National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution

Wallace Warfield (legendary ADR figure and professor at George Mason’s ICAR) delivered a quite provocative keynote at the ACR conference in Atlanta.  View it in its entirety here. Some of his points:

“With a few exceptions, ADR is marginalized in issues of social conflict. We are relegated to tinkering around the edges. ‘When real conflict hits the ground, conflict resolution is nowhere to be seen.’”
”We tend to believe that the irrationalities all belong to the parties, not to us. We in fact bring those to the table and we need to be honest about that.”
”Part of this has come for a struggle for professionalization, which has become in part the ‘legalization of mediation.’ We used to be the ‘alternative’ to litigiousness, but I’m not so sure any more.”
”How do you evaluate and credential a moving target?”
”We need to embrace the change that is occurring in additional third party practice… We need to create new images of ourselves; a different kind of intervention requires a new type of identity.”

Frank Dukes and John Stephens have started a discussion about some of the points made on their Ning – I encourage you to check it out and participate:

http://highergroundswell.ning.com/forum/topics/challenging-conventional