From The Japanese Quake, Pearl Harbor, Karmic Payback and Cognitive Biases.

Pearl Harbor is unfortunately a trending Twitter topic because millions of little microphones have been given to people unable to think things through.

People who say the Japanese “deserve” it, like those who believe that AIDS is God’s punishment for immorality, are suffering from a cognitive bias called Fundamental Attribution Error. Here at She Negotiates, we’re deeply concerned with cognitive biases because they cause otherwise kind and rational people to believe that their neighbors are mean-spririted, ill-willed or downright evil.

And that prevents us from being compassionate, helping out in times of crisis or negotiating the resolution of disputes.

Instead of becoming mired in the debate between the  Japan-deserved-it tweeters and those who call the tweeters stupid jerks, let’s use the trending Pearl Harbor-Japanese earthquake topic as a teaching moment.

From Excuse Me for Having to be Rescued: Negotiating Order in Japan.

Today, the newspaper of record for Los Angeles, its own readership jumpy and restless, tells us that the Japanese are maintaining order by exhibiting behavior (“impeccable manners”) that most Westerners would consider overly deferential and needlessly self-sacrificing.

From Please Don't Buy Me Retail - Negotiating with Professionals

The Women Don't Ask author quoted her keynote fee as $10,000, which is an eminently fair price. A man of similar provenance would have asked for at least twenty grand. If you’re skeptical about that, check out the fees at BigSpeak which lists a couple of male Harvard Business Professors at $40,000 + (Clayton M. Christensen) and $20,001 to $40,000 (John A. Davis) while quoting a couple of women at the top of the corporate ladder at $7,500 to $10,000 (former Accenture managing partner and author Susan Bulter) and $10,001 to $20,000 (Kate White, Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan and New York Times Best-Selling Author).

My conflict resolver's stream of consciousness moves from family strife to violence for reasons both global and personal.  Like many conflict resolvers, I am a wounded healer, raised in a family where violence alternated in alarming rapidity with the denial and suppression of conflict.  This created in the children of that family a desire for peace coupled with a suspicious nature prone to strike before asking questions.

It is we ~ those raised in the cauldron of violence ~ who seek peace and proclaim it while at the same time attempting to corral a pugnacious first response to threat.

That's the personal. I mention it not simply because I lack a religious confessor to urge me toward true acts of contrition, but also because the personal is inextricably interlinked with the political, particularly when it comes to religion. 

Religious Peace and Violence

How and why do we translate our personal weakness for the cutting remark or barroom brawl into religious and political dogma?  The "how" is often simply reflexive.  The author of The Brain Rules tells us that these are the questions we ask when we see a stranger.

Can I eat it?

Will it eat me?

Can I mate with it?

Will it mate with me?

The "how" is also the "why" with the added apprehension that religious beliefs are based on faith and too often require the faithful to convert the unconverted by means intellectually persuasive or violently coercive.  

Thus the human condition.

The Peace Part

Someone schooled in Buddhism once told me that "the world being dual, the best we can do is lean toward the light."

Many people schooled in Christianity have told me in and out of religious congregations that the profound fallibility that burdens all of us is precisely what makes us human.  It is only our willingness to accept forgiveness that takes us into the neighborhood of God.  Incapable of perfection, we are saved by grace. Once saved, we are moved to express that which God has expressed in us and we become agents of forgiveness and reconciliation.  We will never, however, stop "sinning."  The grace given is compassion for our fallibility, not the perfection of our "fallen" nature.

My Jewish friends refer me to Tikkun Olam - the principle of the world as both spiritually and materially broken ~ and in need of repair.  They also tell me about the 36 righteous people whose role in life is to justify the purpose of humankind in the eyes of God.

My evolutionist friends tell me that we share with the forebears from whom we separated fifty million years ago a compelling emotional response to injustice.  We also share with these distant relatives the same cognitive biases that make us respond irrationally to giving and getting.  TED video on this topic below.  

My Muslim friends acknowledge the violence in their sacred text which is not significantly different from that in the sacred Jewish and Christian tomes.  These teachings, all in the Abrahamic tradition, can be read leaning toward the light or toward the darkness.  Muslim organizations for peace are prevalent and powerful.

As a nearly fully secularized humanist raised with the values of mainstream mid-twentieth century Protestantism and dipped in evangelical Christianity in high school, I commit my spirit to the grace of a god I am too limited to understand, too skeptical to believe in without great struggle, and too grateful for the gift-horse of pardon to kick in the teeth.

A list of my favorite books on religion and/or violence/peace are my Christmas present to my readers.

The Ambivalence of the Sacred by Scott Appleby, a great use for the Amazon gift cards you're getting for your Kindle this holiday season.

Conflict Revolution ~ Mediating Evil, War, Injustice and Terrorism by Ken Cloke.

Bargaining with the Devil ~ When to Negotiate, When to Fight by Robert Mnookin.

I'm addicted to something that doesn't exist.  ~  William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This is where those sensible folks who have never been addicted to narrative nor worshiped at the altar of character development check out of the post.  Please do return. 

Live Together, Die Alone

Your plane crashes on a desert island.  Your fellow survivors are, as former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote in Aristotle, already "in the thick of it."

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

Where are you?  Are there "others" on the island who would do your newborn society harm?  How will resources be distributed?  Who, if anyone, is fit and willing, to lead? Is there food and drinking water?  Will some members of your community begin to hoard food for themselves?  Can anyone track, hunt, kill and bar-b-q the wild boars that roam the island?  Who will settle disputes?  Who will betray you and who defend you? 

And when will you be rescued?

Now that we know that the island is the spiritual place - the dreamworld - the unconscious - where the survivors are challenged by inner and outer demons and given the chance to experience the healing grace inside every human heart - the mysteries need never be solved and the "truth" need never be revealed.   The "others" and the Dharma initiative and Jacob; the hydrogen bomb and the time travel; are all just the busy work against which the characters will achieve, or fall short, of their human and spiritual potential.

Yet, as Christian Shepard says at series' end - all of your experiences were real, Jack.

"Lost" as the Prisoners' Dilemma

The first two seasons of Lost were all about the Prisoners' Dilemma - is it better to cooperate with our fellows or to betray them?  And which makes us happier?

As I explain in "K is for Kin" in the upcoming ABC's of Conflict Resolution,

If a propensity for physical violence were the most prominent human characteristic, we surely would have wiped ourselves off the face of the earth by now. That we haven’t speaks to something even deeper within us than our collective desire to dominate others and control all available resources for our own benefit. Let’s take a deep breath and pause to remember that despite our sorry history of armed conflict, we also managed to land men on the moon, eradicate or drastically reduce a wide array of infectious diseases, end legalized racial segregation, grant women the right to vote in nearly every country in the world, and build civilizations that, for all their flaws, exhibit nearly continuous progress from barbarity to self-governance.

At the local level, most of us stop at red lights; wait patiently in line at the grocery store; refrain from hitting one another when angry; stay off other people’s property unless invited; play organized sports according to rules laid down decades ago; sit quietly through lectures, plays and movies; arrive at work on time; and, pay for what we gather in retail stores to feed and clothe our families. In extremis we not only behave ourselves, we often act heroically – putting our own lives in danger to save those of others – even when they are strangers to us. Firemen enter burning buildings; doctors and nurses risk their own health tending the well-being of others; police officers chase men with guns and enter abandoned buildings even when doing so is likely to get them injured or killed; and a great number of us would reflexively dash out into a street to save someone else’s child from being run over by a truck.

If each of us has decided to answer to the higher angels of our human nature, how might we convince our fellows to do the same? Once again, we turn to the evolutionary biologists for help.

