1961; Shulman, 2006, Steinberg, 2004; Toseland & Siporin, 1986). The rationale for cultivating mutual aid in the group encounter is premised on mutual aid's resonance with humanistic values (Glassman, 2002) and the following propositions: 1) members have strengths, opinions, perspectives, information, and experiences that can be drawn upon to help others in the group; 2) helping others helps the helper, a concept known as the helper-therapy principle (Reissman, 1965) which has been empirically validated (Roberts et al, 1999); and 3) some types of help, such as confrontation, are better received when emanating from a peer rather than the worker (Shulman, 2006). Mutual aid transactions that occur amongst and between members stimulate cognitive and behavioral processes and yield therapeutic, supportive and empowering benefits for the members (Breton, 1990;Northen & Kurland, 2001; Shulman, 1986, 2006).
Obviously, we're not pursuing the therapeutic benefits of a mutual aid society as social worker Cicchetti is. Having been a member of such a group (a community-based women's credit union in the early 1970's for instance) I can say that the experience is not only economically, but also personally, enriching.
Let's not wait for the economy to improve. Let's start improving it TODAY. We are the change we want to see in the world.
JOIN US!!
Hat tip to
Virginia Construction Lawyer Christopher Hillfor introducing us to the extremely multi-talented
federal appellate attorney David Mills.
British mediator and blogger Justin Patten (Human Law) has a terrific piece in his ezine today entitled Conflict is inevitable, combat is optional – how to negotiate without falling out. Justin responds with sympathy to a recent survey calling his fellow Brits "the angriest nation in Europe," noting that the
wave of redundancies sweeping across the nation is forcing a number of employers, employees and their advisors such as lawyers and trade unions into conflict situation. As customers become slower and slower at paying added pressure is created for their suppliers and relationships become strained.
Because the "approach taken by those involved and their attitude in dealing with the conflict will have a significant impact on the outcome and the costs involved in finding a solution," Justin provides the following easy to implement solutions:
1 Avoid macho posturing – In an attempt to hide the weakness of their position some people are all bluff and bluster in conflict situations. . . . . (more)
2 De-personalise problems – My experience of disputes is that often things can happen due to personal issues between the individuals. It can be difficult to take the personalities out of a matter but believe me there are clear benefits. . . . (more)
3 Focus on your own emotions – In many work environments there are unwritten rules that emotions are not to be expressed. Is this really wise? . . . (more)
4 Listen – Effective communication starts with the speaker taking responsibility for understanding the language, perspective and experiences of the listener. . . . (more)
5 Analyse the Conflict – Research on problem solving indicates that the effectiveness of solutions increases significantly once the real problem is identified. . . . (more)
Justin Patten handles conflict for a living and whilst as a litigation solicitor he is familiar with the combat zone of the court room he much prefers to work with clients to achieve mediated solutions through negotiation and agreement. Contact Justin on 0844 800 3249 or email Justin here.
Further reading:
Negotiating for Excellent Results
Human Law Mediation has just published a new White Paper – Negotiating for Excellent Results – which contains advice and tips on how to negotiate with power and persuasion in conflict situations. You can download a PDF version of the White Paper here.
Keeping Away from Court Room Battles and Employment Tribunals
A White Paper with advice on How to save money, maintain business relationships and avoid negative publicity by embracing the power of mediation to resolve business and employee disputes. Download the PDF here.
You can subscribe to Justin's invaluable eZine here.
I'm re-posting below an article published in both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco Daily Journals (the local legal rags) about the dangers inherent in email communication. I do so because I had several complaints about the use of abusive email by in-house counsel last week at my negotiation training as well as in my twitter network from attorneys exasperated with combative emailers who refuse to take telephone calls (see post about conflict avoidance here)
My advice? Use the tried and true tit-for-tat strategy: retaliate for uncooperative conduct and be quick to forgive as soon as your bargaining partners bring themselves back into line. The advice I gave on twitter (@vpynchon) this morning was simple and pointed: tell opposing counsel that you will program your email system to automatically delete all of their emails until they pick up the telephone and give you the courtesy of a return call.
Below, my Daily Journal article on the Dangers of Using Email During Litigation.
.jpg)
This story occurs in the spring of 2001, in a hotel room in Toronto, at 3 a.m., the morning of a deposition I've been preparing to take of an aging petrochemical engineer.
2001 is a year I'd dreamed of since elementary school. But the technological changes predicted in the science fiction of my childhood and adolescence are nothing like the "hi-tech" I'm living with now.
There are no one-man jets cruising the skies; no robots running my errands or cooking my dinner; no tele-transportation; and, on the political scene (it's not yet 9/11) no Big Brother.
My personal 2001 "future" is mostly about my instantaneous access to information and "real time" communication via the "killer app" -- email -- telegraphic, spontaneous, unnuanced, and about to get me in a great deal of trouble. (See Vanity Fair's must-read oral history of the internet here.)
There's an associate back in Los Angeles, you see, the quality of whose work and the strength of whose dedication to the case at hand is in alarming decline. More troubling, his work is deteriorating at the same time I'm taking old fashioned passenger jets from province to province to take the testimony of as many witnesses still living who know how 500+ toxic waste sites got that way in the first place.
Did I say it's 3 a.m.? The associate I'm thinking about failed to get me the outline I need for tomorrow's deposition on time -- or at all. The "hard copies" that were supposed to be waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel have gone missing. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I'm lonely. And I'm angry.
Worst of all, I'm composing an email to my associate about my considerable disappointment in his recent performance. There is a moment, a split second, in which my finger hovers over the "send" button while a rational voice in my head says "no." Then I push "send."
Email Makes Settlement More Difficult
More and more often when I'm meeting counsel on the morning of a mediation, they're also meeting one another for the first time. In fact, they often have not even previously spoken to one another unless they've met in Court ("good morning, counsel") or in depositions (eyes averted; objections made). Increasingly, by far the vast percentage of their communications have taken place via email.
And that's a problem.
Conflict Escalation
There's no question that litigation escalates whatever conflict existed when our client first walks in our door. We don't, after all, make requests. We issue demands. We don't seek concessions. We insist upon them. We don't make inquiries. We require responses. And we're not such great listeners. Rather, we impatiently tap our feet in Court, waiting for counsel to finish his argument (which we've heard dozens of times before) so we can press our case.
Are these bad things? Not necessarily. So long as we understand what we're doing and the likely results our conduct will have, escalation is not necessarily worse than maintaining a steady state or even deescalating conflict.
The problem for most of us is that we don't know what we're doing and we don't understand the breadth and depth of the likely repercussions.
In Conflict Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of E-Mail Communication, author Raymond A. Friedman of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University quotes conflict specialists Rubin, Pruitt and Kim on the difficulties caused by escalation tactics and strategy. According to Rubin, et al., escalation is
"an increase in the intensity of a conflict as a whole.” Escalation is important . . . because when conflict escalates it “is intensified in ways that are sometimes exceedingly difficult to undo.” One reason why escalated conflicts are so hard to undo is that when more aggressive tactics are used by one side they are often mirrored by the other side, producing a vicious cycle.
