Our mission is…
…to help empower everyone to be able to amicably resolve their issues with others and preserve valuable relationships by reaching a true 'Resolution', and not just a 'Conclusion', to their dispute in a kind and friendly way
Liam Moore, Founder of An Olive Branch, has a simple philosophy from his decades as a trial lawyer:
“If you force it, it will break!”
Sound familiar? It applies to all of us, especially when we find ourselves trying to resolve differences that arise in our own business or personal relations.
How do we know what is the best way to fix things? Liam has this simple rule of thumb:
There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. A 'right way' is one that works, or at least makes things a little better. A 'wrong way' is one that makes things worse.
Every dispute resolution process has its strengths and weaknesses. In the thousands of disputes litigated and settled for clients, there is a 'winner' at the expense of a 'loser', which is not a sustainable and lasting outcome, and one can expect to see the dispute resurface, albeit in some other guise, sometime in the future.
The essential components to a true once-and-for-all ‘resolution’, which are missing from confrontational dispute resolution processes, are empathy and conciliation. Both of these are the very foundation of An Olive Branch.
“As the sun makes ice melt,
kindness causes misunderstanding,
mistrust and hostility to evaporate.
”
An Olive Branch is designed on the dispute resolution processes known as Mediation and Conciliation. Mirroring Albert Schweitzer’s effect of kindness is the dictionary definition of ‘conciliate’, meaning: ‘to overcome the distrust or hostility of; placate; win over (e.g. to conciliate an angry competitor); to win or gain (goodwill, regard, or favour); to make compatible’.
An Olive Branch does exactly this by providing an intervention step that can be utilised at any stage to defuse tensions, remove conflict and salvage relations between the disputants themselves and thereby minimising the consequences of what went before.
“Traumatized people are afraid of conflict. They fear losing control and ending up on the losing side once again.”
“If you can learn a simple trick, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”