Negotiations have reached an impasse, but both sides agree on one thing: you need help resolving the dispute. You engage a neutral mediator to do just that. Rather than acting as a judge who decides who “wins” or “loses,” a third-party mediator assists parties in reaching an agreement.
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Discover step-by-step techniques for avoiding common business negotiation pitfalls when you download a copy of the FREE special report, Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
mediator
The following items are tagged mediator:
Harvard Mediation Intensive
Led by mediation experts Audrey Lee and Alain Lempereur, the Harvard Mediation Intensive delves into mediation principles and processes through interactive presentations and hands-on exercises. From employment and business disagreements to public and international conflicts, you will discover effective ways to enable parties to settle their differences across a variety of contexts.
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Dealmaking: Secrets of Successful Dealmaking in Business Negotiations
Discover how to boost your power at the bargaining table in this free special report, Dealmaking: Secrets of Successful Dealmaking in Business Negotiations, from Harvard Law School.
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Top 10 Dispute Resolution Skills
Too often, dispute resolution can be an acrimonious and unproductive process. The following 10 negotiation and conflict resolution strategies can help you find creative ways to reach mutually satisfactory agreements.
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Mediation Secrets for Better Business Negotiations: Top Mediator Techniques
In this Special Report, the experts and editors from Harvard’s Program on Negotiation offer a sampling of advice from past issues of Negotiation to help you learn the techniques you need to resolve your disputes through mediation. You will learn to select the right dispute-resolution process, choose a mediator with appropriate expertise, learn the steps … Read More
How Fast-Food Workers Used Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to Demand Higher Wages
Labor unions are the most obvious example of negotiating coalitions. If an individual employee made demands of its employer, the company could threaten to hire someone else.
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What Is the Difference Between Leadership and Management?: Successful Leadership Strategies From Harvard’s Program on Negotiation
In this FREE special report, we offer advice to help you improve your leadership and negotiation skills.
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5 Conflict Resolution Strategies
Whether a conflict erupts at work or at home, we frequently fall back on the tendency to try to correct the other person or group’s perceptions, lecturing them about why we’re right—and they’re wrong. Deep down, we know that this conflict management approach usually fails to resolve the conflict and often only makes it worse.
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What are the Three Basic Types of Dispute Resolution? What to Know About Mediation, Arbitration, and Litigation
When it comes to dispute resolution, there are so many choices available to us. Understandably, disputants are often confused about which process to apply to their situation. This article offers some guidance.
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Dispute Resolution on Facebook: Using a Negotiation Approach to Resolve a Conflict
For several years, Facebook has been working with social scientists to bring traditional methods of dispute resolution to cyberspace. The site has begun to offer users tools to resolve disputes with one another over offensive or upsetting posts, including insults and photos.
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What is Conflict Resolution, and How Does It Work?
If you work with others, sooner or later you will almost inevitably face the need for conflict resolution. You may need to mediate a dispute between two members of your department. Or you may find yourself angered by something a colleague reportedly said about you in a meeting. Or you may need to engage in … Read More
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Use Video Examples to Teach Your Students to Become Better Mediators
Parties engaged in disputes are often unable to reconcile their differences alone, or fail to reach outcomes that are adequate for everyone. Mediators can add a great deal of value by helping parties to efficiently and effectively examine the issues at hand, take the interests … Read Download Your Next Mediation Video
Managing Emotions in Negotiation: Teaching Students to Turn Emotions into an Opportunity for Mutual Gain
How do you move from an emotionally charged moment in a negotiation to a mutually beneficial agreement? In negotiations of all types, whether buying a house or negotiating a company acquisition, emotions naturally manifest. Left unaddressed, emotions can derail a negotiation and make agreement seem impossible.
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Mediation Checklist: 5 Questions to Ask When Hiring Mediators
Are you hiring a mediator? When considering a potential mediator, create a mediation checklist and ask the following questions of those who have worked with him in the past.
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Dispute Resolution Example: The Chicago Symphony’s Contract Dispute
A dispute resolution example involving the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and management highlights the potential value of involving an influential mediator in negotiations.
