Vickie,

Thanks for your comments. I'm happy to have found your blog as well. I'll definitely keep reading it. I've already added it to my blogroll.

Have a great day,
Guy Harris

No matter how hard we try to see things from the other guy's perspective, unless we ask the type of questions one of your recent posts suggests we pose, it's just about impossible for us to do so.

I know.

I spent 25 years attempting to read the tea-leaves of my opponents' legal and narrative strategies as I litigated and sometimes tried commercial disputes to a jury.

Now that I've been mediating those same types of disputes for four years, I finally "get it."

We lawyers (and too many business people) start communicating with the idea that we need to persuade the "other guy" to see OUR point of view.

When you get business people together in a room after years of litigation, not only the mediator and the attorneys, but the people in conflict, often realize that the miscommunications that caused the litigation in the first place have only hardened and been made more resistant to resolution by the legal process.

Often, what "the other" needs and wants turns out not to be all that different than what my clients had once been willing to give.

As you suggest, "working to see the other person's perspective" is easier than all of us think. Who, what, where, when, why, how; and, if not this then what? are all the questions we need to ask to clarify the confusion that derails the best of plans. In 9 cases out of ten, the parties are then able to relatively quiclky resolve disputes that have decreased productivity and the quality of everyone's lives for years.

Thanks for picking up this post. It's a pleasure to find your blog, which I'll be adding to my link page.

All best,

Vickie Pynchon