Épisodes

  • Championship Mediation: How Dr. Stephanie Westmyer Thinks About Sports Conflict Resolution

    Championship Mediation: How Dr. Stephanie Westmyer Thinks About Sports Conflict Resolution
    Jan 2 2026
    Dr. Stephanie Westmyer’s Triangle Effect framework reveals how unresolved conflict silently undermines collegiate athletic performance, with student-athletes trapped between academic pressure, athletic demands, and fear of retaliation. Her innovative approach combining communication training, dispute resolution, and sports-specific mediation offers transformative solutions for teams where locker room tensions cost championships and careers. Interview by Anna Agafonova • Sports Conflict Institute • 24 min read Categories: Collegiate Athletics | Conflict Resolution | Team Dynamics Executive Summary The Framework: The Triangle Effect integrates communication skills, dispute resolution, and sports-specific context to transform how student-athletes navigate conflict from paralysis to championship performance. The Challenge: Student-athletes face triple pressure—academics, athletics, and personal life—while fear of retaliation keeps conflicts festering, ultimately manifesting as lost games and fractured teams. The Solution: Mediation as “championship opportunity” where neutral facilitators enable win-win outcomes, preserving relationships while resolving disputes that traditional hierarchical approaches cannot address. In this illuminating SCI TV interview, Dr. Stephanie Westmyer unveils a revolutionary approach to collegiate athletic conflict that challenges fundamental assumptions about team dynamics and performance. Her Triangle Effect framework—born from witnessing a well-dressed athlete “flubbing through his professional presentation”—addresses the hidden crisis undermining American collegiate sports: the systematic suppression of conflict that transforms championship potential into mediocrity. Westmyer’s unique credentials—doctorate in communication, master’s in dispute resolution, MLB experience, and personal athletic journey including conquering Rwandan mountains—position her to see what others miss. Her observation that “games are lost because of lack of connection and communication” rather than skill deficits reframes athletic failure from physical to relational causation.1 This insight proves particularly crucial in the NIL era, where financial disparities between quarterbacks earning millions and teammates receiving “scooters” create unprecedented locker room tensions. This analysis examines three critical dimensions of Westmyer’s framework: first, the unique pressures creating conflict in collegiate athletics; second, the systemic barriers preventing resolution; and third, the mediation model that transforms conflict from performance destroyer to championship catalyst. Her work reveals how student-athletes navigate impossible tensions between academic excellence and athletic dominance while institutional structures inadvertently perpetuate the very conflicts they claim to prevent. The Pressure Cooker: Understanding Student-Athlete Conflict Dynamics Westmyer’s characterization of student-athletes as performing “two jobs”—academics and athletics—understates the complexity they face. These young adults navigate triple demands: maintaining GPA for eligibility, performing at elite athletic levels, and managing personal crises from family illness to parental divorce. The intensity at Division I levels transforms this juggling act into psychological warfare where “intrapersonal communication”—internal dialogue—becomes battlefield for self-worth.2 Westmyer’s observation that this leads to “low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression” reveals mental health crisis masked by athletic glory. The fear of retaliation Westmyer identifies—athletes staying quiet to avoid being benched—creates toxic silence where conflicts metastasize from manageable disagreements to team-destroying cancers. This dynamic proves particularly destructive in football where “slightest move, eye contact, head gesture” determines success or failure. When unresolved interpersonal conflicts disrupt these micro-communications, championship teams become dysfunctional groups of talented individuals. The “undercurrent running through the team” Westmyer describes operates like organizational infection, invisible yet debilitating. High school athletes face additional pressure as Division I dreams intensify every interaction. Westmyer’s insight that these students are “caught between their coach and their parents” reveals triangulated conflict where young athletes become battlegrounds for adult ambitions. This dynamic establishes conflict avoidance patterns that persist through collegiate careers, creating athletes technically proficient yet relationally incompetent—precisely the combination that destroys team chemistry when pressure peaks.3 The NIL revolution compounds these pressures exponentially. As Anna Agafonova’s research reveals, financial disparities between teammates create resentments that traditional ...
