I am told I can negotiate to lose or negotiate with, by or for women, but I cannot "negotiate to win," even if I add the word She in front of the transitive verb Negotiates before going on to suggest that by negotiating, "she" can win.  

And let the world be on notice, She is a word I'm gonna own, baby.

Only Mr. Thompson, I was told, has the right to annoint himself as the negotiator who wins, despite the plethora of winning negotiation books -- such as Negotiate to Win by Patrick Collin and Negotiate and Win by Dominick Misino -- and winning negotiation seminars, like the AMA's Negotiating to Win and another company's Negotiate to Win-Win (the key, apparently, in the redundancy)

I am also advised that I must eliminate posts from my blog concerning Mediators Without Borders which used to be the name of an organization of which I was a charter member (now Mediators Beyond Borders). My blog posts concerned Mediators Without Borders before another MWB told the new MWB's Board that "without" had been taken, thank you very much.

One assumes the French don't care what one says in the English language because they own French and are only interested in keeping words like "hot dog" out of it (see L'Académie française). It's Medecins sans Frontieries, not Doctors without Borders, merci.

If I'd used the words "Face" and "Book" in the same sentence before Mark Zuckerberg cornered the market on the words "face" and "book," would I be required to rewrite history, changing yesterday's news to recognize the subsequent rights of language captors intent on propertizing the entire English tongue (FaceTongue?)

Yes, the Color Yellow is Trademarked 

I went to a New Year's party and asked a friend who is a rockin' IP lawyer, about trademarking the word "win." In response, he regaled me with the story of his victory on Wham-O's right to corner the market on the color yellow in all of its shades, which came with an eight-figure verdict against folks who felt free to dye their slip n' slide golden rod or even khaki  (SLB Toys USA, Inc. v. Wham-O, Inc.;Wham-O, Inc. v. Manley Toys, Ltd). So I eliminated the word "win" from a seminar in Boston that was cancelled on account of snow (bad karma?)

I'm happy to find another way to say just about anything. I think I have more words at my disposal than most people, being a writer and all. But, listen up! Beginning even a potentially contentious relationship by making demands or asserting rights or dropping the name of your prestigious AmLaw100 trademark law firm in my voice mail does not incline me to cooperate.

No one wants to do anything at the point of a gun.

Someday, when "She Negotiates" is on the map, Mr. Thompson will wish that I would provide his seminar and book a little of my network's juice. And Mediators Without Borders will ask itself why I'm not increasing its traffic by using my several publishing platforms to its benefit.

Because these people are not practicing what they're preaching. They know, but momentarily forget in their zeal to protect what is theirs, that it is far easier to get me to do something I want to do than it is to force me to do something I do not.

As in "win win."

Still, I am practicing restraint in 2011, which is why I eliminated the Mediators without Borders posts from this blog without a fight.

If I hadn't made this one of several new year's resolutions, I would be far more inclined to dig in my heels and say go ahead, make my day. 

The Davos World Economic Forum

The paucity of women at the Davos Economic Forum despite how rich the ones who attended are as described in this post by Forbes staff writer Louisa Kroll, The Richest Women at Davos.

Women's Davos Wardrobe Dilemmas covered by Moira Forbes as an unfortunate but still critical factor for the display of power necessary to be a player at the World Economic Forum.

A photo gallery of the executive conferences women CEOs love best.

The Continued Assault on the Glass Ceiling

Aman Singh's post on Why So Many Top Women Don't Make it to Executive Leadership.

Jenna Goudreau's Jobs Outlook:Careers Headed for the Trash Pile

Five Reasons Your Boss Wants to Give You a Raise This Year (Gender Neutral)

Negotiating with Mattie Ross of True Grit (Gender Neutral)

Sponsorship, Not Mentorship, Can Greatly Narrow the Wage Gap

Kucinich and the Olive Pit in a World of Injustice (gender neutral)

First You Wake Up, Then You Negotiate (gender neutral)

Jealousy's Underhanded Contribution to the Wage Gap by our Gen-Y blogger Katie Phillips.