In 1984, Professor Robert Axelrod organized a world-wide tournament among computer programmers. He issued an invitation seeking winning computer strategies for a game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma poses a problem involving trust, self-seeking and collaboration that economists use to show why people often fail to cooperate even if it is in both of their best interests to do so.

The game begins its life as the story of a human dilemma. Two suspects are arrested by the police for burglary. Because the police do not have sufficient evidence to convict either suspect, they can only secure a conviction if they are able to convince at least one of the two to confess the crime and implicate his partner. To coax the suspects to confess, the police offer each one the same deal. If either one of the two accused individuals testifies against his partner, he will be freed and his partner will receive a ten-year sentence. If both confess and testify against one another, each will receive a five-year sentence. If both remain silent, they will be sentenced to only six months in jail. These offers are made to the suspects in separate rooms.

The optimal choice for both partners in crime is to cooperate with one another by remaining silent. If they do so, each will earn only a six-month jail sentence. The optimal solution for the individual suspect is to “rat out” his partner, securing his own freedom. Because neither partner is capable of predicting the other’s choice, the only “rational” decision is mutual betrayal.

To learn the best means of resolving this dilemma, Professor Axelrod and others like him engaged their research subjects in repeated rounds – or “iterations” – of the game. Because our community life requires us to daily choose between cooperation and generosity on the one hand, and independence and selfishness on the other, this iterated prisoner’s dilemma best represented conflicts among our fellows in everyday life. Of the fifty iterated Prisoner Dilemma programs submitted to Professor Axelrod, one – named Tit for Tat – was the clear winner. Tit for Tat began each round of play with each new player by cooperating. If cooperative play was met with betrayal, Tit for Tat retaliated on the next occasion it “met” the non-cooperative gamer. Only if that program returned to cooperation would Tit for Tat do the same.

Those programs that were designed to cooperate haphazardly or to continue cooperating in the face of betrayal, were repeatedly victimized. Those programs that chronically betrayed their fellow gamers, became locked in escalating spirals of retaliatory play.

Only Tit for Tat behaved the way evolutionary biologists believe successful human survivors played the game of life. Those survivors were pre-disposed to cooperate with their fellows in at least some circumstances – circumstances in which their families or “kin” were threatened. Those inclined to betray did not, however, die out completely. To bring disreputable players back into the cooperative endeavors that would assure the family’s survival, it was necessary for punishments to be meted out. Banishment or penalties of death for non-cooperative players were not retaliatory options except under extreme circumstances. To survive, families needed “all hands on deck.” The “fittest” to survive, like the winning Tit for Tat computer program, quickly forgave as soon as punishment brought uncooperative family members back into line.

We appear to be hard-wired for cooperation in the same way Tit for Tat was programmed for success. When research subjects played the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma while attached to equipment monitoring brain activity, the brains of those who were cooperating with one another lit up like pinball machines. Not only did the cooperators win more total points for cooperation than did the betrayers, they were happier whether they were winning or not. As the neuroscientists discovered, when we cooperate, the neurochemical that gives us pleasure – dopamine – is released. At the same time that the cooperators’ brains were being bathed in the warm glow of dopamine, their impulse inhibition areas were activated, helping them resist the lure of self-seeking.

Our evolutionary history has created us to be a “band of brothers” – a human family that places the well-being of the tribe on a higher level than anyone’s “personal best.” If family members betray us (and they will) we doom our effort to secure compliance if we fail to retaliate. A sharp slap on the wrist or even expressed disapproval (the powerful shock of shaming) is usually sufficient to bring miscreants back into line. To optimize the benefits to be gained by cooperation among the greatest number of family members, we must be quick to forgive when our retaliatory actions bear fruit.

As I became more and more involved in the complexities of the Lost narrative, the through line for me was always the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The survivors lied about their motives.  They betrayed one another.  They remained silent when speaking might have saved them.  They demonized "the others" only to find that demons inhabited their own hearts as well.  When the squabbling amongst them threatened to pull them apart, another threat from "the others" or the wild boars or the deadly black smoke or the hydrogen bomb, drew them back together.  And over time, they became kin.

More on Lost and the social psychology of conflict later this week.

After three years of negotiation and general ADR blogging, I feel the need to narrow my Negotiation Blog posts and expand my IP ADR Blog posts to the type of work that consumed the vast bulk of my 25-year litigation and trial career – general commercial litigation.

In the course of handling business-to-business disputes, I’ve prosecuted and defended legal actions for copyright, tradename, trademark, and patent infringement; securities fraud; and, insurance coverage (particularly concerning catastrophic environmental liabilities); antitrust; and, unfair competition disputes.  I have also represented both the Plaintiffs and the Defendants in nationwide class actions; and, from time to time, represented attorneys and accountants in malpractice cases.  I even have a small amount of experience representing employees and employers in wrongful termination and discrimination cases, but certainly not enough to call myself an expert in that field.

In the course of my ADR career, I have continued to focus my practice on commercial disputes, although I have also mediated employment, legal and medical malpractice, and personal injury cases.

Colin Powell famously said that the most important knowledge to possess in international diplomacy is the “other guy’s decision cycle.”  What interests must the client serve and to whom does he or she answer?  What potential damage might there be to the career of in-house counsel or a high-level manager if the litigation goes south or the mediated settlement agreement angers the Board, the shareholders or even the public?  Are there tensions between counsel and client that should be resolved if the settlement reached will serve everyone’s interests?  Are there upcoming mergers or other significant corporate events that make “circumstances” more important than the merits of a particular piece of litigation?

This describes just the tip of the iceberg of the commercial litigation and settlement “decision cycle” that I know intimately. I know what keeps clients awake at night because their concerns have been my business for more than a quarter of a century.  I also know at greater depth than I know anything else the competing demands and hard hours my new “clients” – commercial litigators – labor under on a daily basis.  And having cut the law firm umbilical cord five years ago, I finally know first hand the challenges of running one’s own business.

This is what I bring to my mediation practice, along with the negotiation and mediation skills I have been studying, writing about, and teaching with great diligence for the past five years.  I continue to teach trial and deposition advocacy for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy just to keep my hand in the adversarial system.  I also continue to follow developments in the law of all of the specialties that consumed my practice as an attorney.

And then there’s that LL.M in Conflict Resolution that perplexes most people in the legal community.  One of my dearest friends – a man who served as my discovery referee for seven years – asked me “how many ways are there to stir the mediation  pot?”  Thousands, it turns out, particularly given the enormous progress that has been made in the science of the mind, the study of decision-making and the identification of cognitive biases since I was at University.

Sitting on this side of the table for the past few years has been as confounding as it has been exhilarating.  I remain steadfastly convinced that the principle problem at hand is a commercial one to which there is almost always a better business, than a legal, solution.  That does not mean that I ignore or marginalize the “merits” or “positions” of the parties.  The ability to analyze the facts and the law of matters that have been in litigation for years — sometimes decades — in several hours or a couple of days is the mandatory minimal qualification for anyone who wishes to help litigators resolve commercial disputes.

Though the law “monetizes” injustice, no one – not even the most cynical Fortune 50 client – wants to settle a case that leaves the bitter taste of injustice in his mouth.    To deliver the benefits of the legal system to our clients we must never forget that they seek out the services of the “justice system” because they believe they have been treated unfairly.  A critical element of every “commercial” solution to every legal/business conflict, is therefore the resolution – even at the level of “rough” justice – of what brought clients to lawyers in the first instance – their perception that they have been cheated, blackmailed, insulted, taken advantage of, lied to, coerced or disrespected.

