“In May 2009, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School hosted the first Mediation Pedagogy Conference. Theorists, practitioners, and teachers of mediation from around the world who specialize in such diverse fields as education, law, international relations, game theory, and business joined to talk about teaching mediation.

Moving between plenaries and breakout sessions, attendees shared and compared reflections on topics that included the use of role-play simulations, live mediation videos, evaluation methods, teaching technologies, education theory, and interdisciplinary integration. PON commissioned Noah G. Susskind of Adroit Productions to create this Podcast capturing some of the attendees’ reflections throughout the conference.” -  The PON Clearinghouse website, 2010.

Download the Podcast here.

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The Faculty Environmental Network for Sustainability (FENS) at MIT is a group of 100+ faculty and staff from across all schools on the MIT campus who have come together to try to make sustainability a larger part of the MIT course offerings for both undergraduate and graduate students. This requires a significant consensus-building effort within the administration. To help engage with the public and the rest of the MIT campus, Adroit was hired to build them a website. It features:

• a list of all FENS members’ names, titles, and email addresses
• presentations about topics that “every environmentally literate MIT graduate ought to know”
• information about a proposed new undergraduate minor
• information about a proposed new graduate certificate
• announcements
• a moderated forum
• a contact page
• web traffic analytics

As well as other bells and whistles.

What we wanted to avoid. (Image source: paradisechamber.com)

When we were researching this project, Adroit found that most websites about the environment and sustainability followed the same predictable aesthetic:

• a blue/green/brown color palette to match sky/grass/dirt colors,
• idealized and pastoral images of nature (think: small globe/plant/droplet in a child”s cupped hands, etc.), and
• transcendentalist text.

What we used instead

In addition to being predictable, that design aesthetic wouldn’t (in our client’s estimation) have optimum appeal to an empirically-minded MIT audience that, while perhaps animated by some of the same underlying goals and concerns, studies things like designing sustainable cities, engineering greener fuel resources, and tracking global climate change metrics. “It can’t look like something that could be dismissed as tree-hugging hippie stuff,” we were told. “This community prizes hard science.”

So we built FENS a site that would package the information in a style more indigenous to the engineering mindset that dominates the MIT academic community. Thanks in part to the creation of this site, the FENS has already accomplished some of its goals.

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We write the summaries of the field’s new books for the quarterly Negotiation Journal, housed at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Part of what gives us an edge is that we stay abreast of the latest developments in the ADR field. Since writing summaries of the field”s recent books for NeJo is one of our ongoing projects, we are better positioned to help other clients with research and other projects.

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Karen Tokarz, Professor and Director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, hired Adroit to do research about the intersection of ADR and clinical legal education in South Africa.

With a fixed small budget and a narrow time frame, we returned everything we could find with summaries of major articles and an overview of the results. This research helped her contribute a chapter in the book Global Clinical Movement.

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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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When Adroit CEO Noah G. Susskind was an intern at the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, he interviewed Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler about Major League Baseball”s free agent negotiations.

The purpose was to add to PON’s catalogue of Podcasts about contemporary issues in negotiation and dispute resolution.

Wheeler mentions the Boston Red Sox’s talks with World Series MVP Mike Lowell that year (2008) and highlights three features of these negotiations–considerations of value, publicity and policy–and the implications for other negotiations.

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Harvard Law School Clinical Professor Bob Bordone recorded a Podcast about the 2007–2008 Writer”s Striker negotiations. The purpose was to contribute to the public discourse on this topic and add to the Podcast catalogue at the Program on Negotiation (PON).

Just as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers head back to the table, Harvard Law School Clinical Professor Bob Bordone offers some insight on possible next steps in the negotiations, including identifying sources of value and creating an interest-based process for future negotiations.

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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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