Provocative Posts and Articles

Bad Career Advice:Nice Guys (and Girls) Finish Last by Christine Scivicque

Study says Dads Should be Less Involved in Parenting by Forbes Staff Writer Meghan Casserly as well as her terrific article on Sexy News Anchors' Distracting Effect on Viewers who can't seem to recall the news disseminated by these attractive women!

There's lots more over at ForbesWoman but those are the articles and blog posts that caught my own attention this week. Put ForbesWoman on your newsreader whether you're male or female, because it's pretty clear that women's economic power is growing and attention must be paid. 

Thanks to @NeilDenny of Lawyer 1point9  for the head's up.

Dr. Kenneth Cloke tells us that every conflict “occurs at the intersection, or crossroads, between problems we need to solve in order to grow and skills we do not yet possess. With each level of growth and development, we experience fresh conflicts and transcend old ones that we not only successfully resolve, but develop the skills to move beyond.”

Let’s take marriage, or long-term relationships of any kind. Whenever I complain about a conflict with my husband, my friend the Buddhist reminds me that my husband is my Zen master. Her reminder focuses my attention back on myself and what I have to learn from the dispute I’m having with my husband. The two of us are like the couple in Anne Tyler’s novel, The Accidental Tourist. We sometimes feel like rivals competing for the “better housekeeper” award. Should I win the prize for insight and understanding even though I am haphazard and mercurial in my habits? Or should the blue ribbon be awarded to my husband who is methodical and steady? When we first met, he loved my spontaneity and I his dependable nature. Now his steadiness irritates me and my disorganization angers him.

This intractable meta dispute – the dispute on which all others are based – evaporates when I realize it has something to teach me about my own character and presents a challenge against which that character could possibly develop. What if we solved the immediate problem? “If only you’d put your car keys in the same place every time,” my husband says for the umpteenth time, “you wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes searching for them.” I could choose to shift the argument to my home court (“you are too controlling”) or take the lesson that a little advance planning might ease rather than burden my busy day.

Here’s the transformative part. When I change in a fundamental way, the people in my life inevitably change in relation to my change. Once my husband and I resolve the order-versus-chaos problem, he will have to find someone else to play the "I'm more orderly than you" game or give it up altogether. If his desire is truly to help me lead a more efficient and productive life rather than “trying to control me,” the two of us can move on to greater, more interesting challenges than this one on which we have been stuck for years. The same is true for relations between workers, members of extended families, red states and blue, and America against the rest of the world.

If we were finally able to resolve our differences over, say, the separation of church and state, we could free up our energy to address other pressing problems, like poverty and intolerance, the environment and health care, and full employment for anyone with the desire to work as a contributing member of the society. Conflict among human societies has caused incalculable loss and suffering. It is also the way in which people have finally stood up for human rights, self-governance, peaceful dispute resolution, independence, and tolerance of differences.   If we encounter conflict with courage and self-reflection, it can and will lead us, and those who surround us, to greater freedom and authenticity, to greater self-reliance, acceptance, accountability, forgiveness and, at long last, a far more peaceful world.

I was cruising a conservative political blog this morning and noticed how much darker the photographs of Barack Obama appeared to be there than I am used to seeing in the mainstream press.

Odd, I thought, and tweeted this: have you ever noticed that Obama is BLACKER on conservative political sites? think it’s intentional?

 Not long after, a member of my Twitter Brain Trust, attorney, mediator and consultant Iván Ríos-Mena ~ @IvanRiosMena ~ tweeted back Maybe this explains it… http://j.mp/cHiTgH ~ a link to an article entitled How Light or Dark is Barack Obama’s Skin? Depends on Your Political Stance . . .

Turns out, how light or dark you believe Obama to really be has more to do 

with whether you agree or disagree with him that it has to do with the actual color of his skin (of which I have a pretty good idea, having met the man face to face).