After twenty-five years of legal practice, I can say with conviction that the highest and best use of every mediator is to help the lawyers help their clients obtain – at a minimum – a “deal” that not only releases them from the trap of litigation, but one that releases them from the grip of injustice.

All of these goals; each of these interests; and, every one of these skills, are possessed by dozens of mediators with whom I have worked or who I have observed in the course of their work.  I’m certainly not the best nor the only passionately competent commercial mediator in the business.  I’m just one of them.

This new Commercial ADR Blog will cover not only negotiation and mediation strategy and tactics — including tips for resolving thorny legal and commercial problems, but also the social psychology of conflict as it relates to the business of commerce.  I will also cover  developments in commercial law and civil procedure that are particularly relevant to the settlement of litigation.

I hope you’ll join me.

What does the 200-year present have to do with conflict resolution week?  It reminds us that new forms never really completely replace the old ones.  We continue to employ every technique we've ever used to suppress, avoid, deny, resolve, transform, or transcend conflict, including force (violent and non-violent such as injunctions subject of a Trial Warrior Blog post this week); thievery (the Trade Secrets Blog); shaming (which Scott Greenfield does to bloggers "looking for fights and dumb as dirt" and which Volokh suggests we do to health insurers); bullying (solutions to which appear at the Citizen Media Law Project); torture (still with us at the Crim Prof Blog); cheating (Make Yourself Better with Their Secrets at Concretely Ambiguous) ingratiation (at the Law School Expert); persuasive argumentation; appeal to third party authority; bargaining; communication; and, problem solving (The Tao of Advice at the Business of Creativity). 

Whichever dispute resolution mechanism you use, it should be much improved if you take up  juggling (as reported this week at Idealawg).

Transformative conflict resolution of the type covered by New York City police officer, Jeff Thompson at Enjoy Mediation, requires accountability (by lawyers, for instance, to the principle of justice at Law21); recognition (at JD Bliss); apology, amends, reconciliation (at Opinio Juris); power with (negotiation and cooperation at the Ohio Family Law Blog) instead of power over (at the Election Law Blog); and, interests rather than rights (at the Gay Couples Law Blog).

No brand of law-giver or enforcer has ever entirely left the scene.  Cops, negotiators, mediators (on the international scene at the Business Conflict Blog); conciliators, arbitrators, trial attorneys (marking tattoos as exhibits over at LawComix), corporate lawyers, legislators  (fomenting a Franken Amendment at the ADR Prof Blawg); judges (whether elected or appointed at Legally Unbound), and, juries (who might be biased at SCOTUS Blog). 

And of course the gadflies (wolf protection lawsuits anyone? at  Point of Law). 

Win, lose, settle, enjoin (at Charon QC) or simply give up (6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy at CSO Security and Risk).  We regulate crime and prescribe punishment (Polanski at Sentencing Law and Policy and The End of an Era at Defending People). 

We wage war (at Prawfs Blog) and seek peace (at the Delaware Employment Law Blog) as conflict inevitably erupts over Obama's (embarrassing) peace prize (at Balkinization).

And, lest we forget our primary purpose, we bend our efforts toward justice (which, according to BLT is not necessarily available to card-carrying members of the ACLU).

My own personal 200-year present spans the life of my maternal grandparents who were nine years old in 1909, and that of my step-children’s children, who (assuming they procreate on a reasonable schedule) should be ninety-five'ish in 2109. 

My grandfather, born in 1900, witnessed the birth of electricity, saw the first automobile roll off an assembly line ^[2] and stood awestruck in a cornfield as one of mankind’s first airplanes took flight. ^[3]  Although we've progressed from bi-planes to jets and rockets (some of which may someday be green) we still fly balloons of the type first launched in 1783 -- both Goodyear Blimps and the backyard variety, covered this week by Legal Blog Watch as Law and More

asked here whether the shiny, flying, silver Jiffy Pop-looking craft tethered in the backyard of Richard Heene was an "attractive nuisance" under the law.

Grandpa's first war was, well, the First and his second was the Second,^[4]  as if there'd never been any wars before the Great One. By the time I was born, mid-century, we'd fought the war to end all wars twice and knew we'd never survive a third. 

My imagined grandchildren, ^[6] born sometime between today and 2014, will not be strangers to any of my grandfather’s technologies. Despite the advent of compact fluorescent light bulbs, the early lives of my step-children's children will likely pass under the glow of the same incandescent lights that brightened granddad’s one-room school house. They will be transported to school in cars with internal combustion engines, learn the same alphabet from the same cardboard and paper books (as well as from the "e" variety) ^[7] and play many of the same games ^[8]  he did – hop scotch, jump rope and ring-around the rosy. 

Change will etch itself into the lives of my grandchildren as surely as it did my own, my parents' and my grandparents'.  Hybrids will give way to fully electric (and perhaps hemp-powered) ^[9] vehicles (effective or defective) and though electricity will continue to be  generated by hydroelectric dams, wind farms and nuclear power plants, some new and unimaginable source of power will surely push back the nights of my grand children's children. ^[10]

Law, politics, society and culture also exist in the 200-year present of conflict resolution.  ^[11] In my personal 200-year span, the law seems to have changed the most profoundly. Was it the law first and culture later?  Or do they weave our future together?

The first U.S. woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell, was admitted to practice a mere ten years before my grandmother was born. Mrs. Bradwell’s legal career was the subject of one of the sorriest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, in which the Court opined,

The civil law as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender.  The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say the identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea for a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband … for these reasons I think that the laws of Illinois now complained of are not obnoxious to the charge of any abridging any of the privileges and immunities of cities of the United States.

^[12]

Another nineteen years would pass after Bradwell began her practice before she (and my nineteen year old grandmother) were guaranteed the right to vote. ^[13] And another 30 years would pass after my women's movement -- the Second Wave -- before we'd have our own  business magazine -   ForbesWoman (my part in it here).  And let us not forget that despite the 20th Century's great civil rights achievements, when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia.  See e.g. Problems All Around for Blacks in Big Law at Being a Black Lawyer.

My grandparents', parents' and step-children's 20th Century was dominated by genocide ^[14] on a scale and a technological precision unimaginable to our earlier forebears.  Mid-century brought with it the threat of nuclear annihilation but also liberated millions of people enslaved by colonialism.  We cured polio in my own lifetime with both "dead" and "live" vaccines (neither of them counterfeit) - a singular moment in scientific history during which no one took ownership of the cure and no one tried to stop others from seeking another, a problem Patently O addressed this week in Reverse Payments.

Whether god or satan, heaven or hell, war or peace "won" the twentieth century, the world's greatest peace-making body was created during it -- the United Nations.  And here in the U.S., the “living room war,” Viet Nam, coupled with the largest generation of adolescents ever to grace American society, ended the forcible induction of young men into the military. ^[15]

With the recent discovery of our earliest ancestor, Ardi, our biological and social lives exist in a 4.4 million year now. Our physical bodies “evolve” in the womb along the same lines as did our species and, once born, we carry with us our earliest organs. ^[16] Most critical of these to conflict escalation and avoidance is our “fight-flight” mechanism – the amygdala.^[17] And the most pertinent biological agents to promote the collaborative resolution of conflict are our “mirror neurons” which

 provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture . . . absorb[ing] it directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.

 ^[18]

As “exquisitely social creatures,” our “survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.” Id. That our misunderstandings and cognitive biases -- mentioned by Volokh on Paternalism and Michael Carbone on reactive devaluation at Mediation Strategies this week -- threaten our survival as a species is undeniable (cf. Lawyers Must Survive or Face Extinction at the Lawyerist). 

