For those of you who are interested, I have added a new article.  Here is a sample.  The rest can be found by going to our Articles page, or clicking “more,” below …

Those who study the negotiation process and train negotiators and mediators have, through time, devised their own construct to explore and discuss negotiation issues. Through this process, specific categories of negotiation situations have been developed, mostly for the purpose of designing negotiation training to prepare mediators and negotiators to work with similar situations.  Through this process a wide variety of training scenarios have developed, based on common situations that a negotiator or mediator is likely to encounter.

In my March 13^th blog posting called “Trees: A Mediation Lesson-Learned,” I spoke of one such scenario, that of working beyond a potential impasse situation by encouraging the participants in the mediation to look to different forms of “currency” beyond dollars, in order to resolve their case.  In classic negotiation theory, that article discussed a scenario that exemplified shifting the negotiation focus from a distributive negotiation – that is, one where only one thing (typically money) is the focus of the negotiation, to an integrative negotiation where other items in addition to or aside from money are the focus of resolving the issue. In Trees I described a real-life scenario where shifting the focus in a mediation session from dollars to end a dispute to replacing that focus with trees (that might die), resulted in a successful outcome.

Another situation that mediators and negotiators will commonly encounter is called a “gap” situation.  This typically involves a negotiation or mediation process, during which the parties struggle to close the differences between their starting positions in an effort to find a figure that both parties find acceptable in order to resolve their dispute.  It is not unusual for the parties to begin with a focus on money and to begin to close the differences in their respective starting points, with incremental concessions.  Once again, because the parties’ focus is often on a single item, it is not unusual for them to reach a point where one party reaches his or her bottom line, while the other reaches his or her point of maximum concession.  Often these are based on figures that each party arrived at long in advance of their discussions and often each party’s respective point of maximum concession falls short of what the other party might find reasonable and acceptable.    More …

Organizations that are considering implementing new programs to address disputes in the workplace frequently wonder whether the cost of administering internal conflict resolution processes will justify the benefits of having them.  Of course, many factors beyond cost are typically weighed by an organization when it evaluates whether to provide in-house conflict resolution services.  The factors that may be considered are many.  Among them are:

• Employee morale
• Employee productivity and time lost to conflict
• Union avoidance
• Public relations
• Corporate reputation
• Retaining control over outcomes
• Privacy of outcomes
• Time involved to resolve issues
• Expense involved to resolve issues.

Virtually all of these considerations are difficult to measure in objective terms. Many of the measures involve “psycho-metric” measures such as moral, reputation, stress, and others.  And, virtually all of the metrics can be difficult to assess in objective terms absent clear before and after comparisons.  Often such comparisons are impossible to draw due to the absence of structure in the internal systems to begin with.

Program Measurement

Every now and then, however, we professionals in conflict resolution have the good fortune of being able to collect such data.  Because I have devoted the majority of my long career to working in the “dark underbelly of the beast” in various roles – attorney, employee relations manager, labor relations director, and ombudsman – I have now had several opportunities to draw meaningful comparisons in systems that involve internal conflict resolution. I was reminded of some of these opportunities during the course of some office housecleaning when I came across some reports I prepared during my tenure in some of my various positions.

While working for a large high-tech R&D employer in the early 1990’s, I was tasked with re-designing that organization’s internal grievance and employee disciplinary “due process” systems. The then-current systems were widely viewed as “broken” on several levels. The disciplinary review system too way too long – an average of 559 days from the time disciplinary action was taken to the time that the organization completed its internal review.  The review time required to process a simple employee complaint (“grievances”) was nearly a year (355 days). Just to conduct the internal peer hearings cost (at the time) an average of $6,350. This figure did not include the staff time involved for the caseworkers that coordinated the process in the Employee Relations function. The system emphasized formal internal hearings and, at the time, did not include any mediation process.

My team and I implemented a number of key improvements to the system. Among these were several that had dramatic results.  First, we reviewed the processes involved and attached concrete time limits to each step.  Second, rather than having an organization-wide pool of untrained potential hearing panel members, we recruited a cadre of people to serve in a standing pool of panel members.  All of the members of this pool received comprehensive training serving as panelist, including precepts of evidence and other fact-finding skills, and comprehensive training in hearing procedure. Finally, we implemented a “conciliation” stage to the review process.  Essentially, this was a step that provided the parties with informal mediation by a trained internal mediator.