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    22 min
  • Go Slow to Go Fast: Building Repeatable Negotiation Success Without Red Tape

    Go Slow to Go Fast: Building Repeatable Negotiation Success Without Red Tape
    Dec 19 2025
    Repeatability in negotiation delivers risk insurance, not bureaucratic burden. Level 2 organizations achieve consistent success through simple fifteen-minute protocols that align strategy, capabilities, and incentives while avoiding the hundred-page manuals that paralyze execution. By Joshua A. Gordon, JD, MA & Gary Furlong, LL.M. • Sports Conflict Institute • 18 min read Categories: Negotiation Systems | Organizational Excellence | Strategic Implementation Executive Summary The Problem: Organizations resist systematic negotiation processes, fearing bureaucracy will slow execution and stifle creativity in dynamic deal environments. The Framework: Level 2 repeatable competency integrates organizational capabilities with individual factors through lightweight protocols that enhance rather than impede negotiation velocity. The Solution: Fifteen-minute pre-briefs aligned with strategy create consistency without complexity, raising both floor and ceiling of negotiation performance. Executive resistance to negotiation process typically manifests as a single objection: “We don’t want to slow things down with too much process.” This perspective fundamentally misunderstands repeatability, confusing risk insurance with red tape. Like teaching a seven-year-old to pack their backpack properly to avoid four return trips, organizational negotiation requires minimal upfront investment to prevent massive downstream rework. The principle of “go slow to go fast” revolutionizes negotiation capability by recognizing that fifteen minutes of structured preparation saves hours of reactive scrambling. Organizations achieving Level 2 repeatable competency discover that consistency accelerates rather than impedes execution, creating predictable success instead of random victories. This transformation requires neither hundred-page manuals nor certification programs but simple protocols that align organizational and individual capabilities. This analysis examines how organizations build repeatable negotiation competency without bureaucratic burden. The discussion proceeds in three parts: first, understanding the six integrated capabilities that enable repeatability; second, demonstrating how lightweight processes replace heavyweight documentation; and finally, implementing sustainable systems that raise both performance floor and ceiling simultaneously. Understanding the Challenge: The Six Integrated Capabilities Repeatable competency emerges from integrating three organizational capabilities with three individual factors, creating systematic excellence without suffocating flexibility.1 Strategy, values, and direction establish organizational North Stars that prevent divisions from sending contradictory signals to counterparties. Consider multinational apparel brands where cost-focused, sustainability-driven, and speed-obsessed divisions negotiate independently with the same suppliers. Without unified best-deal definitions, these organizations create confusion that undermines all negotiations regardless of individual negotiator skill. Human capital and organizational investment transform individual expertise into institutional capability through shared history and playbooks. Mid-sized technology companies rotating salespeople annually demonstrate the catastrophic cost of absent institutional memory.2 New representatives re-open settled issues, damaging relationships while confusing counterparties who question organizational stability. The worst negotiation outcome involves not rejection but confusion—confused counterparties stop paying attention, viewing the organization as unpredictable and therefore untrustworthy. Repeatable processes capture lessons, agreements, and patterns that transcend individual tenure. Incentive alignment represents the most conceptually simple yet practically complex capability challenge. Freight companies rewarding tonnage over profitability watch negotiators accept low-margin, high-risk contracts to hit volume targets.3 Government negotiators passionate about green energy push outcomes their cost-focused ministries cannot support. Professional sports teams hire relationship-focused negotiators who ignore analytics despite salary cap dependencies on data precision. These misalignments create internal competition replacing market competition, with organizational units fighting each other rather than advancing collective strategy. Individual capabilities of fit, knowledge, and interests must align with organizational requirements to enable repeatability. Labor negotiations exemplify fit failures when organizations hire external lawyers focused exclusively on minimizing union gains, damaging relationships that must endure for decades after negotiators depart.4 Regional utilities negotiating fuel contracts without environmental compliance expertise demonstrate knowledge gaps that repeatable processes identify early. Basketball teams where individuals ...
