Cross Collaborate

You are browsing the archives of2009 April.

Peter Adler has written an article of compelling interest on the core values and direction of mediation. Provocatively entitled, The End of Mediation, this ambitious essay sets out a powerful vision for the future of the process and its practitioners. His basic point is that mediation is not a “field” or “profession” but a set [...]

Once a good friend and colleague was exchanging “war” stories with me about confrontation during the peaceful business of collaborative meetings. He assured me that he had a story that would top anything I could offer, and he was right. Here’s the brief version. I was facilitating a group that was supposed to reach agreement [...]

Who controls collaboration? That might seem a contradiction in terms since the process itself requires joint decisions by the participants. But the issue of control doesn’t go away so easily. Several months into policy negotiations with a large collaborative group, I arrived at the last planning session for a critical meeting that was to take [...]

Rich Harwood is one of the major voices arguing for basic changes in the methods of engaging the public in policy questions. Through the Harwood Institute, which he established in the 1980s, he has published numerous studies and guides on how people relate to public issues, where they seek out trustworthy information and how they [...]