As the article cited by Rios-Mena explains, students who felt aligned with Obama “tended to mentally lighten his skin” in experiments conducted by University of Chicago researcher Eugene Caruso.

Anyone in a mood to attribute this tendency to explicit or implicit bias will be disappointed with Caruso’s results. The student volunteers’ image of Obama as lighter if they agreed with (or voted for) him and darker if they disagreed with (or voted against) him, “remained even after adjusting for racial attitudes, both hidden and explicit.” The choice of lighter or darker photos by the students was so strongly correlated with their approval of Obama that it turned out to be a better indicator of voting choice than were the scores on either of the explicit or implicit bias tests given to them.

Assuming the vast majority of the student volunteers were “white” (European) the ABC’s of Conflict would attribute the lightening and darkening effects revealed by Professor Caruso’s studies to in- and out-group bias. If we agree with people, we tend to think of them as being more “like us” and when we disagree with them, we like to think of them as different from us ~ the Others.

 No one is color-blind.

So what do we do? We must be mindful of our implicit biases, ask ourselves whether we’re making assumptions about people based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, disability, regional accent, age and the like and then think again. As you’ll see if you take the implicit bias tests yourself, they do not let you think long enough to work against your prejudices. This is why the tests are able to reveal our implicit, or unconscious, biases.

 We do not, however, have to act upon these knee-jerk assumptions because in real life outside of the social science lab, we do have the time to fire up our thinking minds before we judge another human being based upon superficial characteristics.

Ask yourself if your prejudices are likely getting in the way of your better judgment. Don’t let yourself off the hook too quickly but also don’t judge yourself too harshly. Prejudices are a short-cut to establish trust when we do not have the time to investigate. The culture is soaked in negative images of African Americans, Muslims and any other group who happens to be “out.” Stay alert and mind the gap.

What does this man have that you don't?

A year-end 2009 salary of $21,340,547 during one of the worst year's in the history of his industry ~ banking.

Listen!  The recession is just another excuse for not paying you what you're worth.

How do we know?

Because the most effective negotiators on the planet ~ corporate CEO's ~ are finding the downturn to be the best time to squeeze every last living dollar out of their employers.

If they can do it, so can you!

 Here's the evidence:

	Bank of America Corp. Thomas Montag 2009 Total Compensation: $29,930,431		JPMorgan Chase & Co. James Dimon 2009 Total Compensation: $9,274,494
	Citigroup Inc. John Havens 2009 Total Compensation: $11,276,454		Morgan Stanley Walid Chammah 2009 Total Compensation: $10,021,969
	The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Lloyd Blankfein 2009 Total Compensation: $9,862,657		Wells Fargo John Stumpf 2009 Total Compensation: $21,340,547

 Whhaaaaaatttttt? do these men have that you don't have?

• Social networks with rich and powerful people who sit on their Boards of Directors and influence policy makers and Wall Street power brokers
• The self-created illusion that they are "too big to fail" /1
• The persuasive argument that only they, with their unique combination of experience, education, knowledge, savvy, can-do-spirit, and leadership qualities can pull these banks out of the sinkhole of the recession.
• Friends in very high places.
• Chutzpah and shamelessness (not that we'd want to encourage this second character flaw in our readers).
• Self-satisfaction.
• Entitlement.
• An employment history of asking for and receiving increasing levels of compensation based upon their salary negotiations at every career point possible (and every career point impossible)
• the demonstrated ability to produce results (our readers do possess this strength but haven't used it to their greatest advantage yet)
• the tendency to measure their market value by their value in the hands of their employer, not by what they "need" or what they are "worth" according to some internal metric that depends upon how they feel about thier accomplishments.

__________________

1/  This is where collective action comes in.  When we aggregate together America's employees, small business owners and homeowners, we get a non-corporate "entity" that is waaaayyyyyy bigger than some little piss-ant bank and it is we who are too big to fail.

O'Melveny & Myers ~ We attract, retain, and promote people of all backgrounds, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, or any other group characteristics.