How we’ve manage to survive despite our tendency to misread one another’s actions, intentions and emotions, is often the subject of those who advise us how to choose and move juries -- here -- Anne Reed at Deliberations (explaining why "they" don't see things like "we" do here); and, the Jury Room (explaining why pain hurts more intensely when we believe it's been intentionally inflicted here). 

The Most Effective Conflict Resolution Technology is the Oldest

One of our true original gangsters, Al Capone, is reported to have said that “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone” and one of our greatest Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Capone and Roosevelt didn't know it, but they were talking about the most effective (and most ancient) form of conflict resolution – tit for tat. In 1980, political Scientist Robert Axelrod asked game theory experts to submit computer programs designed to prevail in a game that provided the highest reward to cooperating pairs -- the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. (See also Max Kennerly's excellent post on Game Theory and Medical Malpractice Settlements at the Philadelphia Litigation and Trial Blog).

The winner of Axelrod's competition was a program named tit for tat.  Tit for tat was programmed to cooperate ^[19]  with its first encounter with any other programmed player.  It  rewarded cooperation with cooperation (just as networking will reward the savvy lawyer over at Chuck Newton's Ride the Third Wave) and punished non-cooperation with retaliation. Because Tit for Tat retaliated in the face of non-cooperation (just as a former employee did according to Hell Hath No Fury at Chicago Law Blogger) it was never repeatedly victimized. And because Tit for Tat “forgave” non-cooperators upon their return to cooperative game playing (as some believe Mr. Polanski should be forgiven over at the Marquette U. Law School Faculty Blog) it never got locked into mutually costly chains of mutual betrayal. ^[20]

As Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal explained, had Tit for Tat been tossed into the game with 50 steadfast non-cooperators, there would have been a 49-way tie for first place. But none of the players' programs failed to cooperate in at least some circumstances, leaving Tit for Tat the clear victor.  According to Wright, humans, like the programs in Axelrod's competition, are evolutionarily “designed” to cooperate under at least some circumstances. The engine and benefit of cooperation is present in our neurochemistry.  When scientists observed the brain activity of volunteers playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, for instance, they found that the participants' “reward circuits” were activated and their impulsive "me first" circuits inhibited when they cooperated. Cooperation, retaliation, forgiveness and a return to cooperation. Tit for Tat. 

Laws and Lawyers

First and most importantly, I suppose, are the social media signs that you're "tweeting" like a lawyer over at the Social Media Law Student Blog.  Why first or important?  Know thyself.  Everything else follows that.

We don't "dis" lawyers here at the Negotiation Blog.  We simply remind ourselves that our primary purpose is the promotion of justice, with a stable societal order closely behind.  Most people don't understand, for instance, that Shakespeare's famous the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers was not an insult.  In King Henry IV, Act IV, Scene II, Shakespeare's sentiment was not his own, but that of a revolutionary who wished to destroy the social order.

The historic "present" of laws and lawyers is in the thousands, not simply the hundreds, of years. Hammurabi (make of his choice for the memorialization of his laws what you will) was the sixth king of Babylon, remembered for creating -- in his own name (and likeness?) - the first written and systematic legal code. 

These laws provided for a mix of physical punishment - 60 lashes with an ox hide whip - ‘measure for measure’ awards (still with us in the form of lethal injection as covered by The StandDown Texas Project) – eye for eye, bone fracture for bone fracture – and monetary compensation – 20 shekels for tooth injuries – (preserved by workplace injury awards such as those discussed at the Workers Compensation Blog) depended not only upon the type of injury, but the social classes involved in the loss, i.e., ‘measure for measure’ sanctions were specified for losses among the upper classes while monetary awards were required for losses caused to and by commoners (reminding us that disrespect still too often turns on social status or "outsider" classification as discussed at Balkinization this week).  ^[23] 

For the wrongful killing of another, for instance, the victim’s kin were paid according to the social status of the deceased party. Thus the ‘man price’ for killing a peasant was 200 shillings and that for a nobleman 1200 shillings. Payments were not, however, tailored to the loss, but fixed according to types of affront, a distinction we continue to make when we punish intentional torts more severely than negligent ones.  ^[24]>

Criminal law and civil, it all comes down to a process that is "due" (a topic covered in a blistering post about tea-partiers and other "protectors" of the Constitution at the Criminal Jurisdiction Law Blog) and a set of guidelines against which we can exercise some small degree of control over our own commercial and personal futures (like those subject of Delays Not "Party Time, Excellent" for Subcontractor at the Construction Contract Review).

Lawyers, litigators and trial lawyers are too often demonized by the ADR community as if you could get someone to sit down to negotiate without first pointing the gun of litigation at their heads; I salute you (and myself, for that matter!) for bringing us all to the bargaining table.  See Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters, Factors When Peace Makes Sense for a note that touches upon the symbiotic relationship between litigation and mediation, litigators and mediators.

I shouldn't cite single legal blogs twice, but I cannot resist this quote of Scott Greenfield's on another pundit's view of the future lawyers have in store for them, i.e., 

shucking oysters for a living if we don't accept a future of lawyers being piece workers in factories, sending our work off to Bangalore in pdf files and complementing people on their choice of forms at Legal Zoom.

Legal Rebels:  the Sky is Falling at Simple Justice.  Charon QC also weighs in on the ABA Legal Rebels project here.

Arbitration

Which came first? Public civil trials or private arbitrations? You’ll be surprised, I’ll wager, to hear that arbitration was one of the earliest forms of dispute resolution, practiced by the juris consults of the Roman Empire. Roman arbitration predates the adversarial system of common law by more than a thousand years. ^[25]

Ah, the glory of Rome! The juris consulti were (like too many mediators) amateurs who dabbled in dispute resolution, raising the question whether they (and we) should be certified or regulated as Diane Levin asks at The Mediation Channel this week.  The Roman hobbyists gave legal opinions (responsa) to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). They also served the needs of Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with advisory panels of jurisconsults before rendering decisions. Thus, the Romans – god bless them! - were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems (an activity some readers will recall Ralph Nader calling "mental gymnastics in an iron cage").

18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology:  The (Inevitably Polarizing) Adversarial System

It was Buckminster Fuller who famously opined that the "significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."  If you keep this aphorism in mind for the remainder of this post, you'll likely have some extraordinarily innovative comments to make in the comment section below.

As the Law Guru wiki reminds us, we can trace the adversarial system to the "medieval mode of trial by combat, in which some litigants were allowed a champion to represent them."  We owe our present day adversarialism, however, to the common law's use of the jury - the power of argumentation replacing the power of the sword.

The Act abolishing the infamous Star Chamber in 1641 also granted every "freeman" the right to trial by "lawful judgment of his peers" or by the "law of the land" before the Crown could "take[] or imprison[]" him or "disseis[e] [him] of his freehold or liberties, or free customs."  Nor could he any longer be "outlawed or exciled or otherwise destroyed."  Nor could the King "pass upon him or condemn him." 

English colonies like our own adopted the jury trial system and we, of course, enshrined that system in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments.  Whether this 17th century dispute resolution technology can be fine-tuned to keep abreast of 21st century dispute creation technology (particularly in the quickly moving area of intellectual property) remains one of the pressing questions of legal and ADR policy and practice, particularly in a week in which a Superior Court verbally punished the lawyers before it for filing The Most Oppressive Motion Ever Presented (see the Laconic Law Blog).  The motion? 