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    17 min
  • The Hidden Epidemic: How One Bobsledder’s CTE Journey Is Revolutionizing Brain Health Advocacy

    The Hidden Epidemic: How One Bobsledder’s CTE Journey Is Revolutionizing Brain Health Advocacy
    Dec 12 2025
    Will Parson’s journey from Team USA bobsledder to brain health advocate exposes the devastating reality of CTE in sliding sports, where athletes routinely experience G-forces exceeding 80Gs. His candid account of cognitive decline, teammate suicides, and the transformative power of hyperbaric oxygen therapy challenges sports organizations to confront their responsibility while offering hope through accessible treatment models that could save lives across athletics and beyond. Interview by Anna Agafonova • Sports Conflict Institute • 25 min read Categories: Athlete Welfare | Brain Health | Sports Safety Executive Summary The Crisis: Bobsled athletes experience G-forces up to 84.5Gs—17 times what was previously disclosed—leading to epidemic levels of CTE, depression, dementia, and suicide among retired competitors. The Revelation: Symptoms often masquerade as other conditions, with athletes rationalizing memory loss, personality changes, and cognitive decline until crisis points force recognition. The Solution: Parson’s American Postconcussion Wellness Center model offers free hyperbaric oxygen therapy to athletes and veterans, addressing the $12,000 treatment cost barrier that leaves sufferers without options. In this powerful SCI TV interview, Will Parson, former Team USA bobsled athlete, breaks decades of silence surrounding brain injury in sliding sports. His story—marked by teammate suicides, personal cognitive collapse, and ultimate recovery—exposes a hidden epidemic affecting not just bobsledders but athletes across all high-impact sports. Parson’s journey from electrical engineering student to elite athlete to brain health advocate reveals how normalized violence against the brain has created a generation of suffering athletes abandoned by the very organizations that profited from their sacrifice. The numbers Parson shares shatter comfortable assumptions about sliding sports safety. While athletes were told they experienced 5 G-forces, actual measurements revealed spikes of 84.5Gs on “mild” tracks—forces that would be fatal in sustained exposure but create cumulative brain damage through repetitive micro-trauma.1 This revelation, combined with seven recalled crashes over nine years and countless subconcussive impacts, paints a picture of systematic neurological assault disguised as athletic competition. This analysis examines three critical dimensions of Parson’s testimony: first, the insidious progression of CTE symptoms that athletes rationalize until crisis; second, the institutional failures that perpetuate suffering through denial and abandonment; and third, the revolutionary treatment model Parson is pioneering to provide hope where none existed. His work challenges fundamental assumptions about sport, sacrifice, and society’s obligation to those who entertain through self-destruction. The Invisible Decline: How Champions Rationalize Their Own Destruction Parson’s account of symptom progression reveals the insidious nature of CTE development. The electrical engineering student who once excelled at complex mathematics found himself unable to calculate change at a store—yet rationalized this as stress or fatigue. This cognitive dissonance, where elite athletes normalize profound dysfunction, represents CTE’s cruelest mechanism: it attacks the very faculties needed to recognize its presence.2 Parson’s admission that he “minimized” and “rationalized” symptoms reflects not personal weakness but neurological sabotage of self-awareness. The nocturnal panic attacks Parson describes—waking disoriented, needing visual cues like European paintings or Olympic Training Center brick walls to establish location—reveal hippocampal damage affecting spatial memory and emotional regulation. His strategy of identifying location through environmental markers demonstrates remarkable adaptation to progressive neurological decline, yet also shows how athletes develop coping mechanisms that mask severity from both themselves and medical providers. The “mild, calm guy” experiencing panic represents fundamental personality alteration, not temporary stress response. The ex-girlfriend incident Parson recounts—failing to recognize someone intimate enough to jump into his arms—exemplifies prosopagnosia (face blindness) associated with temporal lobe damage in CTE.3 His rationalization that he “meets so many people” as an athlete demonstrates how high-achievers construct elaborate explanations for neurological symptoms. This self-gaslighting, where accomplished individuals convince themselves that dramatic cognitive changes are normal, delays intervention during potentially treatable stages. Parson’s morning routine adaptation—keeping coffee or Coca-Cola bedside because he “couldn’t get out of bed,” then determining day and month upon waking—reveals executive function collapse requiring external scaffolding for ...