201 male partners and 21 women ~ 10%.  In the legal realm, you win awards for this.

O’Melveny & Myers LLP has been named to The American Lawyer’s 2010 A-List, which recognizes the nation’s most elite law firms for stellar performance in the areas of revenue generation, pro bono commitment, associate satisfaction, and diversity representation.  This is the Firm’s third consecutive year on the list of 20 firms judged best at balancing the practice of law with their obligations to the profession.

I don't mean to pick on O'Melveny.  It's representative of the whole.  Any AmLaw100 law firm that would like to crow about its great track record in retaining and promoting women and minorities, please do drop by with your results and suggestions to your peers for improvements in these figures that the smartest guys in the room just can't seem to be capable of figuring out.  

Today, Forbes Corporate Social Responsibility Blog is commencing a series on how a serious commitment to diversity results in improved bottom line performance.  I commend that series to the attention of the real powers that be inside AmLaw 100 law firms and they cannot be found in the Diversity Programs, of that I can assure you.  Here's the intro to the McDonald's diversity program series:

How does a company that serves 56 million customers a day across 118 countries become a leader in diversity hiring and retention? According to the inclusion and diversity team at McDonald’s, it takes a combination of knowing how to leverage a multicultural customer base, a C-suite-led commitment to talent management, and academic-style learning labs.

If you're a woman, like me, we have our own garden to tend.  We leave the Fortune 50 and the AmLaw100 out of discouragement.  But part of that discouragement is born of our own diminished expectations and failures to build serious rain-making activities into our daily practices along with our failures to demand assignments to the types of cases where partners are made.

If your law firm or corporation does not have a serious diversity program, click your ruby slippers three times, say "there's no place like the board room," take the She Negotiates signature course, and kick a little butt. 

Remember, as Gloria Steinem said, "the truth shall set you free, but first, it will piss you off."

Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

Can we afford not to learn and teach these skills?  Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

Motion here

Story (misprision of earwhigging meets "honest services fraud") over at Forbes On the Docket.

My Forbes Bernard Pivot questionnaire here.

Here's a piece I missed in April on real litigation filed over virtual property in Second Life.

Architect David Denton spends much of his time on a lush tropical island, where he experiments with cutting-edge building designs and creates spaces for artists to showcase their work.

Never mind that the island only exists in the virtual-reality world of Second Life, a popular online venue where people interact via digital avatars. Denton, 62, said he purchased the island for about $700 — real money, not virtual cash — from its former owner, and considers it his property.

Here's the thought this article triggers.  If 90% of all litigation involving people (I'll skip corporate litigation and litigation brought to vindicate rights such as that declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional) will end with a retired Judge telling the people that litigation is too expensive and a jury trial too uncertain for them to bear, why don't we just litigate virtually (with Linden dollars!) giving the parties the experience of litigation that will eventually drive them to settlement?

I'm sure some smart programmer can come up with an algorithm for most personal disputes, including both factual templates and the application of simple legal principles.  A "ticker" could keep track of the dollars your virtual attorney is billing on your law suit's screen everyday.  Continuances, discovery motions, pre-trial proceedings and depositions could all be simulated.

Then the parties return from the virtual life of Second Life Litigation and sit down in the old fashioned way to negotiate a resolution to their dispute or, if necessary, hire a village elder trained in conflict resolution, sometimes called a mediator, to help them do so.

I'd dodged Luis' phone calls for at least two months and this was our first date.  We'd met at the downtown Los Angeles Biltmore where party faithfuls were celebrating Bill Clinton's first Presidential victory.  An hour earlier, I'd been standing on a balcony at the Century Plaza hotel listening to the dim depressed and increasingly drunken hum of conversation in the room behind me.  My friend and former associate had just sustained a predictably certain loss to the durable Rep. Henry Waxman.  Mark was a Republican sacrifice.  But still.  It's hard to lose.