Defendants['] . . . motion for summary judgment/summary adjudication, seeking adjudication of 44 issues, most of which were not proper subjects of adjudication.  Defendants’ separate statement was 196 pages long, setting forth hundreds of facts, many of them not material—as defendants’ own papers conceded.  And the moving papers concluded with a request for judicial notice of 174 pages.  All told, defendants’ moving papers were 1056 pages.

Id. (and ouch!)  On a less Dickensian note (think Bleak House) take a look at the IP Maximizer's post on IP litigation not being smart source of revenue for inventors. 

Mediator, author and activist, Ken Cloke, suggests that interest-based resolutions to conflict must replace power and rights based resolutions if we expect to create a future in which justice prevails.  As Ken wrote in Conflict Revolution:

Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests.

Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve.

All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response.

As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention.

These are the words I leave with the readers of Blawg Review #234 because they are the ones that informed my personal and professional transformation from a legal career based on rights and remedies to one based upon interests and consensus. 

Whatever my own personal 200-year present was, is and will be, it is pointed in the direction of peace with justice, with an enormous and probably unwarranted optimism best expressed by the man after whom my law school was named:  Martin Luther King, Jr.  - the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Next week's host, Counsel to Counsel, will devote its round-up of the week's best legal posts to the Great Recession.

When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God. For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.

Having just finished reading Wright's The Moral Animal (an evolutionary exploration for our tendency to reciprocal altruism)  and taking the long view of Western Civilization, I'm pre-disposed to believe that we have not only evolved physically and intellectually, but "morally" as well.

I understand from Bloom's review that Wright -- either a firm agnostic or wavering atheist -- is moved to wonder whether a universe in which moral progress takes place might suggest the presence of a higher power.  Quoting Wright, Bloom observes:

[Wright] emphasizes that he is not arguing that you need divine intervention to account for moral improvement, which can be explained by a “mercilessly scientific account” involving the biological evolution of the human mind and the game-theoretic nature of social interaction. But he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. “If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Whatever the source of our moral development, divine or "mercilessly scientific," its encouraging on a bright summer Sunday to believe we can achieve, if not perfection, at least greater decency toward the divine in one another.

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.

As every lawyer knows and most students of high school geometry must learn in mastering "proofs," the answer often comes first, the rationale later.  I used to say, "I'm a litigator, I can rationalize anything."  As a mediator, my rationalizations have turned from the way in which facts can be shoe-horned into causes of action or affirmative defenses to the way in which harm arising from a dispute (including, most assuredly, the moral harm of injustice) can be monetized.

Now David Brooks in the New York Times (which appears to have disabled the "copy" function/1) tells us that philosophy has been sacrificed on the alter of emotion in his column The End of Philosophy. 

As Brooks explains, reasoning comes after moral judgment and "is often guided by the emotions that preceded it."  The good news is that those emotions are not merely competitive.  Brooks again:

Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other, and stand together in the face of common threats.  Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history.  We don't just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals.   We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions.  We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

My mediation experience teaches me that the "soft" arts of influence, empathy, community-building, and prejudice reduction, are as important (and often more important) to the successful (i.e., satisfying) resolution of a lawsuit than our prized ability to parse the evidence,  rationalize away the bad and privilege the good to sell our "proof" to judge or jury.

Most importantly, I find that when attorneys' clients leave a mediation with the belief that a certain rough justice has been obtained, they are more satisfied with the outcome, and with their attorneys' representation of their interests, than they might have been had they left with 10% more change jingling in their pockets.

The experts who study mediation tell us that "neutrals" don't make the difference between settling or not settling.  The cases will settle with or without us.  The difference mediators make is not settlement, but  client satisfaction.  Satisfied clients are  an absolute necessity for a successful legal practice at any time.  In these hard times, legal practices may fail in the absence of resolutions addressing the justice issues your client sought out a lawyer to resolve in the first place.

Money is the instrument.  But justice is the issue.

_____________

1/  More about this at IP ADR later today.

Transparency Will Eliminate Unnecessary Wariness Between Parties (.pdf)

from the April 1, 2009 Daily Journal

FORUM COLUMN

As a mediator, the question I hear most frequently from lawyers is "How do I convince my opponent to sit down and negotiate without losing my competitive advantage?"

Believe it or not, the answer is transparency.

If you can remember way back to last July, when firms like Microsoft and Yahoo were still engaging in business as usual, you might recall that a merger fell apart because Yahoo was acting "weird." At least that's what Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, told the Wall Street Journal.

"We had an offer out that was a 100 percent premium on the operating business of the company and there wasn't a serious price negotiation ... until three months later. It was a little ... weird."

Lawyers know that three months rushes by in the blink of an eye. The board of directors meets. It seeks an analysis from the mergers and acquisitions people, who consult with outside counsel's antitrust department, which renders a decision but whose members first have to chat with the tax guys. Then there are the IP people with whom to discuss license agreements and, of course, the managers in the human resources department, who may or may not have advice about executive parachutes - platinum, golden or brass.

And yet the Yahoo-Microsoft merger fell apart because Microsoft felt that Yahoo's delay was "weird."

Let's go back to what every trial lawyer knows. In the absence of information, people make stuff up. Weird stuff.

And the stories we tell ourselves about our uncommunicative commercial partners do not include one where the other guy is laboring day and night to fulfill our fondest desires. No. In the absence of information, we weave elaborate conspiracy theories in which our opponents are scheming to fleece us of our rights, obstruct our prospective economic advantage and turn our world upside down.

Your dentist can tell you what your opponent wants to be told. A fully illustrated pre-game outline of the upcoming procedure that goes something like this "First I'll put a little numbing cream on your gum. That way the shot of Novocain won't hurt too much. Then I'll drill," she'd say, holding the fearful appliance up and switching it on. "It may sound louder in your mouth than it does here in my hand, but I'll only have it on for about five minutes, after which ... etc., etc."

So how do you get your opponent to the bargaining table without sounding weak?

You say "Listen, Ted, I know both our clients believe their cases are as good as gold but after an initial round of discovery, it's my practice to call a timeout to discuss settlement."

Pause.

"How does that sound to you?"

Ted says it sounds all right. Which it does. Because Ted's got three incredibly acrimonious cases in his practice right now. Last year, one of his adversaries served an ex parte application with three bankers boxes of exhibits the day before Christmas. At 4:59 p.m.  And she scheduled the hearing for hearing on the day after Christmas. Sure, the judge would deny it, but Ted couldn't assume anything. He worked 15 hours on Christmas Day.

So it sounds good to Ted.

More important to your own litigation plan, your opponent has just agreed to come to the bargaining table, even though the actual meeting won't be held for several months. When the appointed hour arrives, you will not have to ask for a settlement conference at a time when it might show weakness on your part. It's part of the plan.

For the remainder of the article, click here.

This week, that "news" is brought to you by the New York Times to explain why a surprising number of us have not been made terribly unhappy as our financial fortunes decline.  As Op-Ed contributor Sonja Lyubomirsky (of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want) observes today:

the economists David Hemenway and Sara Solnick demonstrated in a study at Harvard, many people would prefer to receive an annual salary of $50,000 when others are making $25,000 than to earn $100,000 a year when others are making $200,000.

Why? Because we "care more about social comparison, status and rank than about the absolute value of our bank accounts or reputations."  In other words, we're more concerned with justice (fairness) than we are about the money.  Which is why our clients have sought out our help with their personal, financial and commercial problems -- because we're in the justice business.  When we understand this, the negotiation of financial settlements becomes a whole lot easier because there are many more ways to deliver justice than by throwing money at it.  

Read the full (short) article Why We’re Still Happy here.