Email, Friedman argues, unnecessarily, and often drastically, escalates conflict in ways none of us fully appreciate. Unlike conversation -- in person or by telephone -- we are not
physically present with others, can’t see their faces or hear their voices, and can’t give or get immediate responses. The lack of contextual clues . . . impose high “understanding costs” on participants in e-mail interactions, making it harder to successfully ground the interaction. . . . /* [T]the inability to carefully time actions and reactions . . . makes communication less precise.
E-mail Not Only Lacks Social Clues, it is "Profoundly A-Social."
Sitting in my Toronto hotel room at 3 a.m., reviewing online documents for tomorrow's deposition and now "penning" an email to my errant associate, I am, argues Friedman, not simply making communication more difficult, I have become "profoundly asocial" as my associate will also likely be when he reviews my email the following day. "E-mails," writes Friedman,
are typically received and written while the writer is in isolation, staring at a computer screen – perhaps for hours at a time, so that awareness of the humanness of the counterpart may be diminished.
As evidence, Friedman cites research in which subjects played the "prisoner's dilemma" game against a computer. Not only did the gamers act asocially in this context, "many continued to act asocially even when told that they were now playing with people (through the computer)."
E-mail, Friedman concludes, "often occurs in a context devoid of awareness of human sensibilities."
The Precise Difficulties Caused by E-Mail Communications?
Use of aggressive tactics. If e-mail communication encourages the use of more aggressive tactics during a dispute, or makes a counterpart’s tactics appear more aggressive, then escalation will be triggered.
Changes in view of other. Escalation is more likely if e-mail causes negative changes in psychological processes (e.g., perceptions and attitudes) towards the other, such as (1) seeing the other as unfair, (2) lessening empathy toward them, (3) increasing deindividuation and anonymity, or (4) or seeing the other as immoral.
Weakened interpersonal bonds. If e-mail weakens social bonds with the other, then escalation is more likely (e.g., due to reduced inhibitions for aggression).
Problems are difficult to resolve. If the communication limitations of e-mail (e.g., asynchrony deficits) make problems more difficult to solve, conflict may be escalated as frustrated disputants move from mild to more aggressive strategies to achieve their goals.
As a result, says Friedman, there are "higher rates of escalation when disputes are managed via e-mail than via face-to-face communication or other relatively rich media . . . such as telephone conversations." /**
Back in Los Angeles the Following Day
You knew this story was not going to have a happy ending. What a cranky, tired, stressed partner types into her computer at 3 a.m. and what a fully awake associate reads with his morning coffee the following day are, as Friedman stresses, two quite different things. And though I've rarely had a face-to-face disagreement with a colleague that cannot be mended by further communication, apologies, explanations and the like, this particular communication caused a rift that I was unable to heal.
This experience from several years ago, coupled with my recent mediation experiences, makes me want to advise, exhort, plead, beseech, entreat and pray that you commence every litigation with a telephone call rather than a "demand" letter or email. And that you continue to communicate with opposing counsel by telephone or, even more radically, in person over a meal, throughout the litigation to make sure channels of communication are as open and clear as possible.
The difficulties saved will not only benefit your personal life (reduce stress, increase fellow-feeling and the like) but will benefit your client as well -- in case efficiencies and better settlements all around.
______________________
*/ "Grounding" is the process
by which two parties in an interaction achieve a shared sense of understanding about a communication and a shared sense of participation in the conversation. Grounding is important because “speech is evanescent...so Alan must try to speak only when he thinks Barbara is attending to, hearing, and trying to understand what he is saying, and she must guide him by giving evidence that she is doing just this."
** / There's much more to be learned from this article, but these highlights should tell you whether further reading is in your interest or worth your time.
Here's part I of the Obama Notre Dame Speech YouTube Video (sorry about the intro footage).
There's a skip here (don't know how much of the speech is lost between video #1 and video #2)
OBAMA: Thank you, Father Jenkins for that generous introduction. You are doing an outstanding job as president of this fine institution, and your continued and courageous commitment to honest, thoughtful dialogue is an inspiration to us all. Good afternoon Father Hesburgh, Notre Dame trustees, faculty, family, friends, and the class of 2009. I am honored to be here today, and grateful to all of you for allowing me to be part of your graduation.
I want to thank you for this honorary degree. I know it has not been without controversy. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but these honorary degrees are apparently pretty hard to come by. So far I’m only 1 for 2 as President. Father Hesburgh is 150 for 150. I guess that’s better. Father Ted, after the ceremony, maybe you can give me some pointers on how to boost my average.
I also want to congratulate the class of 2009 for all your accomplishments. And since this is Notre Dame, I mean both in the classroom and in the competitive arena. We all know about this university’s proud and storied football team, but I also hear that Notre Dame holds the largest outdoor 5-on-5 basketball tournament in the world - Bookstore Basketball.
Now this excites me. I want to congratulate the winners of this year’s tournament, a team by the name of “Hallelujah Holla Back.” Well done. Though I have to say, I am personally disappointed that the “Barack O’Ballers” didn’t pull it out. Next year, if you need a 6’2” forward with a decent jumper, you know where I live.
Every one of you should be proud of what you have achieved at this institution. One hundred and sixty three classes of Notre Dame graduates have sat where you are today. Some were here during years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare - periods of relative peace and prosperity that required little by way of sacrifice or struggle.
You, however, are not getting off that easy. Your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and the world - a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age. It is a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations - and a task that you are now called to fulfill.
This is the generation that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before this crisis hit - an economy where greed and short- term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day’s work.
Among the most frequently asked questions at my negotiation trainings are these:
Whenever someone asks me about negotiating evil, I think of Ken Cloke's brilliant book Conflict Revolution: Mediating Evil, War, Injustice and Terrorism – How Mediators Can Help Save the Planet (my review of that book here). Some time ago, when I had the bright but failed idea of launching an online conflict resolution journal, Ken kindly let me publish his article Mediating Evil, War and Terrorism the Politics of Conflict, some of which I quote below. I like the way Ken framed the problem in his earlier book, Mediating Dangerously, as follows:
For those who live under fascism, oppression, or tyranny, or face a fierce, unprincipled adversary, or are afraid even to exercise their own freedom, it may become necessary to engage in conflict, resist oppression, reject settlement, and raise their voices against the silence of acquiescence . . . . [T]here are limits to the desirability of ending [certain conflicts] prematurely, without a fair and honest examination of the underlying issues, and without the full participation of people whose lives will be irrevocably damaged by them . . . Collaboration implies mutuality and partnership, and even compromise involves give and take, but fascism merely [takes] giving nothing in return.
Those who recall the free speech movement on college campuses in the mid-sixties (most notably at U.C. Berkeley) will remember at least some of the words spoken by FSM leader Mario Savio:
There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all.
One might criticize this rhetoric as being a bit overblown for the context in which the students were operating but they were young; had been taught in public schools to believe in and cherish freedom; and, were stunned to find that their on-campus speech was regulated, controlled, and, punished. Savio's voice is the voice of all peoples who find their freedom suppressed or denied altogether.
