We were honoured to have  internationally-renowned mediator Ken Cloke as our guest this week in our ‘In Conversation With’ series available on the IPMO YouTube channel (this interview not available yet!)

Ken is one of the world’s foremost experts on mediation with over 4 decades of experience in conflict resolution.

Ken began his academic journey at the University of California, Berkeley where he became deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He worked as an administrative law judge for the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board and a judge Pro Tem for the Superior Court of Los Angeles. He has a Juris Doctorate, a PhD in history and an LLM and has gone on to lecture in several law schools including Harvard and Pepperdine University. In the 80s, his career shifted to mediation, he set up the centre for dispute resolution in Santa Monica, California, and over the last 4 decades has established himself as a leader in the field of conflict resolution, mediating thousands of disputes and authoring numerous influential books on the subject, including Mediating Dangerously (2001), The Crossroads of Conflict (2006) The Dance of Opposites (2013), His most recent major work, described as his "magnum opus," is The Magic in Mediation: A Search for Symmetries, Metaphors and Scale-Free Practices (2023). In 2006, he co-founded Mediators Beyond Borders International (MBBI) and served as its first president, aiming to build local skills for peace and address systemic conflicts worldwide.

Leading the conversation with Ken was Shane Dempsey, Partner in Arc Mediation and Deputy Chair of the IPMO, with 15 years of experience as a mediator and many hundreds of cases completed to date. Ken and Shane talked about the “magic in mediation” , the scalability of “higher order skills”, omni-partiality, AI, and delved into a shared interest in physics, mathematics and the natural world.

A truly fascinating and engaging conversation about meaning, metaphor & mediation.