The somber tone at the Century Plaza was not limited to the room in which Mark's supporters had so glumly gathered.  It inhabited the entire hotel as George H.W. Bush's first term failed to morph into his second.  In retrospect, only a Harry Potter reference could have done justice to that election night mood.  It felt as if a coven of dementors was circling overhead, glorying in the Grand Old Party's despair and draining peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them.

"Let's get the hell out of here," I said to one friend or another. 

"We're drunk."

"We can take a cab."

This was more like it.  Balloons.  A band.  Dancing.  It was late - after midnight but not yet 3 a.m.  Only the die-hard Democratic partiers were still on the floor, gyrating to whatever tune was popular in 1992.  This is L.A., not New York City.  Nothing really happens after 2 a.m. when the bars close.

Still, a young Latino man was circling me.  I smiled.  He asked.  We danced.  I gave him my phone number.

"Why were you at the Biltmore that night?" I was asking Luis over drinks.  "And why are you so deeply involved in Democratic Party politics?"

"Jimmy Carter saved my life," he replied.

Why had I avoided this man's phone calls for so long?  I knew the answer but I didn't like it. It made me feel unworthy. Petty. Small.  I didn't return his telephone calls because he had such a heavy Latin accent.  I was still, to my own shame, carrying prejudices about Mexicans from my border-town youth. Later, much later, we'd joke about this and about his decision to join a French conversation class rather than an American accent reduction clinic.  He was Argentine and he was proud.

"Jimmy.  Carter." I said, blinking.

Luis was not smiling.

"Jimmy. Carter.  Saved. Your Life."

"I was an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience," Luis said, dealing the trump card to what would prove to be a tumultuous year-long romance. 

The story of Luis' careless early adulthood, his imprisonment and his immigration to the United States rolled out from there - starting with our first drink and coming to an end now as the waiter served us coffee and dessert.  I was transfixed.  As personal stories go - when told honestly in all their fallibly human dimensionality - it was messy.  Luis himself had not been particularly political during the Argentine "Dirty War."  (wikipedia entry here)  He and his girlfriend were medical students at the time with the determined, hard working qualities a commitment to medicine implies.  But his . . . lover . . . she was politically active.  Inevitably, both Luis and his girlfriend were arrested and imprisoned.  As, of course, was Luis' other girlfriend.

"Carter sent in the Red Cross," Luis said, toward the end of his harrowing prison story as the chill of a late February evening began to grip the outdoor patio on which we'd been sitting and talking and eating for hours.  "Conditions in the prison improved.  We were released but restricted to the towns in which we lived.  My girlfriend finished medical school.   I couldn't.  The University was outside my area of detention."

I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders and shivered, only partly because of the cold.

"I'm more American than you are."  

"The Argentine government gave my girlfriend and me the option of immigrating to the United States or remaining in town detention.  We chose the United States.  A kind family in Texas agreed to be our sponsors.  I spoke Spanish and Portuguese and French and Italian.  But I didn't speak a word of English.  I learned English by ordering hamburgers at McDonalds; listening to the news on the radio and reading the New York Times. 

That's what makes me more American than you are.  America is the land of immigrants.  Not the land of natives.  America is freedom.  Choice,  Opportunity.  America is the escape from tyranny; a haven from grinding poverty; deliverance from gulags and other political prisons.  We, the dispossessed, we are the true Americans."

Despite his talk about freedom and choice, Luis never was able to choose America as his new country.  The "accent reduction" story - a joke between us - ran deep.  He could not return to Argentina despite its proffer of repatriation to a generation of young people whose friends' lives were taken and whose own spirits were crushed.  Luis - man without a country - simply couldn't settle down.  He had a small house in Echo Park and intermittent work as a software programmer.  But he would always be unmoored, adrift and too profoundly sad to join in festive American celebrations like the Fourth of July.