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Teaching Mediation: Exercises to Help Students Acquire Mediation Skills
Often, disputing parties are unable achieve satisfactory or sustainable outcomes on their own through direct negotiation, and require the assistance of a mediator or facilitator. Mediators can help parties involved in a dispute through examining the issues at hand, uncovering the parties’ underlying interests, and identifying creative solutions. To act as mediator requires a great … Read More
Negotiation Research on Mediation Techniques: Focus on Interests
There is a better way to resolve your dispute: by hiring an expert mediator with a focus on interests – the needs, desires, or concerns that underlie each side’s positions according to negotiation research on mediation techniques.
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Three Questions to Ask About the Dispute Resolution Process
Dispute resolution is often a multistep process that can start with negotiation, move on to mediation, and, if necessary, end in arbitration or litigation.
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Ripeness Theory in Dispute Resolution: Seizing the Day
The longer a dispute drags on, the less likely a collaborative solution often appears to be. But that view may be pessimistic: At a certain point, the time will be ripe for agreement. A labor dispute between the Minnesota Orchestra’s musicians and management highlights negotiation mistakes that can drive us apart—and ripeness theory suggests how … Read More
What Makes a Good Mediator?
What makes a good mediator? And how is it that mediators—who themselves lack any power to impose a solution—nevertheless often lead bitter disputants to agreement?
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Now Available: Full Videos from the AI Negotiation Summit
On March 8 and 9, 2025, the Program on Negotiation (PON) convened leading practitioners and scholars on artificial intelligence (AI) and negotiation to present their cutting-edge research and discuss innovations in the field. The summit was also the culmination of a student AI negotiation bot competition, held by MIT. Chaired by Jared Curhan and Jonathan Gratch, the AI … Read More
Employee Mediation Techniques – Resolve Disputes and Manage Conflict with These Mediation Skills
If you manage people, disputes will show up at your door. Here are some mediation techniques from the world of alternative dispute resolution to help you resolve conflicts with employees in the workplace.
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Settling Out of Court: Negotiating in the Shadow of the Law
When disputes arise, negotiators face the difficult question of whether to try to reach a settlement on their own or hand decision-making power over to a judge, a jury, or an arbitrator.
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10 Great Examples of Negotiation in Business
A number of noteworthy disputes among businesses, organizations, and individuals made headlines over the last few years and demonstrate the importance of negotiation in business.
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AI Mediation: Using AI to Help Mediate Disputes
AI mediation is on the rise, with chatbots increasingly assisting human mediators in resolving disputes. Here’s what AI mediation is capable of—and where it falls short.
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In Contract Negotiations, Agree on How You’ll Disagree
During the course of a complex negotiation, the last thing we want to think about is the possibility that a serious disagreement or contract breach will arise during the implementation stage. Yet we also know that such conflicts are common.
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Famous Negotiators: Tony Blair’s 10 Principles to Guide Diplomats in International Conflict Resolution
In his memoir, the former world leader highlights lessons from the peace process in Northern Ireland. One of the world’s most famous negotiators, Tony Blair, offers 10 principles to guide diplomats in international conflict resolution.
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Undecided on Your Dispute Resolution Process? Combine Mediation and Arbitration, Known as Med-Arb
The choice: arbitration vs. mediation. You’re not sure which of two common dispute resolution processes, mediation or arbitration, to use to resolve your conflict. Mediation is appealing because it would allow you to reach a collaborative settlement, but you’re worried it could end in impasse. You know that arbitration would wrap up your dispute resolution … Read More
What is Med-Arb?
When parties find themselves involved in a serious conflict, they often try to avoid the expense and hassle of litigation by turning to one of the two most common alternative dispute resolution processes: mediation or arbitration. Disputants who are concerned about these drawbacks might want to consider a hybrid mediation-arbitration approach called med-arb.
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Dispute Resolution: The Advantages of a Neutral Third-Party Mediator
In an article, “Beyond Blame: Choosing a Mediator,” Stephen B. Goldberg advised business negotiators involved in a dispute to seek out an interests-based mediator to assist both sides in reaching a mutually satisfactory dispute resolution.
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The Mediation Process and Dispute Resolution
As compared with other forms of dispute resolution, mediation can have an informal, improvisational feel. Mediation can include some or all of the following six steps.