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    26 min
  • Negotiation Karaoke: Why Organizations Lose Millions to Ad Hockery

    Negotiation Karaoke: Why Organizations Lose Millions to Ad Hockery
    Nov 14 2025
    Organizations practicing ad hoc negotiation lose an average of 10% of deal value through randomness and chaos. Understanding ad hockery—the organizational equivalent of karaoke after three drinks—reveals why even sophisticated companies fail at negotiations and provides clear pathways to systematic capability. By Joshua A. Gordon, JD, MA & Gary Furlong, LL.M. • Sports Conflict Institute • 19 min read Categories: Negotiation Capability | Organizational Development | Strategic Management Executive Summary The Problem: Organizations rely on individual heroics and last-minute tactics rather than systematic negotiation processes, creating expensive failures masked by occasional victories. The Framework: Ad hockery represents Level 1 in the negotiation capability model, characterized by absence of process, measurement, and organizational learning. The Solution: Three simple tools—negotiation charter, pre-brief protocol, and post-action review—transform chaos into repeatable competency. Picture a CEO entering an elevator for a $10 million negotiation while frantically googling “negotiation tactics” on their phone. This scene, tragically common across industries, epitomizes what we call ad hockery—the organizational equivalent of karaoke after three drinks. You might occasionally nail the high notes, but consistency remains elusive, and the audience suffers through the failures while remembering only the rare successes. Ad hockery pervades modern organizations despite sophisticated approaches to manufacturing, software development, and sales. Companies deploy Six Sigma, Agile methodologies, and detailed playbooks for nearly every business function except negotiation. When billions in value hang in the balance, organizations inexplicably revert to hoping their negotiators possess magical abilities to succeed through charm and intuition alone. This analysis examines ad hockery as a systemic organizational failure, revealing its true costs and providing actionable pathways to capability. The discussion proceeds in three parts: first, understanding how ad hockery manifests across industries; second, quantifying the visible and invisible costs of negotiation chaos; and finally, implementing simple tools that transform random outcomes into repeatable excellence. Understanding the Challenge: Ad Hockery in the Wild Ad hockery thrives in the gap between organizational sophistication and negotiation practice. Consider a regional hospital network procuring protective equipment during stable market conditions.1 When prices remain predictable and suppliers compete freely, strategic thinking suggests building relationships, mapping alternatives, and perhaps creating regional buying consortiums. Instead, procurement handles each purchase independently, treating strategic preparation as tomorrow’s problem. When respiratory outbreaks trigger panic buying and prices surge exponentially, the unprepared organization signs five-year exclusives at triple market rates, then celebrates securing inventory while ignoring the long-term financial hemorrhage. Infrastructure projects reveal ad hockery’s devastating impact on complex negotiations. Imagine a consortium bidding on a $2 billion smart city project where the lead negotiator develops food poisoning seventy-two hours before submission.2 The backup negotiator, unfamiliar with industry terminology and unaware of recent labor agreements adding 20% to overtime costs, submits a bid containing unlimited liability for data breaches and missing critical supplier dependencies. The organization wins the contract—a victory ensuring financial losses for the next decade. Yet management celebrates the win, illustrating how ad hockery masks failure as success. Sports organizations demonstrate ad hockery’s opportunity costs through broadcast rights negotiations. Major federations focus intensely on European and American markets while delegating Asian rights to whoever remains available Thursday afternoon. These peripheral negotiations, handled without understanding mobile-first consumption patterns or social platform monetization, surrender tens of millions in digital rights buried in standard television contracts.3 Years later, organizations litigate to reclaim rights they never realized they possessed, having signed away future value through present ignorance. The pattern remains consistent across industries: time pressure plus absent process equals expensive surprises. Organizations possessing sophisticated approaches to every other business function abandon discipline when negotiating. Jazz musicians practice scales for years before improvising; ad hockery attempts improvisation without foundational competence. The result resembles not artistic expression but chaos masquerading as flexibility, with occasional random successes reinforcing dysfunctional patterns. Case Illustration: The Lottery Winner Scenario A technology ...