From this coming Monday's Forum Column in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (byline V. Pynchon):

 

Psychologists tell us that we are not only "meaning making" beings, but that we are all born conspiracy theorists. Viewing a field of nonsensical, unrelated data, we naturally begin to "connect the dots" - to organize the information into a coherent, and often compelling, narrative.

Pattern making or conspiracy theorizing is a human survival mechanism. We have never been the fastest or the biggest creatures on the planet. We don't have the sharpest teeth or blend in all that well with the scenery. Our soft, easily punctured skin is not covered with a protective shell. In a pinch, we can't take a running leap and fly away from land-bound carnivores who might make us their prey.

We are, however, the canniest creatures on the planet. To avoid the tiger who made lunch of our best comrade, we surveyed the scene and committed the pattern of otherwise unrelated details to memory. Five banyan trees, a narrow stream, and, a pile of rubble left by a recent avalanche means "there are tigers here."

Couple this with Fundamental Attribution Error and you have all of the ingredients necessary to blame inadvertently caused harm on elaborate conspiracies cooked up by our untrustworthy companions - Fundamental Attribution Error being our universal tendency to over-emphasize the role of others' negative personality traits to explain why harm befell us.

So it is with our legal adversaries. Once the channels of communication have been severed by the filing of a lawsuit, attorneys and clients alike begin to make up "what really happened" based on predispositions, scattered conversations, faulty memories and scraps of documentation.

 

Continue reading Monday's Daily Journal Forum Column here.

If we have suffered misfortune and are able to attribute our loss to the actions of another, we will universally attribute the series of events resulting in our loss to the bad intentions or evil character of the person we lawyers call "the defendant." 

If we are the defendant, we will universally attribute the series of events resulting in the injured party's loss to the circumstances causing Plaintiff's harm (or, of course, to the Plaintiff's evil intentions). 

The attribution of harm primarily to character or motive on the part of the victim and primarily to circumstance on the part of the accused is fundamental because it is hard-wired into the way we think.  It is an attribution error because it attributes effect to a particular type of cause.  It is error because all human activity and the inevitable conflicts that arise from it

"take[s] place not only between individuals, but in a context, culture and environment; surrounded by social, economic, and political forces; inside a group or organization; contained by a system and structure; among a diverse community of people at a particular moment in time and history; on a stage; against a backdrop; in a setting or milieu."

See Ken Cloke's Conflict Revolution (this from the Introduction) here and my review of it at The Complete Lawyer here.

In other words, all events, conflicts, injuries, and benefits, all causes and effects are determined both by human actors and by circumstance.  We are the cause and the effect of everything that surrounds us and everything that we surround.

How does this knowledge help us resolve our disputes and why does the way we tell our stories hold the key to resolving them?   I could give you more explanations from the field of social psychology or I could simply tell you a story.  In this case, I tell the story of a book of stories written by Malcolm Gladwell who writes about the stories we tell ourselves and one another about success. Gladwell, we're told, introduces us to Bill Gates as

a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.

At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.  

Continue reading the NYT Sunday Book Review of Gladwell's new book, Outliers, here.

More on using dual narratives to help you settle litigation tomorrow (or later this afternoon)

Leave it to a legal marketing blog -- Lawyer Casting - to choose Evolution Day for its first entry into the BlawgReviewOSphere.  As blogger Joshua Fruchter explains in Blawg Review #187, because the anniversary of Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859 is inextricably intertwined with the idea that only the fittest survive, Evolution Day should be celebrated with advice for survival.  And so it is.

For those of us who toil the legal fields, Fruchter suggests a range of survival options including

• Excelling at Our Work with links to Drug and Device Law; Law Prof on the Loose; and our own post on sincere and effective apology.
• Switching Practice Areas with links to the Bankruptcy Practice Pro; The Volokh Conspiracy; Conglomerate; the Electronic Frontier Foundation; PomTalk; the Legal Blog Watch; Pepper Podcasts /*; and, the Antitrust Review.
• Going Solo with links to Charon QC (an interview with Susan Cartier Liebel about Solo Practice U; ) the greatest American Lawyer; and, Law21; and,
• Leaving Law with (what else?) Above the Law; JD Bliss; and, Rush on Business.

There's advice for law firms here as well, so crawl on out of the loser gene pool and make your way over to Blawg Review # 187.  The survival of the legal species might just well depend upon it!

Note that Eric Turkewitz at the New York Personal Injury Law Blog  will host Blawg Review #188.  Anyone interested in participating in future blog carnivals should take a look at Blawg Review, which has information about next week's host and instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

Finally, in true celebration of Evolution Day, take a look at some of the most enduring misconceptions about Darwin's paradigm breaking theory here, including the fact -- noted by Fruchter -- that Darwin did not originate the phrase "survival of the fittest."

________________

*/ Pepper Hamilton is podcasting??????  A short but vivid season of my legal career was served as a Pepper associate back in the late '80s (Alum Network here) when this grand old Philadelphia law firm turned 100 at which time it was still using quill pens - at least in the Philly office.  In the Los Angeles office, we associates routinely gathered in the library (yes! with books) and were required to share the one Lexis/Nexis research station which we were forbidden to use except in the most dire circumstances and with pre-approval.

Today, we learn a lesson in heart-felt apology from Larry Bodine for a post I hadn't seen, but which Bodine himself admits was anti-Semitic.

"Elevator Pitch" Post Deleted I sincerely apologize for the crude and offensive "Elevator Pitch" post I put online last week.  In the clear light of morning, it is clear that it was anti-Semitic and repellent.  I want to thank all the people who commented and called me about it; I listened and took what you said to heart.

If you read on here you'll see that Bodine did not simply say "I'm sorry."  He removed the admittedly offensive post; disowned it; and, empathized with those who found it offensive by sharing his own family's WWII imprisonment story.

As my Second Track International Diplomacy Professor Brian Cox has written in his book Faith-Based Reconciliation

Words that heal include expressions of caring, concern, gratitude and affirmation.  [I]n demolishing the walls of hostility, we must be prepared to examine our own pattern of spoken words and embrace the practice of ethical speech. . . .

Because Bodine himself admitted the anti-Semitic nature of his post, it falls into the category of an identity-based conflict with some or all of his readers.  Though speaking from a religious or "faith-based" viewpoint, I always found Cox' prescriptions for resolution to work equally well from the point of view of secular humanism.  As Cox explains:

A faith-based reconciliation framework applied to an identity-based conflict . . . consists of six basic elements:  imparting moral vision, building bridges between estranged groups, a peace accord, advocacy for social justice, political forgiveness, and healing deep collective wounds.

