Tribute to Michael Leathes

When Jeremy Lack asked me if I would give this tribute to Michael, I felt immediately inadequate for the task. So many of you have had so much to do with Michael over the years – and you have so much that you also could share today in memory of Michael. And I do hope that today will give you all many opportunities to do just that.

But I am also conscious that one of Michael’s many endearing attributes was humility. So, I approach this tribute humbly. I shan’t repeat all that has been said in the obituary and in the many tributes which have been made online, courtesy of the IMI. But I hope that, in these personal remarks, I can do some justice to our memories of him.

I first met Michael in the very early 2000s courtesy of Oxford-based David Miles, himself a distinguished pioneer in promoting mediation. It was early in my mediation career and David, who had been very supportive of me, reckoned I should meet this enterprising promoter of mediation who worked as Head of Intellectual Property with BAT, managing BAT’s worldwide intellectual property rights.

I made an appointment and ventured into that impressive building on the Embankment, at which incidentally, courtesy of Michael, the late (and also much lamented) David Richbell, along with Jane Gunn, later hosted mediation seminars which some of you may remember.

I was quite nervous but Michael put me at my ease as we met in his office with its inspirational leadership quotations pasted on the wall. I recently found Michael’s description of these: “…over the years I have collected remarks made by great leaders, from Confucius onwards, which individually have made me stop and think.” Reflecting on this, Michael later recalled that some people might even regard him as a little “off the wall”…

In our meeting, he was attentive, incisive and interested. Thus began a friendship born of a mutual interest in thinking differently about how mediation could transform dispute resolution in the world.

In those early days, Michael paid me an enormous tribute by sending many of his BAT colleagues to the mediation training courses I was running in Scotland. That was quite something when CEDR and others were leading the training field in London.

Later, he introduced me to “Pangaea”, his multi -dimensional vision for how mediation and other forms of dispute management and resolution could change the world. It is a regret to me that I cannot show you today one of the eight-sided (as I recall) cardboard models that he had manufactured to demonstrate his vision – in a clear-out last year, my two models went off to the great shredder in the sky. But they captured Michael’s creativity and imagination so well.

Nadja Alexander and Lela Love quoted Yuval Noah Harari in the introduction to the Seven Keys project, to which I’ll refer later: “In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order”. That was Michael and that was what Pangaea was all about.

I recall a lunch with Michael and Tina Monberg, a Danish conflict resolution specialist, in her London home to discuss Pangaea’s potential. It seemed ambitious then – perhaps overly so – but the International Mediation Institute’s formation was the practical outworking of that vision. It is a profound sadness to me that I did not share some of Michael’s vision for the IMI and that led us to have to agree to disagree at times – and that affected our friendship I think, in ways I have only come to realise since his untimely passing.

Being a visionary, Michael was not afraid to be controversial. I recall a particularly challenging meeting of the International Academy of Mediators in London when Michael’s presentation of the concept of the IMI led to some real tensions and difficult exchanges. These included me being reprimanded subsequently by the then President of the IAM for promoting the view, again as I remember, that the IAM should engage positively with Michael.

In any event, the presence today of IMI as a key player in the dispute resolution world owes so much to Michael’s vision – and to his quite sacrificial commitment to establishing, guiding and maintaining the organisation in its early years. That legacy is a profound and indelible one – and will be recognised in the topics discussed this morning, just as it was in an IMI event held in London on Wednesday.

There was the Global Pound conference series too, of course – and, in some ways, of as much significance was the Seven Keys to Unlock Mediation’s Golden Age project that Michael initiated and coordinated with Mediate.com. What a rich and inspiring resource that is and another fitting legacy by which Michael can be remembered.

I also recall his remarkable conference presentations when, as a corporate user of mediation, he was able to articulate its benefits in ways that we mediators could not. In this regard, he travelled on a number of occasions to Edinburgh to support my efforts in Scotland.

Edinburgh was special to Michael because, each time he visited, he was determined to see the monument to Wojtek the bear which is located in Princes Street Gardens (I found an email this week in which Michael told me that his grandfather was part of the bear’s amazing Anders Army odyssey in World War 2).

The highlight of these visits was a major conference twenty one years ago in 2004 (where did the time go?) when Michael, as the keynote speaker, held us all spellbound. I have re-read his presentation and reviewed his slides this week. It would almost make you weep. Michael identified and foresaw all of the issues we still face now – and which drove the formation of IMI among other initiatives. It’s all there.

That presentation remains one of the most compelling arguments I have ever read not just for mediation but for a complete mindset change about the way we do things. It is just as relevant today as it was twenty one years ago.

