Lawrence Susskind

Who is Lawrence Susskind?

Lawrence E. Susskind is a teacher, trainer, mediator, and urban planner. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation. He has mediated fifty complex disputes in the United States and in other parts of the world. Since the early 1970s, he has helped to train thousands of negotiators and mediators in the public and private sectors and to promote the use of mediation to resolve facility siting, regulatory, community development, and environmental protection disputes. Susskind’s ideas about the techniques and strategies of consensus building have helped to define best practice. In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute, a Cambridge-based not-for-profit that is now a leading mediation service provider. Through CBI, he has advised the Supreme Courts of Israel, Ireland, and the Philippines; helped to facilitate a variety of international treaty-making efforts; developed the techniques of conflict assessment and joint fact-finding; evaluated collaborative adaptive management efforts; and created new strategies for building organizational negotiating capabilities.