Alternative Dispute Resolution
Claudia Murrow, ALB ’05, participates in Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation (PON)
As part of my ALB degree, taking advantage of the professional courses option, I enrolled in Conflict Resolution: Practical Negotiation Skills taught by Professor Jeffrey Prottas of Brandeis University. I wanted to learn the skills needed to resolve disputes that affect large numbers of people. I had sold real estate in the past and spent a lot of time bringing smaller parties to agreement. Through this course I learned that I had been using many of the theoretical points of negotiating skills. Instinctually, I had been separating the problems and issues from the people and focusing on their interests.
Claudia Murrow
After the CSS course, I wanted to learn more. I summoned all the confidence and courage that I had gained from my eight-year tenure as an ALB candidate and enrolled in Mediation and Participatory Processes, a course taught by adjunct professors David Seibel and David Laws, and offered through the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. PON, founded in 1983, was established to encourage new thinking in negotiation theory and to improve the practice of alternative dispute resolution. The course discusses the meaning of mediation (definitions, styles, and principles), how to justify intervention, how to diagnose a conversation, the human side of complex public policy mediation, and myriad ethical dilemmas. The course is open to all, but it tends to attract accomplished leaders in the world community. At my first class the participants began to introduce themselves, one saying, “I was the Canadian Ambassador to Haiti,” the next, “I work for the Department of Energy.” The other students were from all over the world and had varied backgrounds: lawyers, clergy, entrepreneurs, all trying to make the world a better place by learning the theory and practice of alternative dispute resolution. I felt more than just slightly intimated and under-qualified, but when I shared that I recently completed my undergraduate degree at the Harvard Extension School, cum laude, and I did it before my 17-year-old son graduated from high school, they all responded with a loud cheer. I began to relax. But not for long; this course is intense.
The class first covers plenty of theory, and then we got to role-play large scale negotiation scenarios such as convening several stakeholders from different states and interest groups to see whether we can help them reach consensus. It can get extremely real. I could be representing myself, 10,000 members of a group, or several labor unions seeking jobs from a potential new development. For example, I represented a developer who wants to build a certain number of residential units near the beach and agrees to many, but not all, of Save Our Shores demands. Save Our Shores wants to keep the shoreline available to the public with minimal environmental impact. Participants with opposing positions dug in: “I can’t see any way for this development to get the support of Save Our Shores.” “We’re talking about 3,500 jobs.” “We can’t further reduce the size of the project.”
Students, acting as facilitators, had to help the participants move away from their fixed positions and focus on their interests. The facilitator quickly finds out that he or she can have an unintentional impact on the parties that can spin the conversation in an unintended way. I’m glad I learned this in the safety of the classroom. The tools we studied and practiced in this course made the daunting task of finding a middle ground seem possible.
It has been a wonderful experience to learn the tools of successful facilitation, mediation, and negotiation, and the theories behind them, and to practice them in the heat of a valid role-play. I flubbed sometimes, and sometimes I was instinctively good. I also learned about my communication patterns, which are pointed out during the role-play debriefings. Being associated with PON has opened up a new world. PON is a lightning rod of alternative dispute resolution theory and practice, where participants meet, learn, and maybe even become those who have an impact on the institutions that will shape alternative dispute resolution in the future.
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