More particularly, Cox recommends the following specific steps:

1.  Sharing life journeys and building common ground.

2.  Sharing perceptions of the conflict.

3.  Engaging in problem solving.

4.  Sharing how one has caused offense to the other.

5.  Exploring each community's narrative of history and perception of historical wounds.

If you read Bodine's spontaneous apology, you will see all of these elements contained in it.  This is not surprising because apology and attempts to re-build interpersonal bridges are hard-wired into us as toddlers.  As I wrote in "Shame by Any Other Name,"

Shame . . .  "acts as a powerful modulator of interpersonal relatedness and . . . ruptures the dynamic attachment bond between individuals." 30  When an individual has broken this bond, he wishes to recapture the relationship as it existed before it turned problematic. 31 Toddlers shamed by their mothers, for instance, naturally initiate appeals to repair the momentary break in the emotional bond resulting from the shame-inducing behavior. 32 This process is called self-righting. 33 It is natural and universal. 34 The shamed toddler reflexively looks up at and reaches toward his mother. 35 Even a preverbal child will spontaneously express this need to be held in an attempt to reaffirm both self and the ruptured relationship, to feel restored and secure. 36

A healthy and responsive mother accepts and assuages the child's painful feelings of shame, enabling the toddler to return to a normal emotional state, one in which love and trust are ascendant. 37 If the caregiver is "sensitive, responsive, and emotionally approachable," especially if she uses soothing sounds, gaze and touch, mother and child are "psychobiologically reattuned," the "interpersonal bridge" is rebuilt, the "attachment bond" is reconnected, and the experience of shame is regulated to a tolerable emotional state. 38

This may all seem excessively academic.  The point is that we all trespass on the feelings of others; those feelings are critical to our connection with one another; our connection with one another is fundamental to our individual well-being and our survival as a species; the urge toward reconciliation is therefore natural, as are our desire to be forgiven, our spontaneous expressions of remorse, our attempt to explain and normalize our bad behavior (we are all fallible and we have all suffered harm)  and our fellows' willingness to forgive, particularly when we bare ourselves and our histories to one another in the course of our effort to re-establish what joins us and to move beyond that which divides us. 

And for that lesson, we owe thanks to Larry Bodine this evening.

The problem, as eloquently described by a lengthy email posing the question, is one that all employers face, large and small.  For this GC to have thought that mediators might make a difference is particularly heartening on a day when mediator Justin Patten was reporting that mediators are the furthest thing in a UK company's mind when dealing with conflict.  

(above, the work of the brilliant Hugh McLeod)

To understand the depth of the problem posed, I'm providing you with the full email sent to me:   

Victoria:

I just read your blog post of September 15, 2008 regarding Peter Murray's article (which I have not read yet). I was having a discussion today with my Director of Human Resources, and raise a related issue.

Our company spends an inordinate amount of time explaining disability, workers comp and federal employment law to employees who misunderstand what their rights are, or do not give us the right information to help them get the help they need.

Of course, we are the big bad employer, so any information we give them is suspect. I have considered hiring a social worker as a case manager/advocate for these people, but that position would just be interpreted as another tool of the evil employer out to keep them out of work/make them go back to work in violation of their best interests, so it would be a waste.

We would LOVE if there was an independent agency that would assign a case worker, not to work as an attorney for the employees, but as an advocate to help them understand their rights and access the system correctly. I would gladly pay to fund this service.

Then I realized, if the employer, or a group of employers, funded this employee advocacy agency, employees would think the advocates were biased toward the employers and were just in a sham relationship to deprive them of their rights to serve the interest of the employer.

Now, I do not believe this would be the case. I trust in the professionalism and ethics of mediators, but I do believe that uneducated and single users would form that opinion. Professor Murray's opinion reinforces that conclusion, even though at first glance, he would seem to be "educated."

But, is bigger government the answer. My experience with the EEOC is that they want employers to do MORE than is required by law. We have had success with mediators after complaints are filed, but my goal is to get the employees what they need when they need it, not have a mediator help us fix it after time has run out.

What are your thoughts on this?

The Problem as Cognitive Bias

I've highlighted the sections of the GC's email that raise the problem of reactive devaluation -- our tendency to devalue and resist anything our "opponent" offers to us.  Most attorneys were taught reactive devaluation as first year associates -- "if opposing counsel wants it, you don't." 

As the linked article -- Reactive Devaluation in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution -- notes:

One can be led to conclude that any proposal offered by the “other side”—
especially if that other side has long been perceived as an enemy—must be
to our side’s disadvantage, or else it would not have been offered. Such an
inferential process, however, assumes a perfect opposition of interests, or in
other words, a true "zero-Sum" game, when such is rarely the case in real-
world negotiations between parties whose needs, goals, and opportunities
are inevitably complex and varied.

Combatting Reactive Devaluation in the Workforce

Cognitive biases such as reactive devaluation are not random artifacts of an irrelevant evolutionary past.  They are built-in protections against deception by our friends as well as by our adversaries.  There is only one lasting protection against this bias -- to engage in clear communication with your work force on a daily basis concerning the mutual and complementary interests of employer and employee; to express your belief in your interdependence in word and deed, i.e., by engaging in dialogue and activities demonstrating  benevolent intent; and to willingly listen to one another's complaints, understanding that one man's benevolence is another's bondage. 

As recent legal news touching too close to home (the Heller dissolution) bears out, the workplace will not work if the middle or the bottom collapse.  If human resources are your greatest capital asset, attend to the wisdom of Adam Smith Esq. on Heller's recent failure:

"Our assets go down in the elevator every night."

Take that bromide seriously.

You must give people a persuasive reason to come back "home" every Monday morning.they go down the elevator every night and must have a good reason to come "home" the next day. 

Asking Diagnostic Questions and Using Transformative Mediation Methods

I repeatedly tell my clients what I've learned from the academics who teach negotiation strategy and tactics at elite business schools throughout the country -- 93% of all negotiators fail to ask their bargaining partners diagnostic questions the answers to which would dramatically improve the benefits of the bargain to everyone. 

What's a diagnostic question?  One that would reveal our bargaining partners' needs, desires, priorities, preferences and motivations.  I'm no employment expert, but I have participated in the management of law firm personnel as a partner and have been managed by others throughout my professional life.  As a full-time mediator for more than four years, I have also asked hundreds if not thousands of diagnostic questions to help litigation adversaries understand one another's motivations, to reframe those motivations as non-threatening, or, at a minimum, the result of ordinary human fallibility, and to explore the parties' mutual and complementary interests. I also remind my parties and myself as often as possible that you cannot drill a hole in the other guy's side of the boat without making your own side sink to the bottom of the lake as well.

As the transformative mediators who have been most successful in workplace disputes tell us, our job is to assist the parties in moving from fear and powerlessness to accountability and mutual recognition of the interests of the other.

Empowerment, according to [the fathers of the transformative paradigm] Bush and Folger, means enabling the parties to define their own issues and to seek solutions on their own. Recognition means enabling the parties to see and understand the other person's point of view--to understand how they define the problem and why they seek the solution that they do.

(Seeing and understanding, it should be noted, do not constitute agreement with those views.)

Often, empowerment and recognition pave the way for a mutually agreeable settlement, but that is only a secondary effect. The primary goal of transformative medition is to foster the parties' empowerment and recognition, thereby enabling them to approach their current problem, as well as later problems, with a stronger, yet more open view. This approach, according to Bush and Folger, avoids the problem of mediator directiveness which so often occurs in problem-solving mediation, putting responsibility for all outcomes squarely on the disputants.

Rights and Remedies vs. Interests

It's not surprising that employees just don't seem to "get" the legal rights and remedies company HR departments keep trying to explain to them.  They don't make any sense absent legal training.  

People who are not lawyers simply don't understand why there is a legal remedy for one type of injustice but none for another that feels just as unfair.  Let's take our patchwork of Constitutional protections for employees.  As an life-long ACLU member, I'd be the last to denigrate them.  But we have to understand that we've created a "fair" workplace for only some of our citizens, not all of them. 

Women, people over 40, under-represented minorities and the like, can take the square peg of their unfair work treatment and cram it into the round hole of a viable cause of action.  If an employee does not want to cry "gender discrimination" even though she's being treated badly on the job, or if he has no bundle of legal rights to assert, there is no remedy for a termination that feels (yes, feels) wrongful.  Remember, it took us lawyers quite some time for the legal worldview to "click" and we were immersed in it, drilled in it and eager to learn it.  Employees just want someone to listen to their problem and to help them resolve it.  They don't want to know the wage-hour laws, the need to exhaust administrative remedies with the EEOC and the like.  