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    31 min
  • The NIL Paradox: How Financial Opportunity Tests Team Cohesion in College Sport

    The NIL Paradox: How Financial Opportunity Tests Team Cohesion in College Sport
    Nov 7 2025
    Anna Agafonova’s groundbreaking research reveals how NIL’s financial opportunities paradoxically undermine the very team cohesion necessary for success. Her findings expose critical blind spots in implementation, from international student exclusion to the corrosive effects of financial disparity, while offering frameworks for preserving unity in the money era. By Joshua Gordon, JD, MA • Sports Conflict Institute • 20 min read Categories: NIL Policy | Team Dynamics | College Athletics Executive Summary The Research: NIL negatively impacts team trust and cohesion, with effects magnified in larger programs where financial disparities between star players and role players create jealousy, resentment, and reduced unity. The Blind Spot: International student-athletes on F-1 visas cannot participate in NIL due to federal immigration restrictions, creating systematic exclusion that undermines both recruitment and team equity. The Solution: Proactive conflict management frameworks, financial literacy education, and team cohesion initiatives must accompany NIL implementation to preserve competitive advantage. In a recent episode of SCI TV’s Sports Conflict Advantage, I spoke with Anna Agafonova, whose unique journey from international boarding school to USC athletics to organizational psychology research positions her as one of the few scholars systematically examining NIL’s impact on team dynamics. Anna’s persistence in pursuing sports conflict resolution—despite being told by law school professors that the field “doesn’t exist”—has produced critical insights into how financial opportunity paradoxically undermines the very cohesion necessary for athletic success. The timing of Anna’s research proves prescient. As college athletics enters Year Four of the NIL era, with revenue sharing on the horizon and transfer portal chaos intensifying, the initial euphoria over athlete compensation has given way to recognition of unintended consequences. While celebrating athletes’ newfound earning power, we’ve overlooked how seven-figure quarterbacks sharing locker rooms with walk-ons surviving on meal plans creates dynamics that no playbook can overcome. Anna’s findings that “comparison is the thief of joy” resonates particularly as teams discover that talent without trust rarely translates to victory. This analysis examines three critical dimensions of NIL’s impact on team dynamics: first, the corrosive effects of financial disparity on trust and cohesion; second, the systematic exclusion of international athletes and its implications for global competitiveness; and third, the frameworks necessary for managing inevitable conflicts in the money era. Anna’s research, combined with emerging best practices, offers a roadmap for preserving competitive advantage while embracing athlete compensation. The Financial Fracture: How Money Divides Teams Anna’s research into football programs reveals a fundamental truth obscured by NIL celebration: financial disparity corrodes team chemistry. Her finding that larger programs experience more severe trust degradation than smaller ones initially seems counterintuitive—shouldn’t better-resourced programs handle NIL more effectively?1 The answer lies in opportunity concentration. In Power Five programs, starting quarterbacks command seven-figure deals while offensive linemen—whose protection enables those quarterbacks’ success—receive nominal compensation. This disparity doesn’t just create jealousy; it fundamentally alters team dynamics. The psychological mechanisms Anna identifies deserve careful examination. When teammates invest equal time, effort, and sacrifice yet receive vastly different compensation, cognitive dissonance emerges. Players must reconcile competing narratives: the team-first culture coaches preach versus the individual-first reality NIL creates. This tension manifests in reduced effort during practice, diminished sacrifice for teammates, and fractured locker room relationships.2 Anna’s observation that “locker room issues don’t just disappear once you make it to the field” underscores how financial resentment translates directly to competitive disadvantage. The comparison dynamic Anna highlights—”comparison is the thief of joy”—operates particularly viciously in athletic contexts where performance metrics are public and constant. Unlike professional sports where salary disparities reflect market valuations and collective bargaining agreements, college NIL lacks transparent frameworks for determining worth. A backup quarterback might earn more through social media influence than a starting linebacker who anchors the defense. This disconnect between contribution and compensation violates fundamental fairness principles that underpin team cohesion.3 The temporal dimension compounds these challenges. Professional athletes enter leagues understanding salary ...
