The International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR) hired Adroit to record events at its 2009 Annual Meeting. The first event was The Heritage Dinner, a large and boisterous social gathering that honored those who’ve been members of CPR for over 20 years. Using just a discrete mobile microphone application on an iPhone, Adroit CEO Noah G. Susskind interviewed several dozen members over the course of a couple hours, capturing CD-quality audio of some speeches and toasts too. We then edited, conceptually organized, and stitched clips of these interviews together into a narrated audio file that CPR posted on its website.

Over the next two days, we also attended the 2009 Annual Meeting open to all CPR members. These ADR professionals gathered to network, socialize, and hear presentations from some of the field”s leaders. (The keynote speakers were Bob Mnookin of Harvard Law School and Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch.) We made CPR a Podcast asking attendees what they like about CPR and why they come to the annual meetings. This, too, was used by CPR’s marketing department to engage with and try to increase membership.

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The Kheel Center on the Resolution of Environmental Interest Disputes at Pace Law School hired Adroit to:

• make recommendations about how to improve its website, and
• identify seasoned environmental dispute mediators in the US.

Unfortunately, the Kheel Center is locked into a website template by the mandate of the law school that houses them, but they were still able to implement some of our website design recommendations. And with the mediator roster we provided them, they are better equipped to build their virtual Rolodex and also refer people to environmental mediators when asked to do so.

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We recorded and edited audio of MIT and Harvard Professor Lawrence Susskind discussing his book Breaking Robert”s Rules. The book offers a deliberative group decision-making alternative to the archaic parliamentary procedure that structures (some would say handcuffs) most public hearings. The recording is available for free here.

Like most podcasts we make, we were able to cut about 90% of the tape because we have the microediting skills to seamlessly re-stitch audio recordings and the macroediting skills to know what”s relevant to the ADR field and what”s not.

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For this recording, CBI’s Hal Movius and Adroit CEO Noah G. Susskind discuss why individual negotiation training can fail to produce results for their organization. He also describes how to build organization-wide negotiation capacity.

Dr. Movius co-authored the book Built To Win, which is about building world-class negotiating organizations.\n\nHere again, we were able to draw on our knowledge of the field to have the conversation with the interviewee, and then we drew on our technical expertise to nip and tuck an interview into a more digestible length.

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For this Podcast, CBI’s Managing Director Patrick Field talked to Adroit CEO Noah G. Susskind about “public apologies”—apologies to the public on behalf of one”s self or organization. He discusses the apologies offered after The Challenger explosion, the Tylenol poisonings, and FEMA’s fake news conference.

This was used to promote Field’s trainings on public apologies for corporate and public clients. The The EPA’s Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center later hired him to lead their staff through workshops on this issue, and CBI then commissioned a second interview with Field to tease those.

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CBI’s Managing Director David Fairman talked to Adroit CEO Noah G. Susskind about why and how leaders should do consensus-building. He mentions Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter, as well debates over The Clean Air Act, vehicle emissions standards, and reintegrating ex-offenders. The purpose was to help market CBI as a leader in the field of leadership training and influence how the public thinks about leaders.

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