So what do we, mediators and interest-based negotiators, do when confronted with tyranny? Cloke's partial response (see full article here) is as follows:
Genuine, lasting peace is impossible in the absence of justice. Where injustice prevails, peace becomes merely a way of masking and compounding prior crimes, impeding necessary changes, and rationalizing injustices. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton presciently observed:
To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and leisure.... [T]heir idea of peace was only another form of war.
When millions lack the essentials of life, peace becomes a sanction for continued suffering, and compromise a front for capitulation, passivity, and acceptance of injustice. This led anthropologist Laura Nader to criticize mediation for its willingness to “trade justice for harmony.”
True peace requires justice and a dedication to satisfying basic human needs, otherwise it is merely the self-interest of the satisfied, the ruling clique, the oppressors, the victors in search of further spoils.
For peace to be achieved in the Middle East or elsewhere, it is essential that we neither trivialize conflict nor become stuck in the language of good and evil, but work collaboratively and compassionately to redress the underlying injustices and pain each side caused the other. Ultimately, this means sharing power and resources, advantages and disadvantages, successes and failures, and satisfying everyone’s legitimate interests. It means collaborating and making decisions together. It means giving up being right and assuming others are wrong. It means taking the time to work through our differences, and making our opponents' interests our own.
In helping to make these shifts and move from Apartheid to integration, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that for people to reach forgiveness, they needed to exchange personal stories of anger, fear, pain, jealousy, guilt, grief, and shame; to empathize, recognize, and acknowledge each other’s interests; to engage in open, honest dialogue; to reorient themselves to the future; to participate in rituals of collective grief that released their pain and loss; and to mourn those who died because neither side had the wisdom or courage to apologize for their assumptions of evil, or the evil they caused their opponents and themselves.
At the same time, they also needed to improve the daily lives of those who suffered and were treated unjustly under apartheid. Where shanty towns coexist with country clubs, peace cannot be lasting or secure. Where some go hungry while others are well-fed, terror and violence are nourished. In the end, it comes down to a question of sharing wealth and power, realizing that we are all one family, and that an injury to one is genuinely an injury to all.
Making justice an integral part of conflict resolution and the search for peaceful solutions means not merely settling conflicts, but resolving, transforming, and transcending them by turning them into levers of social dialogue and learning, catalysts of community and collaboration, and commitments to political, economic, and social change. By failing to take these additional remedial steps, we make justice secondary to peace, undermine both, guarantee the continuation of our conflicts, and prepare the way for more to come.
By the way, tomorrow is Ken's birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEN!!!
Internet defamation attorney Adrianos Fachetti; entertainment attorney Gordon Firemark; class action attorney H. Scott Leviant; Barger & Wolen Marketing Director Heather Milligan and I will be presenting Social Networking for Lawyers: A Roadmap to Success Session 1 (9:15-10:30) at the Second Annual LACBA Solo and Small Firm Convention on June 25, 2009.
In this interactive session we will explore the buzz surrounding social networking and social media tools and how solo and small firms practitioners can effectively employ them to communicate with current clients; control your messaging as you reach out to new clients and the media; and to meet, network and collaborate with colleagues.
Our panel of solo and small firm attorneys will discuss their experiences with blogging as a social media tool, and we will spotlight several social networking applications, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By calling upon their personal experiences, our panel will highlight best practices for how you can incorporate these and other Web 2.0 applications into your business development, PR and networking activities.
Below is a tremendous slide show on basic social networking by Deanna Zandt and Susan Mernit.
Because I've been talking to a lot of people with services or products to sell in what they perceive to be a buyer's market, I've been giving a fair amount of advice about negotiating from a position of weakness. That being the case, I'm just jotting down a few random thoughts on the matter. None of the items below are meant to be exhaustive.
Here's a previous post on the same topic. And here's a great Malcolm Gladwell article on how weak nation-states and basketball teams can become the victors by playing the game on their own terms: Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath.
PREPARATION
ASK DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS OF YOUR BARGAINING PARTNER
CREATE AND CLAIM AS MUCH VALUE AS POSSIBLE
NAME CONCESSIONS AND DEMAND RECIPROCITY
CONSIDER WHETHER YOUR WEAKNESSES MIGHT BE CHARACTERIZED AS STRENGTHS
If you're the smaller player, you may be in a better position to make novel offers; and you may also be more nimble, less burdened by bureaucratic red tape, and, better able to take risks. You may also:
Dear New Blogger,
I'm happy whenever new legal bloggers contact me to ask whether I'll add them to my blog roll because it gives me an opportunity to be of service to the Blawgosphere that has done so much for me. Because I keep writing this same responsive e-mail from scratch however, I'm going to finally post my most recent free advice so that I can simply link to it next time.
Here’s how linking works.
You add blogs in which you’re interested to a news reader like google reader. You read them and find items that stir your own thoughts – that make you want to engage in a public conversation about the topic at hand.
You cite to that blog in your blog and link to it. Generally, you excerpt a bit of someone else’s post and extend the breadth or depth or reach of it.
Soon, people with a natural affinity to what you’re talking about will be citing to you and excerpting your material. If you say interesting things about settlement, negotiation, or conflict resolution in general, I’ll find you (I’ll add you to my news reader today to watch your blog grow). If I'm following you and you're practicing law and writing about it, eventually I'll see something interesting you've mentioned that I'll want to write about too. I'll excerpt a bit of your post, give you credit and link to you.
I get somewhere between 30 and 40,000 visitors a month. People who are vitally interested in your area of practice will find you because I’ve mentioned you; because I add my audience and my "authority" to your own. (See Psychology of Persuasion at the Flying Solo Blog). This will not happen as a result of your being on my "blog roll" (to which I won't add you because it's a waste of your and my time).
Before you know it, bloggers will begin arriving at your blog-door bearing gifts. It's the Blog Welcome Wagon! You'll get free advice, some of which will be good (like this) and some of which may not. I must tell you, however, that I've never received any bad advice from an active blogger.
What gifts will the Welcome Wagon bring? Lists mostly. Bloggers will tell you the location of the best schools for your children; the name of their gardener; warnings about neighborhood bullies and stores that rip you off. If your grass needs mowing or you've allowed weeds to pop up in the cracks of your sidewalk, they'll mention that too. If your Blog House gets a new paint job or adds a wing, they'll let others know it and drop by to tell you how nice it looks. Your kids will baby sit theirs. You'll be invited to neighborhood Bar-b-Q's and asked to serve on the Neighborhood Watch. If you're interested, you might eventually be elected Mayor of Your Blog Town.
Someday soon, something you write will appear in Blawg Review (for which I’m a “sherpa”). Maybe you’ll even (gasp) begin to twitter. Anonymous Ed. of Blawg Review will be in your twitter network, as will Kevin O’Keefe at Lex Blog who aggregates legal twitterers at LexTweet. Follow everyone Kevin follows. He has a HUGE twitter network of law bloggers. The Wall Street Journal’s “onespot” might follow you too and if you write something topical (the current economy is always a good bet) you’ll find your blog cited there. Then you can tell the people who poo-poo'ed your blogging effort that you were cited in the Wall Street Journal. "So there!"