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    21 min
  • Navigating the Safeguarding Landscape in Sport

    Navigating the Safeguarding Landscape in Sport
    Oct 24 2025
    Ryan Lipes of Global Sports Advocates brings unique dual perspective to safeguarding challenges, having built the U.S. Center for SafeSport from within before defending athletes from without. His insights reveal critical gaps in grassroots education, jurisdictional boundaries, and the delicate balance between protection and due process that defines modern sports integrity. By Joshua Gordon, JD, MA • Sports Conflict Institute • 18 min read Categories: SafeSport | Sports Governance | Athlete Welfare Executive Summary The Evolution: SafeSport has matured from crisis response to systematic prevention, expanding beyond sexual misconduct to encompass physical abuse, emotional abuse, and failures to report. The Challenge: Critical gaps persist at grassroots levels where participants often don’t know they’re covered by SafeSport policies, while case processing delays undermine justice for both claimants and respondents. The Future: Success requires faster case resolution, better education at community levels, and strategic coordination between Olympic governance and other sports ecosystems. In a recent episode of SCI TV’s Sports Conflict Matters, I had the privilege of speaking with Ryan Lipes of Global Sports Advocates, whose career trajectory from Manhattan prosecutor to SafeSport architect to private practice defender offers unparalleled perspective on America’s evolving safeguarding landscape. Ryan’s unique vantage point—having helped build the U.S. Center for SafeSport during its critical early years before transitioning to represent both claimants and respondents—illuminates the complex tensions between protection and process that define modern sports integrity efforts. The conversation arrives at a pivotal moment. Eight years after the Nassar revelations catalyzed SafeSport’s creation, the system faces both validation of its necessity and criticism of its execution. Recent high-profile cases involving Olympic coaches, the expansion of Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies (MAAPP), and ongoing debates about jurisdictional boundaries have intensified scrutiny of how American sport protects its most vulnerable participants. Meanwhile, parallel challenges in anti-doping—where Ryan and his colleague Paul Greene have achieved notable victories—reveal similar tensions between regulatory intent and practical implementation. This analysis examines three critical dimensions of safeguarding evolution: first, the expansion from reactive investigation to proactive prevention; second, the persistent blind spots at grassroots levels and jurisdictional edges; and third, the systemic improvements necessary for sustainable athlete protection. Ryan’s insights, grounded in both prosecutorial rigor and defense advocacy, offer a roadmap for organizations navigating this complex terrain. The Evolution: From Crisis Response to Systematic Prevention Ryan’s account of SafeSport’s genesis corrects a common misconception: Congress didn’t create SafeSport; the U.S. Olympic Committee did, initially as an internal unit before spinning it off in 2017.1 This organic evolution from within the Olympic movement matters because it reflects recognition by sports leaders themselves that existing structures had failed. The legislative backing that followed—first the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017, then the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic and Amateur Athletes Act of 2020—provided crucial federal authority and teeth that purely contractual arrangements lacked. The jurisdictional expansion Ryan describes reveals safeguarding’s true scope. While public perception often limits SafeSport to sexual misconduct cases, its mandate encompasses physical abuse, emotional abuse, bullying, hazing, harassment, and critically, failures to report—the systemic enabler that allowed predators like Nassar to operate for decades.2 This broader mandate reflects hard-learned lessons: abuse rarely occurs in isolation, and cultures that tolerate boundary violations in one domain often harbor violations in others. The shift from pure response to prevention represents SafeSport’s most significant evolution. Ryan highlights the development of MAAPP—detailed policies governing adult-minor athlete interactions that address previously unregulated spaces. The texting example proves instructive: rather than waiting for inappropriate communications to cross into misconduct, MAAPP establishes clear boundaries upfront. Group texts are acceptable; one-on-one texts are not. Parents should be copied; private channels should be avoided. These bright-line rules eliminate ambiguity that predators exploit while protecting well-intentioned coaches from false accusations.3 Training evolution parallels policy development. Ryan notes that SafeSport’s educational offerings have become increasingly sophisticated, moving from generic awareness sessions to ...
