Recent Posts
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Thursday, December 17, 2020
Remote but Robust: having difficult conversations virtually using best practices from crisis counseling
“That is a conversation that probably needs to happen in person.” We can all think of myriad personal and professional conversations that fall into this category: Giving critical feedback to someone you manage; having a conversation with a family member about political views; talking a friend through the loss of a job; announcing big changes in company policy; onboarding a new employee and introducing them to their team; providing support for someone who has an ill loved one; introducing your parents to a new significant other. The list could go on and on. There are many moments in work and in life that prior to early 2020, you would have turned away from text, email, phone calls, or even video chats in favor of in-person communication. But over the last nine months, our ability to build, maintain, and provide support in relationships has been largely – and suddenly – restricted to doing so through technology. … More
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
What we’ve learned from the election – no matter who wins
Election Day has come and gone. At this moment, we sit with anxious uncertainty about the outcome in the Presidential race, as key states continue to count the millions of legitimately cast votes that remain. The color-coded maps are ubiquitous but incomplete, the pundits spin out endless speculative scenarios. And we wait. … More
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Reflecting on the Journey of “Thanks for Listening”
When we launched the “Thanks for Listening” podcast in the fall of 2018, our goal was to explore what seemed like deep and growing political polarization in the U.S., and to find out what was being done about it. We wanted to be able to tell a hopeful story about people and organizations who are working to “bridge the partisan divide in America,” as we said in the opening of each episode. And for both of the authors, hope was something we needed; the political and social dynamics at play at the time seemed to be posing dire stress tests to some of the basic premises of our work. … More
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
On Dispute Systems Design and Democratic Participation: Reimagining Voting
By Deanna Pantin Parrish American democracy is an almost 250-year-old dispute between “We, The People” and those elected to represent us. Since America was an idea, voting has been a central mechanism for defining our collective identity and determining its representation. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton penned that it was for Americans “to decide …… More
Monday, September 14, 2020
Strategies in Multi-Party Negotiations (A Video Presentation)
HNMCP is fortunate to draw on the expertise of a wide variety of practitioners in seeking to understand and teach students about the nuances of alternative dispute resolution. One of those practitioners is Susan Carney Lynch, JD, DrPH, NREMT-P, a lawyer, public servant, and Fellow with Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). Dr. Lynch has built a career… More
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Only a Game: How Elements of “Gamification” Can Enrich Online Dialogue
In light of the pandemic, dialogue practitioners are finding inventive ways to not only transfer dialogue online but also reimagine how traditionally in-person activities can be conducted online more effectively. A new way of making remote dialogue more engaging is to incorporate game-like elements to make the online experience more life-like. Carla Luna talks about how in her new blog.… More
Thursday, July 23, 2020
How will the post-Covid office space change the way we manage conflict?
When the physical setups of our offices constantly remind us to be wary of one another, what will happen to our choices about how to handle conflicts at work? … More
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Bridging the Virtual Gulf: Engagement Strategies for Online Facilitation
Imagine this. You are facilitating a local community meeting over Zoom. Although all participants have their audio and video enabled, about half are staring down at their cellphones while another participant (whom you recognize from two previous meetings) is single-handedly carrying the conversation. As a new participant starts to chime in, your virtual veteran cuts her off mid-speech. She mutes. This is facilitated dialogue post-COVID. … More
Monday, May 4, 2020
Can Dispute Systems Design be “Rapid-Response”?
Dispute systems design, when done well, emphasizes thoughtful, intentional engagement with stakeholders in order to develop robust conflict management systems. Is this approach useful during an acute crisis? A few days ago, a friend who works in a state court system sent the following email to me and a number of colleagues in the field of… More
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Finding the contours of our virtual lives
In-person interaction is now largely unavailable to us. Can digital connections ever be as rich? In visual art, the term “negative space” refers to the space around the subject of an image. M.C. Escher’s Sky and Water I provides a vivid example: the birds at the top of this graphic print start out as positive… More
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
#WhatIsThisMomentFor?
There is no avoiding or downplaying the enormity of the changes we have all experienced in the past three weeks. From the large-scale patterns of our movement from place to place, down to the number of seconds we spend at the sink scrubbing our hands, it seems like the very texture of our ordinary days has… More
Thursday, March 19, 2020
When the pandemic ends, will we remain “distanced”?
When I first read the phrase, “social distancing”—in an email sent by one of our law school deans—my first reaction was a visceral sort of aversion. It seemed a particularly callous phrase, tinged with both sadness and a cold, clinical sensibleness. I have since learned that social distancing was not, in fact, a term made up by a dean at Harvard Law School, but is actually a well-known protocol for slowing contagion, with which I and my colleagues and millions upon millions of people around the world are now personally familiar. … More
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Engaging Deep Differences Online
Originally published on the Indisputably blog as part of the Theory-of-Change Symposium . You can find all the submissions for the symposium here. As we approach the next election, we continue to confront important challenges about engaging across deeply felt differences. Our country remains polarized, and many feel disconnected from those whose views differ… More
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
On the Road
Former HNMCP clients Heather Kulp (New Hampshire Judicial Branch) and Rebecca Price (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York) presented at the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Conference in Minneapolis, MN, on April 9, alongside Clinical Instructor Sara del Nido Budish ’13. The presentation, “Trust the Process? Understanding and Learning from Party… More
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Client Spotlight
The systems design approach HNMCP takes is a substantial asset during the semester of the project. But for me, the skills I’ve learned from HNMCP—both as a clinical instructor but perhaps more as a client—render HNMCP a greater asset long after the students have submitted their final projects. They teach me, and others, how to see our work and environment differently for years to come.… More
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Brexit and Peace in Northern Ireland: The Perils of Ignoring the Interests of Key Stakeholders to an Agreement
By Dr Ronán Feehily, University of Canterbury The imminent withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) has brought into sharp focus the likely impact that a “no-deal” Brexit will have on peace in Northern Ireland. A question that has emerged as part of the Brexit negotiations is: can negotiators maintain the… More
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Sharing What Divides Us
The first time that Ahmad was discriminated against at his local job center in Berlin, the official working there called him a “donkey.” The second time, the same official told him he should have his “brain checked out.” The third time, Ahmad was denied information before being thrown out of the office. After the sixth time, Ahmad stopped going to the job center. Instead, he withdrew into his room, stayed inside and disengaged with anyone from the outside world.… More
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
What Relevance for ADR in situations of Domestic Violence? Part 2: The design and challenges of Bhutan’s Consensus Building Initiative for certain types of domestic violence
This is the sixth installment of a blog series called From the Field. In this series we spotlight stories and insights from former students, friends, and colleagues who are working in the field of dispute resolution. This post is Part II of a two-part post by Stephan Sonnenberg ’06. You can read Part I here. … More
Monday, November 5, 2018
What Relevance for ADR in situations of Domestic Violence?
This is the sixth installment of a blog series called From the Field. In this series we spotlight stories and insights from former students, friends, and colleagues who are working in the field of dispute resolution. This post is Part I of a two-part post by Stephan Sonnenberg ’06. Domestic violence, as we are all… More