Eventually, reporters will begin to call you and ask for your opinion. Lawyers who aren’t in your business will refer clients to you (without asking for that pesky referral fee because reciprocity is the grease that runs the gears and levers of Web 2.0 - not money). Hat tip to Blog of Mr. Tweet.
Read the newspapers and magazines and watch the movies and television that your market reads and watches. Participate in their events. Speak to them in their local habitats. Share your knowledge. Link, link, link, link, link. The blogosphere is a virtuous circle of good intentions and enlightened self-interest.
In EVERYTHING you do, refer to your blog. Put it on your business cards. Mention it when you speak to other lawyers or to local business groups. Walk your talk. Have integrity. Be consistent. Be interesting, novel, innovative, passionate, wise and generous. Be of service. Always say "yes" to a Blawgosphere request, even if the "yes" is wrapped in a "no" (this, for instance, which says "no" to the blog roll request but yes to your participation in my network as a P.I. blogger).
Welcome. The water’s warm and the natives friendly. Feel free to call or write for blog advice anytime. And thanks for letting me be of service.
Best,
Vickie
p.s. here, by the way, is Michael Lawson Neff's new Atlanta Personal Injury Blog.
Here's part I of the Resource Materials for the full-day training which included this Power Point Presentation.
Part I includes articles (see the Table of Contents) on The Social Psychology of Conflict; Negotiation and Gender; Distributive Bargaining; and, Integrative and Interest-Based Negotiation.
O.K., times are tough. And it takes no small amount of courage to face the financial disaster that credit cards can cause to even those who feel themselves to be the most sober of financial citizens. Then it takes real courage to pick up a telephone and make a request to a disembodied and not-likely-friendly voice to ask for help bailing you out of a mess you can barely believe you find yourself in.
I have three things to say about this. First. The country's supposed financial geniuses are unable to pay their debts and are facing bankruptcy. You are not alone. Second. There's nothing to be ashamed of, though there is something to be learned from this painful experience. I know. I was there during the recession of the early '90s. Third. You are not without remedy. Take a look at "How to Negotiate with Your Creditors" at Entrepreneur Magazine this week.
Tips to help you negotiate with a creditor or collection agency:
If you make a request that is denied for whatever reason, ask to speak with a supervisor.
Don’t agree to pay more than you can afford when negotiating. Know in advance what your financial situation really is, then work within those confines. The last thing you want to do is negotiate a settlement or payment plan that you can’t adhere to.
During your negotiating process, figure out what the creditor is willing to accept as a settlement. What’s their absolute bottom line? If you’re looking for a settlement, offering between 50 and 70 percent of what’s owed, either as a lump sum payment or through a payment plan, isn’t unreasonable. Achieving this settlement might take several rounds of negotiation, however.
Avoid becoming intimidated by the person you’re negotiating with, even if they make threats about lawsuits.
Most successful negotiations require several rounds going back and forth with offers and counter offers. The process could take days or weeks.
If you can afford to settle an account by paying one lump sum (as opposed to using a payment plan), you’ll have more negotiating leverage.
The person you’re negotiating with does this for a living and is a trained professional when it comes to debt collections. For them to use legal terminology during a conversation or in writing is a common tactic to confuse or intimidate you. Listen carefully to what’s being said and make sure you understand exactly what you’re committing to. Consult with a lawyer or credit counselor if you have questions.
Make sure everything you ultimately agree to is put in writing, signed, and dated by both parties.
What to Negotiate for When Dealing with Creditors, Lenders, or Collection Agencies
Jason R. Rich is the bestselling author of more than 37 books including The Complete Book of Dirty Little Secrets: Money-Saving Strategies the Credit Bureaus Won’t Tell You, available from Entrepreneur Press. His books cover a wide range of topics, including computers, e-commerce, personal finance, career-related topics, and travel and entertainment. He also contributes regularly to major daily newspapers, including the New York Daily News, as well as national magazines and popular websites.
a lower interest rate
the interest accrued to be waived
the late fees, penalties, and/or legal fees to be waived
the loan to be extended or restructured, allowing you to skip one or more payments with no penalty
a payment plan that would allow you to pay off the amount currently owed, but with no added interest or fees added in the future
a settlement that would include a significantly lower balance due (such as 50 to 75 percent of the total)
- favorable reporting to the credit reporting agencies or the removal of negative information from your credit report pertaining that to that account
Yesterday, we talked about the different negotiation styles of men and women. Today, we're going to explore how men can benefit from learning women-speak and women can benefit from learning man-talk.
All of the data relied upon and excerpted below is from Gender Benders by Dianna Booher at the Negotiation Expert's blog.
I'm going to emphasize this fact as often as possible. NEGOTIATION IS A SKILL THAT CAN BE LEARNED. The first step on the way to being a great negotiator is to be conscious. Be aware of what your own strengths and weaknesses, preferences and goals are.
Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses of "male" and "female" negotiation styles which we can all incorporate, to some degree, into our own gender-transcending negotiation style.
Women's strengths and weaknesses -- remembering that nearly every "weakness" can be deployed strategically as a "strength" (from Dianna Booher).
Men's strengths and weaknesses (with the same caution that all weaknesses can be strategically deployed as strenths)
This is necessarily a partial list; for a fuller list of men's and women's negotiating strengths and weaknesses, read yesterday's post (for a second time if you already have) with the view of turning every perceived weakness into a strength.
My own analysis of the "weakness can be strength" issue tomorrow.
Although I am indisputably a "woman lawyer," I have never thought of myself in those terms. I'm a lawyer. And I'm a woman. I'm also a writer, a step-mother, a wife, a daughter, a river rafter, and an aficionado of squash (the game, not the vegetable), photography, literature, and theater. Oh yes. I'm also Caucasian. I rarely have to think of myself in those terms, however, because the society in which I live doesn't require it of me. I'm aware of my skin color only when I'm with my African-American friends or in a racially mixed workplace (shamefully rare in modern American private legal and ADR practice).
I was forced to become more conscious of my gender when I became a commercial mediator and arbitrator five years ago because I am once again a "minority" -- something I hadn't been in legal practice since the early 1980's. Naturally, I began to research differences in negotiation styles between men and women. What I learned wasn't surprising, but it is empowering. Although we do negotiate differently, if we learn to move more easily back and forth across gender lines, we can all become better negotiators.
First, the "old news" about women's ability to negotiate as well as men from a 2008 article entitled The Different Negotiation Styles Between Men and Women from which all of the quotes below have been taken.
Although negotiation has always been an important workplace skill, it has long been thought to be the province of men: a competitive realm in which men excelled and women felt less capable.
I have lived the change in gender roles since I graduated from high school in 1970. 1970 was a year in which the newspaper's classified ads (yesterday's "Craig's List") were "Help Wanted: Women" and "Help Wanted: Men"; and a year in which I took my high school's career preference test on the literally pink form which limited my choices to occupations like nurse (if I was good at math and science); teacher or social worker (if I was good at the liberal arts); and secretary (if I knew the QWRTY keyboard). The cultural expectations of women, however, persist.
