28/7/2022 Communicate you IntentFailing to Communicate your Intent within a negotiation might mean a really bad outcome - it could mean the End of the World.
I’ve been really enjoying the latest series of Sideways on Radio 4 - Matthew Side’s examination of seeing the world differently. The current season examines the threat of nuclear war, and one episode mentioned how bad parties within a negotiation can be at signalling their intentions. In the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it nearly led to a nuclear war. 27/7/2022 Climbing Stairs in MediationIf life is like a box of chocolates, then ‘challenge’ can be like climbing huge, giant stairs, where the vertical part, the riser, reaches up above you. Like the Borrowers in a normal size house.
I’ve used the ‘stairs’ analogy with newer members of the team, those who are on a steep learning curve, for whom each new project delivers the same high level of challenge as the last one. The next stair is always the exact same level of challenge as the last one, and just as daunting as every other one. That can be so disheartening. 25/7/2022 “Res Ipsa Retainer”Back in the day when lawyers regularly used Latin, “Res ipsa Loquitur” covered the notion that a Court could infer negligence from the very nature of an accident or injury. Literally translated, the facts speak for themselves.
In the 1990’s Lawyer comedy Ally McBeal, one of the characters is asked if his client has a case. He replies “Res Ipsa Retainer” - effectively the fact that his client had hired a lawyer spoke for itself - they have a case because they hired a lawyer. I always loved the idea of that because, whilst in a true legal sense it’s total nonsense, in a practical day-to-day sense it’s totally true. My Naïve Realism means I know I’m right and you’re just plain wrong.
Yep, it’s as Black and White as that. In my own mind, at least. And yours too. What happens is that we all see the world through a lens but our brains tell us that we’re seeing reality. And the lens has a series of filters, biases, pre-existing assumptions, that means what we think we see might not actually be what we really see. WOW!!! That’s an amazingly descriptive way of describing the sting of a bullet ant.
And there’s more: “Once bitten, the pain lasts anywhere between five and 24 hours with symptoms described as waves of excruciating pain, temporary paralysis and shaking in the poisoned area.” So says Dr Justin Schmidt, the inventor of his own eponymously named four point sting pain index, whose own scale was insufficient to measure the bullet ant’s sting, so it got a 4+. And why on earth does he let them sting him? After over 40 resignations from his Government, and still hanging in there, I saw Boris Johnson was described by one Tory MP as being like a cockroach in a nuclear apocalypse.
I immediately thought of people I've dealt with in mediations; those who refuse to see the writing on the wall, those who believe if they keep saying no then they will, against all the odds, buy themselves some sort of leverage, or time for a miracle to happen. |
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AuthorRichard Marshall is an Accredited Civil and Commercial Mediator with over 25 years experience as a Litigation Solicitor, as well as being a qualified Solicitor-Advocate. He is the founder of Striving to Settle, through which he works as a mediator and provides negotiation training. www.strivingtosettle.co.uk Archives
August 2022
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