Employees and employers have people problems with justice issues, not legal problems with "irrelevant" emotional responses that get in the way of resolution. 

Expressed emotion is the key, not the lock. 

It is we -- the lawyers -- who legalize and monetize injustice, shutting our clients down when they try to explain what the problem really is because it's irrelevant to the legal solution.

If you're old enough to remember the lingering moment in United States history when our educational institutions went from white, on the one hand, to multi-hued, on the other, you'll know intimately how you deal with reactive devaluation.  You get to know one another.  Do this and Kaneesha is not "black" or "African American" but a well-known acquaintance or dear friend.  The same is true for employers and employees.  Create activities in which (alleged) oppressor and (purported) oppressed come together to engage in mutually productive (Habitat for Humanity springs to mind) and mutually enjoyable (basketball?  girls nights out?) activities.  At the holiday party, don't relegate the "underlings" to their own table.  Walk your talk.  Destroy the hierarchy everywhere except where it's actually necessary to get work done. 

I can't describe the benefits of interest-based resolutions over rights-based solutions any better than does my mentor and friend, Ken Cloke, in his brilliant new book -- Conflict Revolution.

[r]ights-based processes . . . generate winners and losers, undermine relationships, and result in collateral damage, . . . Since rights rely on rules, change is discouraged, though not prevented, and conflicts are settled rather than prevented or resolved.

This is not easy work. As a mediator, I know how elusive Cloke’s “outcomes” can be

--  outcomes [in which] both sides win and no one loses, when former adversaries en-
gage in meaningful dialogue and reach satisfying agreements, and when power is exercised with and for each other by jointly solving common problems.

I have, I am afraid, given my GC a problem rather than a solution.  More accurately, I've suggested an altered way of looking at the problem without a great deal of detail about crafting a solution.  Not only could people better versed in employee relations write books on this topic, they have.  Therefore, I'm asking my good ADR blogging buddies to please chime in here for you.

Diane Levin?  Geoff Sharp?  Blaine Donais?  Ombuds Blog? John DeGroote?  Nancy Hudgins?  Stephanie West Allen?  Gini Nelson?  Tammy Lenski?

Orange County Bar Association Alternative Dispute Resolution Section Meeting Reminder

Thursday, September 4, 2008
Noon to 1:30 p.m.
Wyndham Hotel
3350 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa

Speaker:

Victoria Pynchon
Attorney at Law, Mediator
Author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog
Judicate West
 

Using and Losing Cognitive Biases to Win Your Next Negotiation

• How common biases prevent us from influencing others, interfere with case analysis, and confound attempts to learn true needs of others
• Learn how to identify specific biases to negotiate better deals for clients

For more information or to register:  Call FastFax at (949) 440-6700, x4 and request document 2279.   Register ONLINE using the OCBA’s online calendar at OCBar.org
 

Max Kennerly

Because Max and I are straining toward the same goal every litigant does when the burdens of a lawsuit begin to outweigh its anticipated benefits, I'm going to include my readers in the conversation.

Our Interests are Adverse, Not Mutual or Intertwined

Max suggests that the hypothetical "business school" negotiated resolution doesn't provide litigators with much guidance in resolving litigated disputes because the buyer-seller-mutual-or-intertwined-interest template cannot be comfortably laid over a conflict between parties whose interests are entirely adverse.  As Max explains:  

The parties to a lawsuit do not have intertwined interests: they have directly adverse interests. Unless there's some possibility of a future relationship, the defendant doesn't want to resolve the conflict: they want the plaintiff to drop their frivolous claim. In their mind, their best alternative to a negotiated agreement ("BATNA") is for the plaintiff to crawl in a hole and die.

Same with the plaintiff. Unlike buyers and sellers, who usually don't get much joy out of their 'conflict' as a conflict, the plaintiff usually prefers imposing a conflict on the defendant (who the plaintiff believes cast the first stone) in pursuit of justice, an imposition they will only relieve for at least "full"  compensation. 

The problem is that most parties don't consider their claims to be assets; the problem isn't that there's emotional baggage around the economic understanding, it's that the parties interpret their dispute as fundamentally non-economic. 

Before moving on to adverse/intertwined/mutual interests, I want to emphasize that what the parties "interpret . . . as fundamentally non-economic" is the key to the settlement of litigated disputes -- not a roadblock. 

Nor can the feelings that accompany litigation be called  "emotional baggage" unless we interpret the desire for justice as pathology. 

This hunger for justice is so fundamental to our social relationships that even  primate relatives like  capuchin monkeys will deprive themselves of food if they sense it is being distributed unfairly.  In capuchin monkey land, injustice appears to consist of being required to do five times more work to "earn" the same benefits as another.  

People seek out lawyers rather than therapists to resolve the emotional issues that accompany conflict -- because they believe themselves to be victims of  injustice and lawyers are in the justice business.  Our clients have not simply suffered an injury (tripped over their own feet) but have a wrong (stumbled over a trip wire placed in their path by a malicious or careless actor).  We can explain until we're blue in the face that money is the only remedy the law can provide.  Our clients will continue to seek justice and will not easily settle for money alone.  

"The Unicorn Settlement"

Max asks that I acquaint him with the Unicorn -- the state "where two hostile parties on the verge of a lawsuit get lawyers, almost file suit, and then, through deft representation, settle their differences peacefully and move on" Unicorns. Excluding business disputes where the parties have an existing and potentially mutually beneficial on-going relationship, this type of settlement, says Max, is a myth.  He explains:

I entered the law expecting The Unicorn to be rare but real; by this point, I have been trained by defense lawyers not to bother to check for it. I still usually do, throwing out what I think is a perfectly reasonable offer early on, which is routinely ignored or dismissed by a letter that gratuitously refers to my claims as baseless, frivolous, or made in bad faith.

So that's my biggest question to you: how do you suggest I get defendants, prior to the courthouse steps, to even enter the mindset that there's a valid claim and mediation / settlement should be considered? Reframed in words closer to your post: what can I do to (a) get the joint session to happen and (b) ensure everyone's in the right mindset?

The Conditions in Which Unicorns Flourish

When I started practice -- in 1980 -- I did so in a small community -- Sacramento -- where everyone was a "repeat player" with everyone else.  Perhaps more importantly, you could file a suit in year one and try it to a jury in year two.  Not only defense counsel, but insurance adjusters, knew which plaintiffs' attorneys would try cases and which would not.  They also knew which ones could persuade a jury to bring back a hefty award.    

Though I only handled personal injury litigation for my first two years of practice (after which I changed firms and moved on to commercial litigation) I saw dozens of "unicorns" in my first few months of practice.  As the junior-most attorney in a small P.I. practice, I settled hundreds of cases without ever filing a lawsuit -- on the telephone with insurance adjusters.  (A really, really good reason to leave PI practice, but that's another story). 

I settled these cases in the world of "three times specials" at a time when and in a place where everyone knew one another and used a common metric to evaluate potential liability and damages.  In that environment, Unicorns flourished.

Unicorn Hunting in the 21st Century

Max isn't asking me to shoot ducks in a barrell here.  He's asking me to deliver the holy grail of mediation -- how to convene an early settlement conference in which the parties (and their attorneys) are united in a desire to settle litigation without protracted discovery or pre-trial procedural wrangling.  

I hate to keep leaving my readers on the edge of a satisfactory resolution, but I DO have work to do and will return to this -- and Max's further observations -- soon, really soon.  Stay tuned.  And join the conversation by leaving your own comments here.