"...our society still perpetuates rigid gender based standards for behavior-standards that require women to behave modestly and unselfishly and to avoid promoting their own self-interest" (Babcock, 2003). As women learn quite early in life "that competing and winning against a man can threaten his socially defined masculinity" and is socially seen as taboo. From the beginning of a woman's life, they are taught by society "that women are thought to be warm, expressive, nurturing, emotional, and friendly" (Babcock, 2003). When growing up girls are cuddled; baby girls are also 'thrown around' less and thought of as fragile. If everyone goes through their life with this mentality in mind, it is hard for women to break away from this stereotype and still be taken seriously and not as overbearing or overly competitive which can harm women in negotiation.
Here's the good negotiation news for women's acculturation.
While these general tendencies of women (understanding that we all operate on a sliding scale of "femaleness" and "maleness") were previously believed to be negotiation deficits, they are now perceived as negotiation assets.
The focus of negotiation recently has shifted to be a more win-win rather than a win-lose (Babcock, 2003), which is why women are tending to exceed more in today's negotiations. "Women take a more cooperative approach to negotiating" (Babcock, 2003) they are willing to work with the other person and are able to see both sides so both can get what they want. In a negotiation, women tend to ask more questions and do more talking one on one, however, "women discuss what is directly related to what each side wants introducing information into negotiations helps expand the understanding of the goals on both sides" (Babcock, 2003). This is good to build a relationship before the big negotiation start.
But let's not get all gender wars about this. Let's instead focus on male negotiation advantages that can be adopted by women and female negotiation advantages that can be adopted by men. The male advantages? (once again remembering that we are dealing with social and cultural stereotypes)
How men and women can collaborate to maximize the value of these differing negotiation styles tomorrow.
Here are the final clips of my interview with mediator and mediation educator, Lee Jay Berman, about helping disputants ask the questions necessary to resolve their conflict and how the new American Institute of Mediation will help the experienced mediator improve his/her existing game and, just as importantly, build the business that allows him/her to practice the profession at the highest level.
Thanks, Lee Jay, for taking the time to chat with me.
And I couldn't resist on this last clip a little appreciation from Lee Jay of my work.
Whether parties to litigation should engage in joint session bargaining at some point in the process is a hot topic at the moment because joint session practice is nearly a dead letter in one of the most active and sophisticated mediation markets - Los Angeles California.
Most attorneys do not like to begin their mediated negotiations with a joint session and neither do many mediators. The reason most often given is everyone's desire to avoid a polarizing set of zealously adversarial presentations. The joint session, however, was never meant to be a mini-trial or reiteration of the parties' adversarial positions - positions with which they've been living, and defending their clients against, for weeks, months, years, even decades. The joint session was supposed to give the parties with the dispute -- the clients -- the opportunity to brainstorm mutually acceptable solutions to their undeniably mutual problem - the sink hole of litigation.
The news for separate caucus mediators is that avoiding joint sessions may deprive us of the "small talk" necessary to put the parties into a collaborative, even generous mood.
First the Neuroscience (from the Neuromarketing Blog)
Recent research confirms that the miserly not only spend more time thinking about money than their more generous peers, they are also more socially withdrawn. Although Dickens nailed the personality type on the head when he created the friendless and miserly Scrooge, it seems that all of us are anti-social and penny-pinching when focusing primarily upon money.
The confirming research? Recruiting the usual cadre of beleaguered undergraduates, scientists at the University of Minnesota found that when students have their minds on money, they tend to be both selfish and withdrawn. Those who were "primed" by money imagery before being asked to engage in (or imagine) solitary, group or "helping" activities
waited nearly 70% longer to seek help than those who[se attention was not directed to money]; spent only half as much time . . . assisting []other[s] . . . [and] preferred working alone even if sharing the task with a co-worker resulted in substantially less work.
The young people whose attention was focused on money also
chose solitary leisure activities . . . preferring a private cooking lesson, for instance, over a dinner for four [and] when asked to set up two chairs for a get-to-know-you chat with another volunteer, . . . placed the chairs further apart than subjects [whose attention had been directed to non-monetary themes].
These findings, concluded the researchers, suggest that thinking of money puts people in a frame of mind in which they don’t want to depend on others and don’t want others to depend on them. (see Thinking About Money from Neuromarketing here).
The Benefit of Small Talk and Joint Sessions
What benefits can litigants draw from these research findings? The same benefits most successful negotiators already derive from small talk -- breaking impasse and closing the deal.
In the not so distant past when I was primarily mediating pro bono cases for the Superior Court, I always commenced my mediations in joint session. I did not ask for those polarizing speeches about the merits of each side's case however. What I asked both the parties and the lawyers to do was very simple.
"Introduce yourself," I said, "as if you were at a cocktail party. Say something interesting about yourself, something pleasing or, at least, something superficially revealing, such as your job, a recent vacation you've taken, and the like."
Expect the Unexpected
In one small commercial dispute early in my pro bono career, that initial "party chatter" resolved the case in short order. The Plaintiff businessman was the first to introduce himself as an importer of household goods from Yugoslavia. After five or six other parties had gone through their introductions, it came time for defense counsel to say a few words. He opened his arms and broke into a grin as he began to speak to Plaintiff in Plaintiff's native language.
Plaintiff's counsel looked justifiably alarmed -- after all -- his client was speaking to opposing counsel outside of his "hearing." As he moved to intervene, however, I tilted my head a bit and mouthed "I think it's a good thing." We both relaxed, leaned back in our chairs and watched the two carry on an animated and increasingly friendly conversation. We were done and the parties were unusually happy with their settlement a brief twenty minutes later.
I've seen small talk settle cases of much greater magnitude and after long, difficult negotiating sessions, particularly when the principals meet alone, often for the first time. In one particularly contentious trademark action, I refused to let the parties leave before the two businessmen sat in a room together in the absence of counsel or mediator in a final attempt to work things out.
They emerged fifteen minutes later, not only laughing, but puffed up with pride that they'd so quickly done that which their attorneys had been unable to do -- settle a case that didn't make any sense to try. When I asked the parties what they'd said to each other, they replied, "baseball, basketball, football. Then we settled."
The Perils of Shuttle-Negotiation
Here, then, is the weakness of shuttle negotiation. The parties' attention is fixated on money. A fixation that neuroscientists tell us makes us ungenerous and anti-social -- the worst possible context for a successful settlement.
The next time you're facing a difficult negotiation or mediation, remember the salutary effect of small talk in helping yourself and your opponent focus on the commercial and human situation that has brought you to the table so that you can more easily resolve the business and the people problem at the heart of the litigation.
With so much emphasis placed on Getting to Yes, we often forget the power - indeed the necessity -- of saying "no."