My America - land of my birthright - is a place I take for granted.  Public education, free libraries, timely mail service, and good roads, not to mention clean drinking water and a standard of living that used to be unmatched in the world.  The right to be left alone and the opportunity to invent and reinvent one's self.  The freedom to speak one's mind. The security that tomorrow will - whatever our current economic and political challenges - look pretty much the same as the day before.

"You Americans," Luis used to say to me.  "You believe the world is secure," shaking his head with world-weariness and bearing, with dignity, the emotional scars of the stories he couldn't tell me.  The stories that ran even deeper than the one about a country willing to imprison a young man because he made love to a woman whose political views differed from those of the men in power.

Wherever Luis is today, I want to wish him a Happy Independence Day, a day on which I'm hoping he's finally settled into his adopted country with a spirit nearly healed and an Argentine accent still firmly in place in honor of the country he loves but to which he can never return. 

Immigration Dialogue 2010

July 23, 2010  (3:30-5:30 pm PT)

at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles

Featuring:

Arizona State Rep.

John Kavanagh (Rep.)  and

Arizona State Rep.

Kyrsten Sinema (Dem.)  

 Moderated by:

Lee Jay Berman
President, American Institute of Mediation

 
Please join us for a very unique and special event where we will discuss the Immigration Issues facing us in 2010, and Arizona State Law SB 1070, which is scheduled to take effect on July 28, 2010.  Rather than an interview or debate, the American Institute of Mediation (AIM) is hosting a public mediated discussion on the topic featuring two Arizona State legislators: John Kavanagh (R) and Kyrsten Sinema (D) and facilitated by AIM founder and President Lee Jay Berman.

There will be only 200 tickets released to the public.  Once they are sold out, the event will be closed.  Video highlights will be available online on the AIM Institute site following the event.

Media Contact:  Brenda McGann Public Relations

View Full Press Release

View/Print Flyer in PDF

Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070

Link to Arizona Senate Fact Sheet for Immigration Law SB 1070

Media Sponsorship Provided By:

Supporting Organizations:

Southern California Mediation Association

Los Angeles County Bar Immigration Section

Thanks to the SCOTUS Blog for the following resources on the upcoming Kagan hearings.  Follow SCOTUS Blog all week for commentary. 

Why should negotiators be interested in the composition of the Supreme Court?  Because the freedom to negotiate requires a strong rule of law culture.  And because everything we negotiate assumes the enforcement of certain agreements and non-enforcement of others, of particular interest to negotiators and ADR practitioners - arbitration agreements. 

SCOTUS whitepapers below:

Diversity Hiring

Abortion

Diversity on the Court

Gays in the Military

Corporate Rights (Citizen's United)

Conservatives

Executive Power

Kagan's Qualifications to Serve

I know, opposing a law that seeks to prevent workplace bullying is like criticizing mom and apple pie.  Still.  More workplace litigation???  And why isn't the existing cause of action for the intentional infliction of emotional distress a perfectly good alternative for anyone who's truly "severely" damaged by "outrageous" conduct that goes beyond the bounds of human civility?

One of the great benefits of posting on this topic over at Forbes.com is the number of comments it generates.  Not because it insures "hits" but because it engages a far larger community in a constructive multilogue on an issue of genuine and important public interest.  Here's an excerpt:

According to a post in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog yesterday --  For Businesses, Bully Lawsuits May Pose New Threat -- New York's state Senate has passed a surprisingly bipartisan workplace anti-bullying law.

According to the Journal, the law would "allow workers who've been physically, psychologically or economically abused while on the job to file charges against their employers in civil court."

Economically abused????? The mind boggles.

The bill defines "bullying" broadly as  the "repeated use of derogatory remarks, insults and epithets" that the (mythical and chronically overly sensitive) "reasonable person" would "find threatening, intimidating or humiliating."

Let's give this proposal a second thought, particularly in the context of legal practice.  We lawyers do endeavor to "keep calm and carry on."  We have been known, however, to push ourselves and to be pushed past our tempers' limits.  We're human.  We're under a lot of pressure.  And we're fallible.

Read more here.

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.

