This year’s Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) national conference features more than 120 speakers on diverse conflict resolution topics in over 75 sessions.  Join more than 400 other conflict resolution practitioners this October in Reno, Nevada from October 7-10.

Here is a brief glimpse of four of the many exciting sessions that are being offered:

Strategies Expanding Your Mediation Practice

Nancy Neal Yeend (Mediator, Silicon Valley Mediation Group) share the following overview of her session:

Mediators want to mediate, and yet to develop a thriving practice, essential business principles are a prerequisite. This intensive, hands-on workshop will enable participants to assess their strengths and weakness, design their own practical strategy, and develop a specific marketing plan for growing their business. This is not a theory session with a few quick tips. Materials and exercises are designed and developed, based on solid business practices, used by successful mediators.

Read more: http://reno.acrnet.org/5

Executive (In)Decision: Four Levels of Leadership Disagreement and Strategies for Resolving Them

Maria Simpson, Ph.D. (President, Personal Skills Management) shares the following overview of her session:

Leadership groups often think they agree on substantive issues and are then surprised when they disagree. The disagreements arise from many sources: incompatible or untrained members; lack of goal agreement or clarity; misunderstanding of members’ responsibilities; working at the wrong level of decision-making, etc. These difficulties can be sorted into categories of decision-making: adaptive, strategic, tactical; and technical or operational. Session participants will explore the dynamics of disagreements in each category and identify resolution tactics to address those dynamics, focusing on how to move the group toward working at a more appropriate level.

Read more: http://reno.acrnet.org/6

Metaphors and Shift: Advanced Discourse Intervention Skills for Mediators

Rachel Goldberg, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor, DePauw University, Conflict Studies) and Thomas H. Smith, Ph.D. (Asociace Mediatorů České Republiky) share the following overview of their session:

Research has shown that metaphors are fundamental to human reasoning, as we make sense of the new or emerging factors through reference to the familiar. People also use metaphors to create bridges to new ways of thinking so they are indicators of critical openings for shift. Participants will learn to listen for and detect metaphors as they frame and shape understandings and openings in conflicts, and learn how that framing works. They will learn to identify metaphoric structures in conflict language, and map how the Source concept limits the understandings of the Target (the object being explained with the metaphor). This research-based workshop combines background information with highly interactive skill building. Participants will learn how to work with metaphors intentionally to increase the complexity of their insight into parties’ frames and understanding, to help parties understand each other and find common language, and extend parties metaphors to work with them towards resolution.

Read more: http://reno.acrnet.org/7

Thinking Fast and Slow in Mediation

Gregory Firestone, Ph.D. (Director, University of South Florida Conflict Resolution Collaborative) shares the following overview of his session:

This interactive workshop will introduce participants to the field of behavioral economics including concepts described by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, in his best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Participants will have a chance to understand human factors uncovered in the study of human decision making and explore the relevance of behavioral economics to the practice of mediation. Such concepts as loss aversion, anchoring, judgment heuristics, and decision weights will be introduced and implications for mediation ethics and practice will be discussed.

Read more: http://reno.acrnet.org/8

Register for the conference [HERE]