Adding the mediation step alone resulted in the most dramatic improvements in the cost and time involved to resolve these internal cases. Implementing the internal mediation process had the added benefit that issues that were not formally reviewable in the grievance process, could nonetheless be resolved so that employees could focus on their work.  No longer did dissatisfied employees have to twist their concern into a formally reviewable issue such as “discrimination” to resolve a conflict with a peer or with their supervisor.

Results

The measurable results of these changes were dramatic!

• Average grievance processing time for formal employee complaints was reduced from 355 days to 147 days.
• Average formal employee disciplinary review time was cut from 559 days to 29 days (95% reduction in review time)!
• Average hearing costs were cut from $6,350 to $2,450 (61% cost reduction) for those cases that even required a hearing.
• Over 80% of the cases never required a hearing and were resolved through the internal conciliation process.

At a later point in my career, I was selected to design and implement a new ombudsman program for this employer and to serve as its first Ombudsman. The program was implemented after a large employee lawsuit that had challenged the employer’s approach to a selective reduction in force as a cost containment/competitive measure. The workplace was rife with dissatisfied employees and in the first three months after establishing the ombuds program, the office had already worked with over 200 employees.

In the years following the implementation of the Ombuds Office, my colleagues and I worked with literally hundreds of employees — 500 to 600 visitors annually.  From its inception, there was significant anecdotal evidence that the Ombuds Program worked well for most visitors, and it demonstrated itself to be a highly effective alternative even as compared to other internal processes, such as the employee grievance procedure. In addition, statistics quickly emerged demonstrating that substantially fewer employees resorted to a formal review by an external authority such as an administrative agency or a court. Within the first year of its operation, new lawsuits dropped to zero, and formal grievances and charges with administrative agencies were cut in half.

Although we were able to show a pattern of higher use of formal processes (including formal complaints of sexual harassment) before the existence of the Ombuds Program, it was always difficult to demonstrate that the Ombuds Office was the direct cause of that reduction because of the possibility that other root causes could also be involved.

Cost Benefits of Alternative Dispute Resolution versus Litigation

A few years into the operation of the Ombuds Program, we had the strange good fortune of encountering a situation where we could clearly and unequivocally demonstrate the cost benefits of the program. During the same timeframe (actually stemming from the same general organizational initiative), two visitors came to work with the ombuds office to resolve nearly identical issues.  The results and comparisons are show in the table below.

Conclusion

I have been asked to design and implement many new programs in my career to this point.  Program design and implementation is one of my first loves.  I’ve had many great opportunities to design and implement new programs including higher education due process and complaint systems, grievance procedures in union and non-union settings, a variety of new ombudsman programs – the latest of which operates in a completely on-line setting. Through this experience, one of the most important things I have learned is the value of metrics.  It is extremely helpful to fully understand your starting position and to have a clear idea of what you seek to improve.  The only way to meaningfully measure improvement is to have clear baseline metrics that establish the starting point for comparison and then to identify metrics through which you can draw comparisons.

The metrics that I have found most useful over the years are fairly straightforward: time, cost, and outcomes. While the metrics may be straightforward, the approaches to improving them may not be as direct.  For example, one obvious goal of providing training to a standing grievance panelist pool was to improve the quality of the outcome.  However a less obvious outcome of providing that training, was a vast improvement in hearing times.  The reason? The hearing panels felt more confident in conducting the hearing and required far less staff support and ad hoc training through the course of each individual hearing.

Conducting cost comparisons can be challenging.  For example, to measure hearing cost, I first had to review the many previous hearings and find out the categories of employees that had been chosen to conduct the hearings.  Then, knowing that these panels were typically comprised of top-level engineers and scientists, I could calculate the average hourly rate involved for the typical grievance committee member.  Using this rate, I could then review the records to see how many hours were, on average, involved by these individuals to meet, get oriented to the case, hold the hearing, and prepare a report.  Once this assessment had been made and each step studied for time and cost, I was much more equipped to engage in the redesign process, to look for ways to shorten steps and to reduce cost even if the same employees with the same salary levels served on the review panels.

