Is mediation annoying to prospective clients?

I read a great little article in the Harvard Business Review recently. In Psst! Your Product Annoys Your Customers author Rita McGrath discusses ways to improve customers’ experience by taking away something they find negative about your product or service.

McGrath argues that anything customers find “irritating, inconvenient, painful, or even worse, scary and disgusting” can doom your prospects as a service provider.

Of course, my mind went straight to mediation and arbitration because “painful” or “scary” could be apt descriptors in some prospective clients’ minds. But my mind also went there because of the potential parallel between mandatory ADR and the pre-loaded computer software example in McGrath’s article: [Read more]

Mediation in the mainstream: the problem of observability

When Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman’s Bringing Peace into the Room first came out in 2003, I adopted it for one of my mediation courses at Woodbury College.

Prepping for class one evening, I read aloud to my husband an excerpt from a chapter by Peter Adler. When I finished, he gave me a long, sad look. “No wonder mediators have such a tough time convincing the public to embrace mediation. Even those who benefit from it think you didn’t do a damn thing.”

This is the excerpt I read him: [Read more]

Mediation in the mainstream: 5 successful strategies for spreading innovation

In my last article, Mediation in the mainstream: how to make it a successful innovation, I discussed ways to increase the rate at which innovation — like mediation or conflict coaching — gets adopted by the mainstream.

Now I’m going to discuss the five critical characteristics for innovation diffusion and the implications for ADR marketing. They apply to those of you who are marketing your own ADR firms and services, and to those of you who may be considering how your state, regional or national ADR association can contribute to public education about ADR.

1: Relative advantage
An innovation will spread more quickly if it’s perceived as better than the status quo – that is, its advantage relative to the status quo is quite clear. [Read more]

Mediation in the mainstream: How to make it a successful innovation

What will it take for ADR to reach a real tipping point? This may be the single most important question for practitioners who want to build their ADR practices and market themselves successfully.

There are five critical characteristics that, while not requirements for an innovation to meet success, can greatly affect the rate at which it gets adopted. And it turns out that all five are highly relevant to successful mediation marketing.

Know the five — and how to address them in your marketing efforts — and you have a powerful key not only for your own success, but also for helping ADR gain traction more broadly.

Back in 2000, when a Boston-based environmental sustainability nonprofit was one of my clients, I facilitated one of their retreats for college and university leaders who wanted to green their campuses. I had the good fortune to watch Alan AtKisson lead his Diffusion of Innovation game at the retreat. The point of the game, [Read more]