I remember in particular two of his slides: one with a big round black dot and “Sell the hole not the drill” as its strap line (think about it); the other with a photograph of Michael shaving – his point being that he always shaved in the same way, as a matter of habit, and that, to adopt mediation, we needed to change habits that were deeply rooted.

Michael emphasized our personal responsibility for change, a responsibility he took very seriously. He told us that the easiest route to what he described as a solution orientation involves

“mindset change. It’s the easiest form of change because it is our own mindset that needs addressing first. It lies within our own gift, and it is based on our own efforts, to achieve it.”

Think about what that means for each of us….

Back then, Michael suggested reversing the use of the expression “ADR” so that it applied to litigation and arbitration as the exceptions to the normal practice of negotiation and consensual problem solving, in which mediation would of course be included. It’s so obvious, isn’t?

Recently, Jeremy kindly curated online gatherings when we heard from many of Michael’s colleagues and friends as they paid their own tributes. The word which was used most often was “leader” and I wish to come back to that. Another is “moral” – Michael had such integrity, a strong ethical sense, he did not seek fame, status or attention- far from it.

Modesty is a word which sums him up well. A complete absence of pretence or pomposity. Authenticity, humanity, decency. Deeply caring, generous, kind, compassionate, enthusiastic, persistent, passionate, warm, not at all competitive (unlike so many of us in the mediation field, if we’re really honest), supportive, always supportive, indeed so supportive of many of us here. In one of our last communications, he provided a lovely review for the first volume of my Mediator’s Musings (available at all good Amazon stores…).

In Peter Phillips’ review of Michael’s own book on Negotiation, he says
“There are some people who seem to have been put on the earth to bring out the most creative qualities of others. Michael Leathes is one of them.”

So true, as many of us can testify.

But back to leadership. Michael was a leader, not that he would ever accept that description of himself. He did have this to say about leadership however:

“Many of us, consciously or otherwise, get hung up trying to define leadership. We try to practice leadership, but don’t really know what it means to be a leader! We trip over the first hurdle because leadership actually defies definition. Like love, it is one of those things that escapes conventional description, yet we all know, recognise and applaud when we feel it because it’s obvious.”

That Michael was a leader is obvious to all of us. A pioneering and servant leader of the best kind. Indeed, in one of his many articles, this one with Manon Shonewille in 2020, he spoke of collaborative, mediative leadership where people “simultaneously lead and serve”. That was Michael.

In an article in Mediate.com in February 2021, he quoted Einstein: “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it’s the only means.” Michael certainly set us all an example to follow.

In his slides at that conference in 2004, towards the end Michael highlighted these words from the American futurist Joel Barker:

“Vision without action
is merely a dream.
Action without vision
simply passes the time.
Vision with action
can change the world.”

And he followed that slide with this from Victor Hugo:

“Vision is the mark of a leader.”

Michael had the vision and he took the practical action that marked him out as an exceptional leader.

Back in 2004, Michael also said this:

“The future is clear. Mediation is coming. It has to. …The world is changing. We business people need to lead that change so we can shape it to our needs. Victor Hugo (again) picked an appropriate turn of phrase in his classic 1852 work Histoire d’un Crime:

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.””

I suspect that, had he been reviewing these words twenty one years later, Michael would join many of us in celebrating how far mediation has come, not least with recent developments here in England, and I noted on Wednesday that current IMI Chair, Tat Lim, referred to the dawning of the “golden age of mediation”. And just this morning George Lim was telling me about all of the positive developments in his part of the world as a result of the work of the Singapore Mediation Centre.

Yet, I suspect that Michael would also share our frustration that there is so much still to do, not least as much of the world seems to be turning away from the central and essential messages of Getting to Yes, with all that may mean for our common humanity.

There is indeed still much work for us mediators to do and, in honouring Michael Leathes, we must re-pledge ourselves to continue the great work that he began, perhaps working even harder to reclaim the ground that could so easily be lost in what feels like the current regression to zero-sum.

It seems fitting to conclude this tribute with the words with which Michael concluded that 2004 presentation, words inscribed in Latin in The Portico at Prinsenhoftuin, Groningen, in that country which meant so much to him, The Netherlands, words which are as relevant today as ever:

“The past counts for nothing, the future is uncertain,
the present is unstable.
Do not lose this moment, which is yours alone.”

For all the many moments you gave us, Michael, thank you. And may you now rest in peace.

John Sturrock

John Sturrock is the founder and senior mediator at Core Solutions, Scotland's pre-eminent provider of commercial mediation services. As a pioneer of mediation throughout the UK and elsewhere, his work extends to the commercial, professional, sports, public sector, policy and political fields. He is a Distinguished Fellow Emeritus of the… MORE