For those of us who have devoted large portions of our careers to working with people in conflict, it can become easy to focus on the complex, human aspects of our work and to forget that virtually all of this sort of work does, in fact occur within a structure with its own systems and processes. It is sometimes easy to lose focus on the opportunities to measure and improve our work if we fail to occasionally look up from the trees to appreciate the whole forest.

BJM

April 2013

As a part of our portfolio of services, we’ve done quite a bit of training for lawyers (mostly in large federal agency solicitor’s offices) focusing on reasons for settlement error. Some of the fascinating research reveals that, indeed, lawyers differ from the general population in key areas. The lawyer population has a higher proportion of “excitable profiles,” meaning they have higher proportions of people who are overly self-critical, higher incidents of obsessive-compulsive disorder, more overly cautious profiles, and lower self-awareness combined with greater task-focus/lower interpersonal focus.

While studies show that the entry level baseline for law students is no different than the general population, by the end of their third year in law school when compared to the general population, law students underperform in reasoning and judgment when compared to other professionals, such as medical or psychology students.

When compared to the general population, as a group, lawyers have significantly higher incidents of depression (19% compared to 7%), alcoholism (20% compared to 11%), hostility disorders (30% for male attorneys and 20% for female attorneys compared to 4% in the general population), and much higher suicidal ideation (11% compared to 1.8% in the general population).

One must ponder the implications of these data.

• What does our legal education process do to actually impair judgment of our legal professionals? What is it about the work that has such an impact?
• What are the implications for others, such as mediators, who are chronically exposed to conflict and issues similar to those handled by attorneys?
• Given the high proportions of lawyers who gravitate to public service in the political arenas of our country, what are the implications to our political system?

For anyone who is interested, I heartily recommend a read of Beyond Right and Wrong, and also of How Leading Lawyers Think, both written by Randall Kiser, a leading researcher in the field of settlement error in the legal profession. Kiser’s work is perhaps the most comprehensive research to date in key areas of what distinguishes successful attorneys from the rest and what attorneys find useful and look for in the  mediation process and as well as in their mediators.

Many thanks to John Zinsser, Managing Principal of Pacifica Communications, for his post in Linkedin about this topic! His post prompted this article.

We have now worked through half of the “Twelve Tips for Effective Communication” series! Because of last year’s extensive work demands, it has taken us some time to get to this point. So, before delving into the next communication tip, I thought it would be good to review the key points we have discussed to this point. 

In my earlier blog posts we have worked through six tips. Here is a summary of the discussions so far.

Tip One: Have a clear goal in mind for your communication 

Tip One focused on setting a goal for your communication. I suggested that you ask yourself questions such as:

• What is the reason for your communication?
• Do you hope to surface and resolve an issue that is of concern to you?
• Do you want to build a relationship with the person?
• Do you hope to repair an injured relationship?
• Are you seeking a favor?

I explained that the approach and content of your communication may vary radically depending on the goal of the communication, so it is important to have a clear understanding in your own mind about what you hope to achieve in the dialogue.

Tip Two: Have anoutcome in mind and a plan to get there.

Once we have a clear goal in mind for our communication, in Tip Two, I discussed the importance of planning your communication to be as effective as possible.  I discussed five key factors that, among others, are often important key elements to effectively planning a communication. These were:

1. Knowing who needs to participate and why.
2. Understanding the issue and framing it in a relatable way.
3. Knowing yourself and the needs and concerns you seek to address.
4. Knowing the other participants and their needs, issues, and concerns.
5. Having ideas for how to meet your needs while allowing the other participants to meet their needs.

Tip Three: Understand Interpersonal Styles.