Why is three the magic number?

Recent studies have shown that it takes three women corporate board members to avoid the deliterious effects of group think on corporate decision making - my own supposition on the question "why three" being that one or two women easily risk falling into male group-think.  This isn't male bashing, by the way. I assume three men on an otherwise all woman's board would have a similar performance enhancing effect.  

1. Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
3. Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.
   

When the above symptoms exist in a group that is trying to make a decision, there is a reasonable chance that groupthink will happen, although it is not necessarily so.  Groupthink occurs when groups are highly cohesive and when they are under considerable pressure to make a quality decision.  When pressures for unanimity seem overwhelming, members are less motivated to realistically appraise the alternative courses of action available to them.  These group pressures lead to carelessness and irrational thinking since groups experiencing groupthink fail to consider all alternatives and seek to maintain unanimity.  Decisions shaped by groupthink have low probability of achieving successful outcomes.

From What is Groupthink  at the Psychologists for Social Responsibility site.

We’re celebrating Mothers Day by posting Blawg Review #263 at the She Negotiates Blog for one obvious and some not so obvious reasons.  The obvious reason is the word “She.”  The not-so-obvious reasons are:  (1) Mother’s Day was a peace and reconciliation movement before it was a holiday; and, (2) peace exists only when we have the political will to seek and the negotiation tools achieve the resolution of conflict.

In addition to the main post, we've also posted Blawg Review #263 on our She Networks, She Succeeds, She Transforms and She Resolves pages (up at the top of the blog).

Whereas American women of every race, class, and ethnic background

Whereas American women have played and continue to play a critical economic, cultural, and social role in every sphere of the life of the Nation by constituting a significant portion of the labor force working inside and outside of the home;

Whereas American women have played a unique role throughout the history of the Nation by providing the majority of the volunteer labor force of the Nation;

Whereas American women were particularly important in the establishment of early charitable, philanthropic, and cultural institutions in our Nation;

Whereas American women of every race, class, and ethnic background served as early leaders in the forefront of every major progressive social change movement;

Whereas American women have been leaders, not only in securing their own rights of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, the industrial labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other movements, especially the peace movement, which create a more fair and just society for all; and

Whereas despite these contributions, the role of American women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued, in the literature, teaching and study of American history:

Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog and the Blogs of all other women who are making and recording the history of the United States of America every working day, that March is designated as "Women's History Month. Every woman blogger and every male blogger whose life has been enriched by the presence of women in it is requested to issue a proclamation each March, calling upon their fellow bloggers to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

This resolution, calling upon "the people of the United States to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities" was passed by Congress in 1987 and successive years since then.  For more information about the origin of National Women's History Month, or the activities of the National Women's History Project, contact:  National Women's History Project.

This blog is celebrating National Women's History Month by running a series of posts on implicit gender bias in ADR.  Those posts, in order of their appearance (including Diane Levin's post on the same topic during the same time period) are here: 

Negotiating Gender:  Why So Few Women Neutrals?  http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2010/02/articles/conflict-resolution/negotiating-gender-why-so-few-women-neutrals/

Update on Gender Diversity in the Judiciary and ADR http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2010/03/articles/conflict-resolution/update-on-gender-diversity-in-the-judiciary-and-in-adr/

Combating Implicit Gender Bias in ADR http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2010/03/articles/conflict-resolution/combatting-implicit-gender-bias-in-adr/

Doing it backwards and in heels:  a prescription for remedying gender bias in ADR (Diane's post) http://mediationchannel.com/2010/03/05/doing-it-backwards-and-in-heels-a-prescription-for-remedying-implicit-bias-in-adr/

Negotiating Gender:  the Old White Men Speak http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2010/03/articles/conflict-resolution/negotiating-gender-the-old-white-men-speak/

Negotiating Gender Bias in ADR:  the Commercial Client Speaks http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2010/03/articles/conflict-resolution/negotiating-gender-bias-in-adr-the-commercial-client-speaks/