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Why is Negotiation Important: Mediation in Transactional Negotiations
We generally think of mediation as a dispute-resolution device. Federal mediators intervene when collective bargaining breaks down. Diplomats are sometimes called in to mediate conflicts between nations. So-called multi-door courthouses encourage litigants to mediate before incurring the costs – and risks – of going to trial.
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How Mediation Can Help Resolve Pro Sports Disputes
Worldwide, mediation has become a common means of resolving conflict, ranging from divorce to workplace disputes to broken contracts. Yet mediation remains an underused tool for resolving disputes in U.S. professional sports leagues.
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Consensus-Building Techniques
Consensus-building techniques can help parties facing a group decision reach longer-lasting, more harmonious outcomes than resorting to an up-or-down vote. Several different approaches are available to parties engaged in consensus building.
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Conflict Management: Intervening in Workplace Conflict
Question: I’m aware of lots of unresolved personnel issues that seem to be festering in my department, such as complaints about someone who is not doing his share of the work, another person whose griping is causing a drop in morale, and two coworkers who can’t seem to get along. I’m comfortable negotiating with customers, … Read More
Can AI Mediation Help Bridge Political Divides?
A form of AI mediation outperformed human mediators in a recent large-scale study. Although AI mediation could have broad real-world applications, its limitations need to be considered.
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Negotiating Identity and Values-Based Disputes
How Do Parties in Conflict Negotiate Core Beliefs?
Identity and values-based disputes are particularly challenging to resolve, as identities are naturally inflexible and values are typically much less elastic than interest-based issues. In conventional interest-based negotiation, parties often do give up one thing in exchange for getting something they want more. This is often not possible … Read Negotiating Identity and Values-Based Disputes
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- Business Negotiations
- Conflict Resolution
- 3 Types of Conflict and How to Address Them
- Advanced Negotiation Strategies and Concepts: Hostage Negotiation Tips for Business Negotiators
- 5 Conflict Resolution Strategies
- MESO: Make Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers to Create Value in Dealmaking Table
- Lessons Learned from Cultural Conflicts in the Covid-19 Era
- Crisis Negotiations
- Crisis Communication Examples: What’s So Funny?
- Crisis Negotiation Lessons: The U.S.-Russia Prisoner Swap
- Negotiating Change During the Covid-19 Pandemic
- Famous Negotiations Cases – NBA and the Power of Deadlines at the Bargaining Table
- Police Negotiation Techniques from the NYPD Crisis Negotiations Team
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Dealmaking
- Dispute Resolution
- Top 10 Dispute Resolution Skills
- How Fast-Food Workers Used Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to Demand Higher Wages
- Cultural Barriers and Conflict Negotiation Strategies: Apple’s Apology in China
- Four Conflict Negotiation Strategies for Resolving Value-Based Disputes
- What are the Three Basic Types of Dispute Resolution? What to Know About Mediation, Arbitration, and Litigation
- International Negotiation
- Diplomatic Negotiations: The Surprising Benefits of Conflict and Teamwork at the Negotiation Table
- India’s Direct Approach to Conflict Resolution
- The Negotiation Process in China
- Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Calls for U.S. Global Leadership
- Unlocking Cross-Cultural Differences in Negotiation
- Leadership Skills
- Mediation
- Negotiation Skills
- Negotiation Skills: Which Negotiating Style Is Best?
- Negotiation Skills for Win-Win Negotiations
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Should You Say Thank You for Concessions in Negotiations?
- Aggressive Negotiation Tactics: Threats at the Bargaining Table
- Power in Negotiation: The Impact on Negotiators and the Negotiation Process
- Negotiation Training
- Ethics and Negotiation: 5 Principles of Negotiation to Boost Your Bargaining Skills in Business Situations
- Cole Cannon Esq. Shares His Negotiation and Leadership Experience
- Negotiation Training: What’s Special About Technology Negotiations?
- Collaborative Negotiation Examples: Tenants and Landlords
- The Importance of a Relationship in Negotiation
- Salary Negotiations
- Teaching Negotiation
- Teaching the Fundamentals: The Best Introductory Negotiation Role Play Simulations
- Teach Your Students to Negotiate Climate Change
- Download Your Next Mediation Video
- Managing Emotions in Negotiation: Teaching Students to Turn Emotions into an Opportunity for Mutual Gain
- The Value of Using Scorable Simulations in Negotiation Training
- Win-Win Negotiations