Keynote Presentation:
What are the Limits to What a Mediator Can Do?

Most mediation texts, training videos and “war stories” focus on what happens at the mediation table. For some kinds of mediations, this focus is appropriate. There are, however, mediations for which this focus is too confining, blocking us from tasks that can be useful or essential in order to help the parties move toward agreement. Bernard Mayer, in Beyond Neutrality, has given us some ways in which we might rethink our role. Experience with public policy or international conflicts can give us others.

This workshop will focus not on what we can do at the table, but on three other tasks, all of them part of the mediator’s overall role:

·   How can we help the parties come to the table?

·   How we can be a conflict coach for one side or both?

·   How can we work with “ghosts”, those people of great influence who are not at the table.

Keynote Speaker: David Matz is director of the Graduate Programs in Conflict Resolution at the University of Massachusetts/Boston and a partner in The Mediation Group, a company providing mediation, training, coaching, and consulting services in the US and other countries. A mediator for thirty years, David has designed court connected mediation programs in the US and in Israel. In 1989 he was Fulbright Professor at the University of Tel Aviv Faculty of Law. David has written extensively on the "plumbing" of mediation and on the peace negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the January 2006 issue of the Negotiation Journal, he analyzed the Camp David II summit of 2000. He has just returned from a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Conference-at-a-Glance | Keynote | Session 1A | Session 1B | Session 1C | Session 2A | Session 2B | Session 2C | Registration |  Directions and Parking