Think of yourself in that iconic bargaining environment, the foreign bazaar. No matter how much of a buyers' market you're in, at some point, the seller must say no -- otherwise you'd just bargain him down to zero, or perhaps negotiate a deal in which he pays you to take the merchandise off his hands. Fortunately for negotiators everyone, the Getting to Yes guy -- William Ury -- has also written an entire book on The Power of a Positive No. As Time Magazine wrote at the time of "No's" release,
In The Power of a Positive No, Ury offers guidance on the flip side of reaching an agreement: how to deal with a situation in which you simply want to put your foot down. No is so often hard to say, Ury writes, because it highlights the "tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship"--in other words, between getting what you want in the short term and keeping everyone happy for interactions down the road. People often err in one direction or the other, prioritizing either the relationship by saying yes when they long to say no or their own power by brusquely saying no and alienating the person they're dealing with. Then there is the ever popular route of avoidance--saying nothing at all and gaining neither what you want nor goodwill.
See Why Almost Everyone Has Trouble Saying No.
Ury's answer to "no" avoidance?
[S]erve your no sandwiched between two yeses. It will go down more easily and preserve your relationship yet still allow you to take a stand.
How does the famous "getting to yes" guy say "no"? By "focusing on underlying interests instead of positions (discussing what you want instead of the way you've decided to get there) [and] developing another option ( . . . Plan B)." To accomplish this goal, the negotiator must ask diagnostic questions about his bargaining partner's needs, fears, preferences and priorities.(.pdf of Northwestern Professor Leigh Thompson's enduringly great article Why Negotiation is the Most Popular Business School Course; see also chapter one of her must-read The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator here).
Assume, for instance, that you're selling software and your customer wants a broad indemnity agreement that amounts to a virtual insurance policy. You know the type. "I want to be indemnified for all litigation arising from my company's use of your software. It's non-negotiable. We'll pull out of the deal if you don't provide it to us."
Before saying "no, no, no" or feeling the need to temporize or mumble something unintelligible, determine whether your customer's demand is primarily being driven by need, desire, or fear. Here, the underlying interest is perceived need based upon fear of potential liability. Rest assured that your customer is not worried about everything. There's some particular danger lurking in the back of his mine or in the contemplation of the manager to whom he's reporting.
The diagnostic question is simple: "what type of potential liabilities are you worried about?" When your customer answers your question, the "yeses" your "no" can be sandwiched between are legion.
"We're always happy to craft an indemnity agreement that covers potential liabilities arising from, i.e., defects in the software that cause the type of harm you're worried about. In fact, because infallible software has yet to be developed, we like to offer our customers a suite of services to quickly remedy any "defects" to prevent the liabilities you're concerned with. And now that we're talking about it, let's define "defects" so that it fully expresses both of our understandings going forward.
The key is to slow yourself down during the negotiation so that you have time to reframe your "no" as an opportunity for both parties to get more of what they really want than they fear they need.
As a former pastor of mine once told me, "God never says 'no' to a prayer. S/he says 'yes,' 'later' or 'I have something better in store for you.' Approach the material world in the same manner as he does and not only your opportunities, but your heart, will grow in the practice.
My statistics page tells me that lawyers are not the only people searching for information about likely outcomes at trial. The clients land here too. For their benefit, here's a report from the Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog, penned last Spring but likely to reflect current trends as well.
California Personal Injury Verdicts
California personal injury plaintiffs are among the best compensated injury victims in the country but that California juries need convincing that the defendant is liable. California’s median compensatory award in personal injury cases is 149,000, dwarfing the national median of $34,550. But California juries only award damages in 44 percent of personal injury case that go to verdict. Nationally, plaintiffs prevail in 52% of personal injury cases.
These California personal injury verdict numbers, not median or average settlements in personal injury cases. But settlement values largely reflect the median verdicts.
I don't know if anyone has yet studied the effect of the economic downturn on juries' willingness to compensate injured plaintiffs (Anne Reed?) I'd suspect that actions against insurance carriers - particularly health insurance carriers - would "sell" to jurors and stimulate their empathy given everyone's fear of losing their jobs and the insurance that often goes along with employment.
I wonder, however, if today's jurors might not turn a cold eye on anyone they believe to be "gaming" the system or seeking compensation for injuries that they too are suffering but about which suffering they have no one individual or entity to "name, claim and blame."
I'd be interested in hearing from my litigation colleagues about the current atmosphere in jury deliberation rooms. The best jury blog, hands down, by the way, is attorney and jury consultant Anne Reed's Deliberations.
Here's part one of a multi-part interview with Lee Jay Berman of the new American Institute for Mediation. Lee Jay is one of the foremost mediation trainers in the United States.
Why bother with yet another mediation institute?
For the same reason I spent the vast majority of time at the recent ABA Dispute Resolution conference talking to attendees rather than attending seminars.
What we need now is not more book learnin', not further power points, not even more bullet points scratched on the Gulliver sized post-it notes favored by mediation trainers.
What we need is more one-on-one. More personal attention to the precise skills we need to improve, the questions we don't yet know how to ask, and the knowledge that can come only in intimate conversations with some of the best mediation practitioners and trainers in the world.
I'm lucky to live in Los Angeles. I have snagged free time with mediators such as Ken Cloke, Lee Jay, Jim Melamed, Woody Mosten, and others too numerous to list, asking them the precise questions the answers to which I desperately need for my mediation practice to develop to the next level. The kind of answers Ken gives, for instance: "behind every accusation is a cry for help." A mediation koan I must flee the premises to fully appreciate ("please, Ken, no more wisdom; let me take this nut back to my tree, hold it up to the sun, knock it against the nearest branch, offer it to a friend for further inspection, crack its shell, taste its meat and come back next month to report on the results.")
Now is your chance to go one-on-one with the world-renowned group Lee Jay has put together at affordable prices.
Listen to Lee Jay here in the first of a series of conversations about the new American Institute for Mediation. If I couldn't get Ken Cloke's advice for the cost of a glass of carrot juice at a local Santa Monica cafe (yes, Ken is one of the world's most generous men) you can be certain I'd be flying in from wherever I was now to take his Mediating Dangerously course at AIM (June 4-6, 2009).
And, oh yes, LITIGATORS??????? Listen. My husband's client is about to spend a cool $18K for one full day of mediation. Should he have mediation training? Yes, he should and thanks to his service on the federal court's Settlement Officer panel, he does. Is there anything to learn other than how to pitch your legal and factual positions to the mediator; to bluff and cajole; to start low/high in the hope that your negotiating partner doesn't know the value of his own case? You betcha! Come study with the best and wax the opposition in your next facilitated negotiation with a third party neutral.
Cheryl Harris, Professor of Critical Race Studies at UCLA Law School talks about color-blindness as the bus we get on to take the journey to a post-racial society. What is the history of post-racial politics in America. What is its present posture and what do we have to learn from our history and our response to the elephant in the room?
The first of a series from the ABA Dispute Resolution Conference in New York City last month.
Professor Harris' bio from the UCLA Law School website below.
Cheryl I. Harris teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination and Critical Race Theory. Professor Harris began her teaching career at Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1990, after more than a decade in practice that included criminal appellate and trial work and municipal government representation as a senior attorney for the city of Chicago. As the National Co-Chair for the National Conference of Black Lawyers for several years, she developed expertise in international human rights, particularly concerning South Africa.