The third communication tool I discussed was understanding the style of the person which whom you are communicating.  Several current and future postings are closely related to this overarching topic. Tip Three focused on gaining awareness the style with which the listener prefers to communication and to make decisions. I explained that each of us has deeply engrained preferences for word and metaphor choice, pace of communication, accompanying body language, non-verbal supplements to our communication. In Tip Three, we looked at problem solving or decision-making styles.  With the caveat noted that individuals are far too complex to be easily categorized in boxes and labels, I explained that some non-diagnostic indicators of a person’s communication preferences they can be very useful. I talked about some categories used by some instruments, that identify personal styles, such as “drivers,” “empaths,” “creators,” and “systemizers.” I explained that naturally, the lines between these simplistic labels can be blurred and people are far too complex to fit neatly into a single category every time.

I discussed the advantages of your own style and the style of another whom you seek to influence and ways to best work with your style to influence others working with their own style.

Tip Four: Listen Comprehensively – the Many Levels of Listening

In Tip Four, I discussed the many levels of listening and suggested that, rather than turning up the volume of speaking we turn up our listening sensitivity. I explained that listening involves more than just hearing. In that post, I focused on comprehensive listening: listening in the broadest and most powerful sense.  This concept expanding listening from one of simply hearing another, to one of receiving information from another in the broadest and more informing and enabling sense.  I discussed some of the components of “comprehensive listening.” Among the key components of comprehensive listening we will discuss here are listening for the speaker’s:

• Verbal content and expressed needs;
• Emotional content;
• Non verbal content;
• Style, and conscious and subconscious metaphor use; and
• Barriers to trust and rapport and opportunities to bridge them through congruence.

Tip Five: Communication is Not Just Speaking

In Tip Five, I focused on another area of communication, which was a corollary to Tip Four.  I explained that just as we should listen for all sorts of information when we are involved in an important communication, we also have the opportunity to use an amazing variety of tools to enhance the effectiveness of our communication. This post focused on the subject of enhancing communication using verbal and non-verbal techniques to enhance our communications and offered only an overview of a number of skills that we will explore in Tips Seven through Twelve.  These included:

• Proxemics, or understanding how our use of space and proximity to others affects how we come across.
• Framing and the effective use of word choice, archetypes, and metaphors to connect with your listener.
• Neural linguistic programming, or the awareness and use of extremely deep-rooted word choices and learning styles to create a link with the listener.
• Haptics or the delicate art of using touch in appropriate situations.
• Mirroring, matching, pacing and leading both verbally and non-verbally to create subconscious rapport
• A variety of other tips to help build trust and rapport and make connecting and communicating with another easier.

In this post I also urged readers to try listening to and observing the communication styles and tools discussed so far when communicating with another in an important communication.

Tip Six: Study the underlying needs of the other person and their motivation for dialogue.

The blog discussion in Tip Six focused on the important and often-overlooked communication skill of seeking full understanding of what the other person needs (or perhaps should expect) out of their interaction with you.   Why should the other person want to help?  What do they gain from the interaction?  I suggested that when engaging in an important conversation, one might want to spend some time at the outset of the conversation to learn about the person and what they might need from you in return and I explained that when the needs of the other are considered, one can build an attitude of mutual trust, support and partnership. The relationships built during simple interactions often pay great dividends in later interactions, with the rapport and mutual understanding making it much easier to acquire support in subsequent interactions.

BJM  3/18/2013

]]> http://bizexteam.com/index.php/2013/03/18/review-of-the-first-six-tips-on-effective-communication/feed/ 0 http://bizexteam.com/index.php/2013/03/13/tips-for-working-with-people-in-conflict-trees-a-mediation-lesson-learned/ http://bizexteam.com/index.php/2013/03/13/tips-for-working-with-people-in-conflict-trees-a-mediation-lesson-learned/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:58:11 +0000 Bruce MacAllister http://bizexteam.com/?p=471 Continue reading →]]> (Author’s Note:  This is a long blog posting.  If you prefer, you can click here to read the same article in our Articles section.)

Tips for working with people in conflict: Trees; A Mediation Lesson-Learned. 

This is a new line of discussion for our blog.  In the past we have focused on leadership, communication skills, and topics relating to ombudsman skills.  This new line of posts will focus on lessons learned from more than thirty years of mediation work.  During this timeframe, when I reflect on the many varied cases I have mediated, I am invariably reminded of the brilliance and commitment of the mediation participants with whom I have worked and their level of commitment and sincerity. I have so often come away from my mediation work impressed with the human spirit and with a renewed sense of hopefulness about humankind’s commitment to collaboration.

