Dr Mike Talbot

Right, now that I’ve just about caught my breath after six days of re-jigging everything I do, it’s time to get some thoughts down (sitting, in shorts, at my home computer!) Suddenly, the mediation world has moved online and, if you’d have told me even a week ago that we’d be where we are now, I would have at least …

I’ve been thinking over the weekend about last week’s visit of Greta Thunberg to Bristol, where she led the ‘School Strike for Climate’ protest. Around 20,000 people joined in – and that’s despite Friday’s pouring rain! Now I’m not going to use this space to talk about climate change, the value or otherwise of direct action, whether we should have …

I wish I could be given £10 each time someone hears that I’m a mediator these days and they ask, ‘So, you gonna sort out this Brexit mess, then? Ha ha!’. (Actually, I wish I could get £28.87, but more on that later). And of course, Brexit is not the only conflict that is big in the news: there’s the …

Spending most of your working day trying to resolve people’s conflict can be quite draining. And although us mediators can learn how not to get drawn into other people’s disputes, inevitably we can find that a little bit of the hostility, persecution, and ill-feeling between people can end up staying with us. My own background is as a psychotherapist, and …

I have quite a lot to do with the National Health Service. Not only have I had to draw on its fantastic services from time to time, I also worked for it some years ago, and was married to one of its employees for 16 years. I now run the company that provides it with mediation, dispute resolution services, and …

OK, I give in. I have been resisting writing anything about Brexit for the last 32 months, but with the supposed leaving date just around the corner, with a petition to revoke Article 50 now topping more than 5.5 million signatures, and with the sight of one million people on the streets of London this past weekend, I think that …

About twenty years ago, I started practising workplace mediation. As a psychotherapist and organisational consultant, I had originally been offering stress management, soft skills training, and other services, but now some of them wanted to find a better way to resolve grievance-type issues and to head off formal processes. So off I went! My first dozen or so cases mostly …

The first in a series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of UK Mediation… Mediation can often be a confusing area to navigate for those looking to seek out its services. With so many providers populating the industry, all claiming to offer different things or be the best ones around, it can be quite the headache if you’re not entirely sure …

Do you wish you could broaden the toolkit you have for dealing with complaints? Would you like to find a way to speed up your complaints process, and to get a better outcome for both you and the complainant? If ‘yes’, then you may find that mediation could be exactly what you are looking for. Mediation is straightforward. It is …

So first of all, what’s a ‘complaint’? Well, in most people’s terms, we mean some kind of an expression of dissatisfaction: that the goods or services that someone got didn’t meet their expectations. Either that, or the consumer feels unhappy about how they were dealt with by the provider when things started to go wrong. Most complaints, whether they arise in …

Some of the most stressful times of our lives are spent dealing with our own and our loved ones’ medical emergencies or episodes of ill-health. Whether receiving bad news, spending prolonged periods in hospital, or having to make critical choices about care, our fear and upset can make it extremely difficult to contribute positively to crucial healthcare decisions. What we …