Welcome To The Facilitation Section

Please allow me to welcome you to the Mediate.com Facilitation Section. My name is Sterling Newberry. As the editor of this Section I plan to seek out content that will stimulate and inform you.

I see facilitation skills as a part of ADR and ADR skills as important to facilitation. To those of you seeking the services of ADR professionals, this Section will provide information that will help you in deciding whether facilitation services will help you resolve your issues. I hope to challenge other ADR practitioners, such as Mediators and Arbitrators, to see how facilitation fits into their work, as well. At the outset I see at least three ways this Section can develop, and welcome your ideas.

Facilitation skills are used in dispute resolution every day. These include:

• Problem solving,
• Idea Generation (brainstorming),
• Clarifying issues, and
• Prioritizing goals or solutions

This section will seek out and present information about innovative uses of these skills.

Conflict management skills are also used in everyday facilitation. Is there controversy at your meeting? Do different departments send representatives with hidden agenda? Are you involved in public participation meetings handling “hot button” topics? You probably use many conflict management skills like:

Balancing participation opportunities among several constituencies, and other strategies.

This section will seek out and present information on these skills as well.

My goal is to make the information interesting, and the format useful to you, the user. This format will develop as our experience with this medium develops. You are a key person in that process. As a consumer of ADR services, you are in a position to ask the questions that will challenge our ADR professionals’ mettle. As a practitioner member of this ADR community you have access to information of interest to consumers and to other practitioners. Please feel free to send in your ideas and suggestions, plus links to interesting websites or articles to me at: sterling@mediate.com.

                       

Sterling Newberry

Sterling Newberry is a Certified Professional Facilitator by the International Association of Facilitators, and has a BA in Sociology from Dickinson College, and a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Resolution from John F. Kennedy University. He believes that organizations are living organisms, that each person plays a vital role in the… MORE >