I was recently chatting with my fellow Biz Ex Team consultant, co-founder and colleague, Monique McKay about our various adventures, misadventures, and lessons-learned during mediation sessions.  The conversation arose, because Monique had just returned from a teaching session at William and Mary, where she serves as an adjunct professor. She was recounting how impressed she was with her students and we were speaking of those learning moments that inspire each of us, and I was reminded of a learning moment I had in a mediation session.

The learning moment was one of those times when something that I had learned and knew in the abstract, became meaningful in a real way.  I was asked by the local district court to mediate a conflict between two neighbors.  The conflict had escalated into litigation between them and the relationship was very distrustful on both sides.

On one side was an elderly couple.  They had lived in their home for many years.  During the time that they had lived in their home, the city had developed around them.  They now found that they had neighbors in a now upscale neighborhood that lived in close proximity, when for years, they had lived in splendid isolation. The elderly couple were longtime retirees, who loved to spend their time in their yard and garden. On the other side, was a comparatively younger couple that had recently arrived from out of state and bought the house next door. The couple was independently wealthy and, also spent quite a bit of time at their home.

The conflict between these two couples arose over something as seemingly innocuous as gardening.  The elderly couple loved their roses, trees, and vegetables.  The elderly wife used routine garden sprays to keep her roses aphid-free and her gardens pest free.  That year, the area was experiencing record drought. As a result,  the local piñon pine trees were stressed and many were succumbing to the ravages of the local bark beetles.  To combat this possibility, the elderly couple wished to spray their trees with a poison proven to help prevent bark beetle infestation.

Meanwhile, on the other side of these events, the wife of the wealthy younger couple was experiencing the effects of “multiple chemical sensitivity.”  She claimed to be highly sensitive to the chemicals used next door, to the point that she found them to cause her to become gravely ill.  As a consequence, this couple asked their neighbors to stop spraying their garden and their trees altogether.

The elderly couple met the younger couples’ request with incredulity.  They found the request overbearing – especially so, since they had observed that the younger woman, though claiming to be chemically sensitive, was a regular cigarette smoker.  And, after all, the elderly couple had lived in their house since the 1940s!  How could their neighbors honestly believe that they could dictate what they did on their own property?

On the other hand, the younger couple earnestly believed that the younger woman’s right “not to be poisoned” more than outweighed the others’ property rights and, at the point where the court asked me to mediate the situation, the court had preliminarily agreed – having entered a preliminary injunction, which restrained the other couple from using any poison sprays on their property.

This was the setting for the mediation.  After the standard processes to establish ground rules and to all the parties the opportunity to share their side of the story, I began the process of working with the parties to explore options to resolve the case short of continuing the litigation process.  Before too long, it became clear that the parties were deadlocked and that neither was willing to let go of what they believed to be fundamental interest.  On one side the couple fervently believed that the health, and potentially even the life of the woman involved was at risk and, what was more, they believed that theelderly couple was simply trying to take advantage of the situation because of this couple’s wealth.  On the other side, the elderly couple felt incensed that these younger people were taking advantage of them and infringing on their property rights only because of what they perceived to be some sort of hypochondriac-type mental disorder.  If their neighbors were allowed to continue the injunction, the elderly couple risked losing a huge part of their retirement nest egg and family wealth, because the value property would be devastated as the many trees that screen and sheltered the house died off, leaving the house exposed to the street, wind, and noise. Not to mention that a large part of their daily fulfillment involved caring for their plants, shrubs, gardens and trees. For them their lifestyle and thousands of dollars were at stake, all caused by what they believed to be the flighty-claims of a smoker who was apparently not sensitive to cigarette smoke, but was highly sensitive to relatively innocuous garden sprays not even applied on her own property.

The mutual mistrust in the room was palpable.  I began to feel that sad sense of flagging hope as a mediator groping for any approach that might divert the session from an impasse.  Something in the back of my mind told me I was missing something.  Aside from the obvious disagreement around the issue, any mention of an option that involved a settlement amount to compensate the elderly couple for the trees that they were most likely to lose, was met with fervent rejection by the younger couple.  This didn’t add up to me.  What was I missing?