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    33 min
  • Prescription Without Diagnosis: Why Your Negotiation Training Keeps Failing

    Prescription Without Diagnosis: Why Your Negotiation Training Keeps Failing
    Oct 17 2025
    Organizations waste millions on negotiation training that fails to deliver results. The Negotiation Assessment Tool (NAT) reveals why: without diagnosing capability gaps across strategy, human capital, and incentives, even world-class training creates only frustrated negotiators operating in broken systems. By Joshua A. Gordon, JD, MA & Gary Furlong, LL.M. • Sports Conflict Institute • 17 min read Categories: Organizational Assessment | Negotiation Strategy | Capability Development Executive Summary The Problem: Organizations default to skills training as the universal solution for negotiation failures, ignoring systemic issues in strategy alignment, organizational investment, and incentive structures. The Framework: The Negotiation Assessment Tool diagnoses organizational capability across three dimensions and four maturity levels, providing targeted improvement pathways. The Solution: Systematic diagnosis followed by incremental capability building creates sustainable negotiation excellence rather than temporary skill enhancement. In medicine, the principle stands unchallenged: prescription without diagnosis constitutes malpractice. Yet organizations routinely prescribe negotiation training without diagnosing underlying capability gaps, creating a cascade of wasted resources and unrealized potential. This fundamental error explains why billions spent on negotiation training yield minimal sustainable improvement in organizational outcomes. The Negotiation Assessment Tool (NAT) transforms this paradigm by introducing systematic diagnosis to organizational negotiation capability. Rather than assuming skills training solves all problems, the NAT reveals the complex interplay between strategy alignment, human capital investment, and incentive structures that determine negotiation effectiveness. This diagnostic precision enables targeted interventions that build lasting capability rather than temporary competence. This analysis examines the NAT methodology and its transformative impact on organizational negotiation capability. The discussion proceeds in three parts: first, understanding why traditional training approaches fail; second, examining the NAT’s diagnostic framework and capability model; and finally, implementing systematic improvement through targeted intervention strategies. Understanding the Challenge: The Training Fallacy Organizations confronting negotiation failures exhibit predictable behavior: they commission training programs. This reflexive response, what we term the “training fallacy,” assumes that individual skill deficits cause poor negotiation outcomes.1 The logic appears sound—better-trained negotiators should produce better results. Yet empirical evidence reveals a different reality: organizations spending millions on world-class training often see negligible improvement in actual negotiation outcomes. The problem lies not in training quality but in fundamental misdiagnosis of root causes. Consider a university athletic department negotiating broadcast rights where revenue maximization, exposure optimization, and student-athlete welfare compete as organizational priorities. Without clear strategic alignment, negotiations swing wildly depending on which stakeholder dominates the room.2 No amount of skills training resolves this fundamental confusion about organizational objectives. Negotiators armed with sophisticated techniques but lacking strategic clarity become more frustrated, not more effective, as raised expectations collide with systemic constraints. Human capital underinvestment compounds strategic misalignment. Organizations rely on individual expertise without building institutional capability, creating dangerous dependencies on star negotiators. When construction firms depend entirely on veteran negotiators’ intuitive understanding without mentoring programs, preparation templates, or debrief processes, retirement triggers capability collapse.3 Decades of accumulated wisdom evaporate because no systems exist to capture, codify, and transfer negotiation knowledge across generations of practitioners. Incentive misalignment represents perhaps the most insidious capability destroyer. Custom home builders pursuing lifetime customer relationships while compensating salespeople on single-transaction margins create inherent conflict between organizational strategy and individual behavior. Research from organizational psychology demonstrates that misaligned incentives override training effects, as rational actors optimize for personal reward rather than organizational benefit.4 Training negotiators to build relationships while rewarding transactional victories ensures behavioral reversion to incentivized patterns regardless of skill development. Case Illustration: The Retiring Expert Syndrome A government contractor’s negotiation success depended entirely on one senior negotiator’s relationships and intuitive ...