Professor Harris was a key organizer of several major conferences both in South Africa and in the United States that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa's first democratic constitution in 1994. She is the author of leading works in Critical Race Theory including the highly influential Whiteness as Property (Harv. L. Rev.). Her work has also taken up the relationship among race, gender and property amd most recently has focused on race, equality and the Constitution through the re-examination of Plessy v. Ferguson and Grutter v. Bollinger.
In 2002 Professor Harris received a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to co-host a semester long interdisciplinary working group and conference series on "Redress in Social Thought, Law and Literature," at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bunche Center for African-American Studies and is part of the Executive Council of the American Studies Association. Professor Harris is the recipient of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California 2005 Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education.
Does race and gender play any role in your mediations? Head's up for an upcoming post on cross-cultural challenges in negotiating resolution to commercial litigation.
If trust had a hologram for all of its forms -- honor, commitment, credulity, betrayal, reliance, and, confidence (harboring the "con" that playwright David Mamet has made his life's work) - that hologram would surely include images of the American Legal System. We lawyers, mediators, arbitrators, legislators, and legal educators run on trust, or as much as we can generate, to resolve the disputes that are brought to us for resolution. Some of us craft legislation or regulations meant to prevent the calamities that breaches of private and public trust can create. Because lawyers thrive on the creation, destruction and resurrection of trust, it is fitting that an attorney such as myself be entrusted, from time to time, with Trust's Carnival.
"You Never Open Your Mouth Until You Know What the Shot Is"
The moment trust collapses -- perfectly dramatized in this clip from Mamet's classic Glengarry Glen Ross -- is played out in far less dramatic terms every day as Jim Connolly explained this week in Trust Me, We're Great! at Jim's Marketing Blog. To retain a customer's trust, says Jim, your product or service must be consistent with your hype.
The salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross expect nothing from the world other than that which they can forcibly rip from its grasp. But there is honor among thieves. Beneath Pacino's tirade is an implied homage to his fellow salesmen who trust one another to "know what the shot is." How does such a trust community arise? Online according to Hannah Levenson at SWOM (the Society for Word of Mouth) in her lengthy and intriguing post -- The Importance of Social Media in the Marketing World. As Levenson writes:
Trust is something all consumers want. Loyalty is something all businesses crave. But in today’s marketing world, one cannot exist without the other. “[Citizen marketers] are part of the mesh of a greater swath of fabric that interlocks everything together. The design of mesh ensures the fabric is evenly spaced. With this in mind, it is the open and transparent nature of shared production that enhances and illuminates what companies strive for but often misunderstand: loyalty” (Huba 173). Today two of the biggest problems a company has is obscurity and loyalty. Those companies that achieve trust are the ones that take risks and work hard to humanize themselves. They utilize the “greater swath of fabric” or in other words “social media.” Loyalty is the necessary seed for growth of a company. If small or large companies can utilize, blogs, podcasts, videos, comment boxes or any other type of social media they are setting the foundations for building a strong trusting community.
If you think you need an Italian and a Brit to create cross-cultural trust barriers, think again. In the world of the con there are "men" who "live on [their] wits," and "company men" like Williamson who don't know "the first rule you'd know if you ever spent a day in your life." If cultures can so brutally clash in the same country, the same town, and even the same sales room, how much greater attention must be paid to genuinely different cultural understandings in a global marketplace. To prosper there, you'll want to run right over to Cindy King's Blog on International Sales Best Practice, where we learn the key to international trust-building -- cross-cultural understanding.
When profanity and shaming don't bring our trusted partners into line, we appeal to a higher authority. Here, Pacino tells Williamson he's going "downtown" to talk to "Murray." He's going to have Williamson's job. After the collapse of Enron, Lehman, and AIG; the imminent demise of the Big Three, and, the death of the fractionated mortgage market, Washington is the new downtown and the FTC the new "Murray." Trust is sometimes insufficient and laws must be enacted to bring balance back to the marketplace. And so it will be according to the Performance Marketing Blog which analyzes the Proposed new FTC Guidelines on Online Marketing here.
"You Don't Think Abraham Lincoln Was a Whore Before He Was President? He Had to Tell His Little Stories and Smile His Shit Eating Back Country Grin and He Did It Just So He Would One Day Have the Opportunity to Stand in Front of the Nation and Appeal to the Better Angels of Our Nature." Jack Stanton in Primary Colors
Is corruption the price of leadership? The fictional Jack Stanton (a thinly disguised Bill Clinton) runs for President in Mike Nichols' tour de force, Primary Colors. Above, Stanton explains the necessity of cutting moral corners to achieve greatness. Dr. Sam Vatkin writing at Global Politician this week might well agree as he teases out the pros and cons of corruption. Does "corruption run against the grain of meritocratic capitalism"? Does it
skew[] the level playing-field; guarantee[] extra returns where none should have been had; encourage[] the misallocation of economic resources; and subvert[] the proper functioning of institutions.
Or does corruption "help facilitate the flow and exchange of goods and services in hopelessly clogged and dysfunctional systems and markets"? Can it
"get things done" and "keep people employed"; serve[] as an organizing principle where chaos reins and institutions are in their early formative stages; supplement[] income and help[] the state employ qualified and skilled personnel; [and] preserve[] peace and harmony by financing networks of cronyism, nepotism, and patronage.
In other words, does "just the right amount of corruption" build rather than destroy the trust that permits a social, cultural and political body to survive? You must read Professor Vatkin's article for the answer, or at least one of the possible answers to this age-old question.
Combating corruption in economic life is more on the minds of Rakesh Khurana and Scott Snook at Harvard Business Publishing for Managers this week in their Manifesto for B-Schools. Khurana and Snook urge B-school professors to "be honest purveyors of the truth," presenting
solid arguments, and be[ing] clear about what we know and what we don't. We need to acknowledge the difference between truth and sophistry, and value the former over the latter. As researchers, we need to understand that a commitment to the truth does not mean we possess the truth. Truth evolves; we must gather evidence that can be critically assessed, and revise our ideas in the face of a new data or better a argument. Otherwise, our knowledge amounts to little more than rank ideology.
Khurana and Snook make other suggestions as well and their full post is well worth the read.
An optimistic view of the potential for global trust from a Chinese perspective can be found this week at The Globalist in Yu Keping's post on Harmonious Diplomacy and Global Governance (Part III). The strategies of Harmonious Diplomacy, writes Keping
center on dialogue and negotiation, win-win outcomes achieved through cooperation, finding commonalities while reserving differences, and promoting an environment characterized by inclusion and openness. To reach maximum consensus, harmonious diplomacy requires equal, friendly and sincere dialogue and negotiation, and mutual trust as well as mutual respect.