The answer came in a caucus with the younger couple.  In their past location, the fact that this couple was very wealthy was widely known and it turned out that in the past they had been the target of several law suits, which they believed were nothing more than efforts to extort money from them.  Thus, from their perspective, this elderly couple was simply another one of those money seekers. Likewise, the elderly couple was completely distressed at the prospect that they could lose hundred-year-old trees that, with their limited resources, would be impossible to replace.

Something in this brought to mind one of the many impasse-breaking adages I had been exposed to, that is to shift the currency or commodity involved if the parties are making no headway towards resolution.  So, a simple question came to me. In the presence of the other couple, I asked the elderly couple how many trees they thought they would lose, if they were not allowed to spray for bark beetles.  They answered that, if they lost every tree, that would be sixteen full-sized pine trees. To them, this was a catastrophic loss that they would never have the resources to replace.  I turned to the younger couple and took a chance.  I asked them if they would be willing to replace any trees that happened to die due to bark beetle kill with comparable trees.  I was dumbfounded when the husband answered, “Well, if it’s only trees, sure!”

It turned out that the younger couple’s mistrust of anyone seeking money had completely closed them off from considering any money settlement.  But, once the settlement involved trees rather than dollars, the settlement was reached in a matter of minutes.

It is always tempting to claim after-the-fact expertise when, as a mediator, you happen to stumble upon an answer that works.  But I believe that the plain truth is, in the heat and press of a real-time mediation process, for the most part, even experienced mediators work more out of instinct and the mental equivalent of muscle memory.  I do thank and acknowledge my many trainers and mentors for planting the seed for asking the question, but I likewise could have completely overlooked the approach.  Since that time, I try to be much more observant of the possibilities, when a settlement in one form is unacceptable to the parties.  Is there another currency we can use?

BJM

After a hiatus, we return to one of our article streams: The Twelve Tools for Effective Communication. Today’s article focuses on an important and often-overlooked communication skill. That is to engage in the communication process with the goal of first understanding what the other person needs out of their interaction with you.   We have already discussed how important effective, deep listening skills are to an effective communicator.  Once we are prepared to deeply listen, we can attend to focusing our communication on questions and discussions that are designed to help you quickly gain an understanding of what the other person truly seeks out of their interaction with you.  What do they need?  How do they perceive that you may be able to help them meet that need?

Even when you are the person approaching another – say to seek assistance with a project or even a smaller task, it is extremely helpful to pause and seek to gain perspective – why should the other person want to help?  What do they gain from the interaction?  For example, even when approaching a boss to ask them for a favor, such as permission for some leave time, there is something of value for the boss in granting your request.  For an effective relationship, working with you in even such a simple interaction should further your boss’s interest in balancing workloads, enhancing your productivity and morale when you are at work, and demonstrating to his or her own superiors that he or she is a person who can work well with subordinates and gain commitment and productivity from the people he or she supervises.

When engaging in an important conversation, spend some time at the outset of the conversation to learn about the person and what they might need from you in return. While you do not have to be dogmatic or rote about your approach, do be prepared to learn from the other by asking them questions along the lines of how can I help you?  What do you need from me?  How can we help one another?

When these questions are considered, even a simple interaction like asking your boss for leave time, can build an attitude of mutual trust, support and partnership.  The relationships built during simple interactions often pay great dividends in later interactions, with the rapport and mutual understanding making it much easier to acquire support in subsequent interactions.

BJM

New Activities
This year our core team of consultants was truly able to collaborate and to draw on our diverse backgrounds to provide conflict resolution and organizational assessment and development services in response to extremely complex situations. We were also able to launch several exciting new programs for new clients. We continued our mediation services to a wide range of agencies, corporations, and court systems. We continued our professional support of the new ombudsman program for the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors, and also had the opportunity to launch an exciting new international, web-based ombudsman program for our new client – The International Foundation for Online Responsibility. This is an exciting new program for us because our work for this program is international and, in addition to providing traditional organizational ombudsman services, it also includes significant systems review and design support to help ensure that the worldwide community is protected from internet abuses such as child abuse imagery, cyber-squatting, and trademark infringement. This activity is truly cutting-edge in a world where internet-based communication and marketing are becoming dominant.