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    14 min
  • From Bookstore to CAS: Building Bridges Across Sports Dispute Resolution Cultures

    From Bookstore to CAS: Building Bridges Across Sports Dispute Resolution Cultures
    Oct 8 2025
    Dr. Roberto de Palma Barracco’s journey from finding a dusty sports contract book in São Paulo to becoming a CAS arbitrator reveals essential lessons about cultural bridging in international sports dispute resolution. His insights on vulnerability, transparency, and the future of ADR challenge conventional approaches to cross-border sports conflicts. By Joshua Gordon, JD, MA • Sports Conflict Institute • 14 min read Categories: International ADR | Sports Arbitration | Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution Executive Summary The Problem: Cultural gaps between Latin America, Europe, and North America create systemic inefficiencies in sports dispute resolution, while lack of transparency limits access to precedent and learning. The Framework: Effective cross-cultural dispute resolution requires curiosity, vulnerability, and soft skills that law schools don’t teach but experience demands. The Solution: Building transparency initiatives, expanding the ADR continuum beyond arbitration and mediation, and leveraging AI for triage represent the future of international sports dispute resolution. In a recent episode of SCI TV’s Sports Conflict Advantage, I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Roberto de Palma Barracco, whose remarkable journey from aspiring diplomat to CAS arbitrator and FIFA mediator illuminates critical lessons about cultural bridging in international sports dispute resolution. Roberto’s story begins not in courtrooms or arbitration chambers, but in a used bookstore in downtown São Paulo, where a dusty volume on football employment contracts sparked a career that would span continents, languages, and legal systems. What makes Roberto’s perspective uniquely valuable isn’t just his credentials—though his resume spans from Sport Club Corinthians Paulista to CAS, from the University of São Paulo to the University of Oregon—but his lived experience navigating the cultural gaps that often determine success or failure in cross-border sports disputes. As someone who speaks Portuguese, Italian, English, Spanish, and French, and who has practiced across Latin America, Europe, and North America, Roberto embodies the cultural fluency that modern sports dispute resolution desperately needs. This conversation revealed three critical insights for the future of international sports ADR: first, the primacy of soft skills and cultural awareness over technical legal expertise alone; second, the urgent need for transparency initiatives that transform arbitral silos into accessible precedent; and third, the untapped potential of expanding dispute resolution beyond traditional arbitration and mediation models. These themes challenge conventional approaches while offering practical pathways forward. Understanding the Challenge: Cultural Gaps and Access Barriers Roberto’s observation about cultural gaps in sports dispute resolution strikes at a fundamental challenge facing international sports governance. “There’s a cultural gap from what happens in Latin America in general, and Europe, or Latin America and North America,” he notes. “It’s rare to have someone able to walk all those spaces.”1 This isn’t merely about language translation but about understanding how different legal cultures conceptualize jurisdiction, process, and fairness itself. The transparency deficit compounds these cultural challenges. Roberto describes discovering sports law through a chance bookstore encounter because “there was no program, no classes on sports law whatsoever in any of the main universities in Brazil” during his LLB studies. This access problem persists today in different forms. While CAS maintains a database for its awards, Roberto points out that it’s “a database focused on arbitration sports, and FIFA is actually developing one relating to soccer.”2 The fragmentation means practitioners and scholars lack comprehensive visibility into how disputes are actually resolved across different systems and cultures. The soft skills gap represents perhaps the most underappreciated barrier. Roberto learned “the hard way” at Brazil’s National Dispute Resolution Chamber (NDRC) that law school teaches legal doctrine but not the cultural navigation essential for effective dispute resolution. “There are some things you just have to experience to learn,” he reflects. “Those soft skills only come with time.”3 This experiential learning requirement creates systematic disadvantages for practitioners from underrepresented regions who lack access to international dispute resolution forums. The state-centric perspective dominating legal education further widens these gaps. Roberto’s discomfort with “state-centric perspectives” during law school led him to explore “non-state jurisdictions” that were “kind of arbitration, but not exactly arbitration.” This conceptual rigidity in traditional legal education fails to prepare practitioners for...
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    46 min