These are sentiments with which I, a mediator, certainly agree. And yet trust without confirmation can lead to ruin. "Trust, but verify" was President Reagan's watchword, which is this week picked up by the Greenpeace blog, with the suggestion that our foreign climate crisis partners "trust but verify" American claims to U.S. support to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. As Philip Radford writes in The Whole World in His Hands,
Even though President Obama was elected on a platform of delivering action on global warming, and has passionately reiterated those pledges since becoming president, he will have to overcome enormous skepticism from his international negotiating partners. At this summit, it is they who will be repeating Ronald Reagan’s maxim about Soviet overtures at the beginning of the glasnost era: Trust, but verify.
.jpg){kind=small}
There's no more trusted advisor than your physician. You trust her not only to re-set your kids' broken arm but, in extremis, to take a buzz saw to your sternum, crack it open, and lift your beating heart up in her hands for repair or replacement. This week, a surgeon at the Cervantes blog (the Surgeon and the Torture Memos) reflects upon the medical training that "habituated" him to cutting through human flesh with a knife ("the scalpel [now] merely an extension of my fingers") while he contemplates the role physicians played in authorizing torture at Guantanamo and further flung sites of extraordinary rendition. The difference between the surgeon's tasks of "poking sharp objects into other people, removing organs and extremities, and switching parts between the dead and the living" on the one hand and those of interrogators at Guantanamo? Trust.
What renders a surgeon’s work different and humane, however, is not just the individual doctor’s desire to do the right thing by his or her patients . . . It is the surgeon’s commitment to and steadfast compliance with his profession’s code of ethical conduct. It is a constant awareness of the extraordinary trust that patients and the public place in their physicians, a trust that entails transparency and accountability in the patient-doctor relationship.
That trust, writes the doctor, has been "shattered" by the participation of our trusted professionals -- particularly physicians and attorneys -- in authorizing the torture that the current administration has (somewhat redundantly but now necessarily) outlawed.
Well worth read and, by the by, the winner of the best literary post award for this month's Carnival of Trust.
The Director of the FBI Testifies that He "Followed the Protocol" (reported to the Justice Department) after Concluding That the CIA was Torturing Detainees
Speaking of lawyers (see the banality of evil here) Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch weighs in on Facebook lawyer and Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly's announcement that he might throw his online fedora in the ring for the office of California's Attorney General. (Facebook Attorney Explores Run for California AG). As Ambrogi notes, Kelly hopes to parlay Facebook members' "trusted online experience" into a two-hundred million member constituency. Whether Facebook's responses to serial mishaps with their members' private information is a trust builder only time will tell.
If you're continuing to repose trust and confidence in financial advisors in this post-Madoff world, check out Investor Watchdog's post from last week on the means to detect Financial Advisor Fraud. Although the advice is commonsensical, too many of us do not take the simplest precautions to "trust but verify" the people to whom we entrust our financial future. The advice? Review account statements and activity promptly and only make checks payable to the custodian. As "wealth advisor" Michael J. Chasnoff concludes:
While an advisor working as a fiduciary does add significant value, the investor is ultimately responsible for his or her financial independence and should take steps to stay engaged.
Finally, we have Influence, Trust and Authority from Future Buzz, outlining the indicators of social media influence as follows:
Influence is the power of someone to be a compelling force on the actions of others. Robert Scoble is an influential person in getting us to try out new web services because he gets so jazzed about them we just have to try them out.
Trust is reliance on the integrity in someone (essentially confidence). If you stop and think about it, we trust each other a great deal in the social web. Consider something as simple as all the shortened URLs you click each day, we trust our networks won’t send us a spam link.
Authority is power or right delegated, given or in the case of the web earned. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor who has written several books and works hard as an advocate of free culture on the web is an authority on copyright (amongst other things).
With these definitions in mind…
. . . influence and authority are not necessarily personal, while trust is more abstract and difficult to measure because it is personal.
We have trust with people on the social web and blogs we read because we form personal relationships with the people behind the content. It is something that has been leeched from traditional media, and illustrates the shift in influence - from brands to people.
[A]ttention + trust = authority. Trust is the shortcut to both of these, thus explaining the earlier example of why someone with just 20 readers can be as influential or authoritative if not more so than popular people, at least to their networks. . . . .
There's much more of value to gain from this incisive post and I highly recommend you read it (in the event I have any influence to motivate you, authority to convince you or confidence to draw you into my own personal evaluation of blog post quality).
Want to become a charismatic leader? It's not just about charm, it's also about trust according to the Leadership Expert post on Charismatic Leadership. "Academics," we're told, have identified the following four stages of charismatic leadership:
Creating a new vision: Charismatic leaders are able to assess unfulfilled needs and opportunities in their environment and project their vision for a future without any shortcomings.
Articulating the vision: The leader will be able to communicate his belief in the vision to his followers and convince them of its viability.
Building trust: The next phase of charismatic leadership involves engendering trust among group members and securing their commitment.
Achieving the vision: The leader will set a personal example and empower others in order to sustain motivation so that the vision can be realized.
Most attorneys consider the phrase "law firm management" to be an oxymoron. Trust me. Most of us were liberal arts majors. The only thing we ever endeavored to manage was our urge to put on tap shoes and sing Yankee Doodle Dandy or recite the Gettysburg address if stage or podium were nearby. Law firm management consultant Rees Morrison, however, believes in our ability to manage the business of the law. In his recent post Which influences most in the selection process, the firm or the lawyer? he suggests that the choice of trusted counsel all comes down to relationship.
[W]hen matters are not so high profile as to tip the selection toward a name firm, it is the individual partner who draws the attention of those who select counsel. So long as the firm’s infrastructure is judged sufficient to handle the matter, it is the brain, style, experience, and judgment of the partner that makes the most difference.
As proof, if a respected partner leaves a firm, even in the midst of a major matter, most general counsel will transfer matters with him or her, accepting the disruption, nodding to the new firm, and demonstrating faith in the partner (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: loyalty to law firms with 6 references; and Sept. 12, 2008: transfer matters to new counsel with 8 references.). The partner, not the junior lawyers let alone the other resources of the firm, makes all the difference (See my post of May 11, 2007: complaints about associates with 13 references.).
How could I, an inveterate "tweeter" (here) conclude the Carnival of Trust without mentioning Twitter? You needn't take my word for its trust-building capacities -- take it from CoveyLink (Stephen Covey, he of the Speed of Trust). As Covey raves in his post Twitter's Speed of Trust ripple of influence:
[Twitter] scales the entire globe. It is both personal. . . . and professional, I connect and communicate with like minded thinkers around the world.
The . . . story that comes to mind is the significance of the realization of the transcendent potential of the world wide web so eloquently described by Christopher Locke at the turn of the century (the 21st century that is) in . . . his book thecluetrain manifesto:
“More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all of our lives. Inside, Outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all 5 years ago and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it is about is futile. It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the 21st century. There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being… This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice. The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.“
Twitter is clearly a giant leap forward in that direction.
Or as the poet Galway Kinnell has written, "if you tell your own personal story deeply enough, your voice becomes that of another creature on the planet speaking." And that, my friends, is a voice you can always trust.
Thank you Charles H. Green for allowing me to host this carnival, and thanks Ian Welsh for his help.
(For the link to Charlie’s blog, Trust Matters click here!)
