Robert Bordone is an internationally-recognized expert, speaker, author, coach, and teacher on negotiation, mediation, consensus-building, dialogue, and facilitation. Currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, he served as the Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for more than two decades where he also founded and directed the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

He has taught thousands of executives, government leaders, healthcare professionals, military officials, and diplomats over the last two decades through tailored executive education and leadership programs for companies, schools, government and non-profits as well as through Harvard’s Program on Negotiation’s Negotiation and Leadership Executive Education Program and through the Harvard Negotiation Institute at Harvard Law School. He has also served as a visiting faculty member at the Georgetown University Law Center and at Boston University’s School of Theology.

In our negotiation courses and training, we mainly focus on how to reach agreements and resolve disputes. And that's good! Ultimately, it's what we want our students and executives to learn. However, sometimes it might create a bias that every negotiation or conflict setting is reconcilable, which is clearly not true.

With Bob we discuss why we live in increasingly polarized societies and what happens when we encounter irreconcilable conflict situations and still need to co-exist, live and work together with those we fundamentally disagree with. We define the concept of conflict resilience and how it differs from conflict management. Bob shares his experience with building conflict resilience, explains how to learn and train it, and what is the role of conflict management professionals during this process.