A part of our work to support the International Foundation for Online Responsibility also involved program design to best assure compliance with applicable standards for both operating an ombudsman program and for designing and operating a web-based complaint resolution system for addressing concerns relating to the initiation and operation of new websites. With the extremely able assistance of one or our senior consultants, Camilla Lopez, we designed evaluation systems “from the ground up,” and now have standards, audit, and quality assurance systems in place to ensure that IFFOR can fulfill its mission.

Another exciting new activity involves working with fellow Business Excellence Solutions principal, Monique McKay, to launch an exciting new entity called the Center for Resolution Advocacy. This new organization is dedicated to continuing the work previously performed by the Master Mediator Institute. The organization will provide advanced training in the scientific basis of human interactions, communications and decision-making. The new organization (C4RA.com) will provide a more inclusive venue for its participants, in that it is not limited in its focus to mediation work alone.
Continuing Activities
This year, we continued our work with many existing clients to provide services such as:

• Providing extensive mediation services to the New Mexico District Court – both for civil tort cases and for foreclosure cases.
• Working extensively with the Bureau of Indian Education to facilitate tribal consultation meetings to hear views from the Indian Nations about challenges to providing the most effective educational services possible to Indian youth.
• Working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide mediation services for workplace disputes and organizational conflict assessment and intervention design.
• Providing executive coaching to various managers, including federal officials and executives in private organizations.
• Providing business coaching to a number of new small businesses in need of start up business planning and individual coaching.
• Working directly with several Indian Nations to help them address governance issues and resolve internal conflicts.
• Continued work with Los Alamos National Laboratory to provide community outreach facilitations in its important work to preserve the environment and to remediate past environmental issues.

All told the total work volume for this calendar year increased by about twenty percent over previous years. As a result of the significantly increased workload, as noted, we fell behind in maintaining and updating this blog. Our apologies! We are working to redistribute support for the blog function and have streamlined other internal systems so that the administrative burdens inherent to consulting on sophisticated issues with organizations that often have their own complex procurement and accounts payable requirements are minimized. Thus, we hope that you will see improved quality and regularity in our posting and our website maintenance.

We strive to consistently look forward to anticipate opportunities to add value to the American and international workplace as well as to indigenous communities. In that vein we have set goals for outreach and support for the coming year that will allow us to continue to be personally challenged and to grow individually while adding value to our clients.

All of us want to thank the absolutely wonderful people with whom we have worked this year for their professionalism, fun, and for sharing the diversity of their experiences. On behalf of the entire Business Excellence Solutions team, I want to wish everyone a blessed Holiday Season and a very Happy New Year!

BJM
December 5, 2012

BES Co-Founder, Monique McKay, is also the Co-Founder of the Master Mediator Institute.  For any one interested in the program, I have posted more information on our Articles page.

BJM

Our role as the Ombuds for IFFOR, will be receive and respond to complaints and concerns about IFFOR policies and the IFFOR policy process, and we will also be responsible for conducting periodic audits regarding how the ICM Registry – the organization that runs the dot-xxx registry – handles complaints that relate to registrant compliance or non-compliance with ICM Registry and IFFOR Policies.

We have already conducted the first quarterly audit of the ICM Compliance Resolution System for IFFOR and we have created a confidential, online process for individuals to raise complaints and concerns about IFFOR policies and the IFFOR policy process.

We are especially excited by this project because of the international, virtual nature, of the programs we will be working with and how those programs will interact with our own virtual structure. Through this new contract, our Business Excellence Solutions team is working on the cutting edge of virtual ombuds and complaint resolution services. We are excited by the prospect of broadening the base of online and virtual conflict resolution work we do including mediation services, organizational assessment and group conflict resolution, and policy and dispute resolution systems design.

We look forward to working with the ICM Registry and with IFFOR to complete their important missions and to ensure that the user community’s rights as well as their responsibilities are respected and enforced.

Many thanks to Monique McKay for her work putting this announcement together!

BJM/MQK