Lawrence Susskind

Lawrence E. Susskind (born January 12, 1947) is a teacher, trainer, mediator, and urban planner.

He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation and is a practicing international mediator through the Consensus Building institute.

Susskind received his BA from Columbia University in 1968.

At MIT, he earned a Master of City Planning and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning.

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.

Mediation as a tool for public decision-making emerged in the 1970s.

In the mid-1970s, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis asked Susskind to help more than thirty agencies, companies and community groups reach a timely agreement on how to handle the environmental impacts of a proposed mass transit extension in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He worked with the Kettering Foundation to facilitate a federal-state-local negotiated investment strategy for Columbus, Ohio.

This was followed by efforts to reach accord in Maine on where to site a low level radioactive waste repository; an appointment by New Jersey's highest court to settle a long-standing lawsuit regarding pollution clean-up in Camden (NJ) Harbor; and work with the Massachusetts Energy Facility Siting Council that led to the creation of the Facility Siting Credo.

Susskind has mediated disputes in the health care field (a controversial decision to relocate the Veterans Hospital in Meriden, Connecticut; efforts to revise a labor contract between the nurses union and the University of Michigan medical system), the field of housing and community economic development (a regional effort to allocate "fair shares" of affordable housing in the Hartford, Connecticut metropolitan area; resolution of growing tensions between elected neighborhood boards and the Honolulu city council); the field of public education (including a tense, racially based conflict over the drawing of school district boundaries in Rocky Mount, North Carolina); and in the environmental field, where he has mediated disputes over water allocation in Massachusetts, emission standards for a proposed solid waste incinerator in New York City, and clean-up of water contamination at a U.S. Department of Defense site in Massachusetts.

Susskind was the originator of the idea of creating state offices of mediation, many of which are still in operation.

He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1971.

Susskind has mediated fifty complex disputes in the United States and in other parts of the world, and is an authority on complex, multi-party negotiations.

In 1971, he joined the faculty in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and subsequently served as assistant head and head of the Department.

In addition to his appointment at MIT, he has been part of the inter-university Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School since 1982.

Susskind was born with a prominent vascular birthmark (of the naevus flammeus aka "port-wine stain" variety) on his right cheek.

He grew up in New York City and in 1983 married Leslie Tuttle.

They raised their two children in Southborough, MA where Susskind created the Southborough Open Land Foundation.

They currently live in Cambridge, MA.

In 1983 he became the first Executive Director of the interuniversity Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, which he co-founded with Roger Fisher (Harvard Law School), Howard Raiffa (Harvard Business School), Frank Sander (Harvard Law School), Robert McKersie (MIT's Sloan School of Management), and Jeffrey Z. Rubin (The Fletcher School at Tufts University).

Through PON, Susskind has helped to produce over 100 role-play simulation teaching exercises, teaching videos, and other pedagogical supports used internationally, including The Young Negotiator Program for middle schools, Workable Peace for high school students, and exercises taught at the most advanced graduate student levels.

At PON he is currently Vice Chair for Education and co-director of the Negotiation Pedagogy Initiative.

In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), 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.

He created MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Group, and since 1995 has held the title of Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning.

As a professor at MIT he has supervised 60 doctoral students and over 100 Master's students.

He played a role in the 2002 National Energy Policy Initiative (NEPI), undertaken with the Rocky Mountain Institute, which followed an effort a decade earlier to help win bi-partisan support for national energy strategy for the United States.

With Gregg Macey Susskind worked with the US Environmental Protection Agency to explore the use of consensus building approach to resolving environmental justice disputes.

This included organizing workshops for the heads of EJ groups from all over the Southeastern United States.

He assisted with the implementation of Project XL—a negotiated regulatory strategy of the Clinton Administration's aimed at demonstrating that a command-and-control approach could be replaced by a more informal facilitated dialogue and still ensure that air quality, water quality and other environmental mandates were met.

Along with Herman Karl from the United States Geological Survey, Susskind established the MIT Science Impact Collaborative in 2003 to train "science impact coordinators"—multidisciplinary professionals with a background in science who can work at the intersection of science, policy, and politics.

Based at MIT, the Science Impact Collaborative program trains graduate students who apprentice for two years as part of their graduate studies and assist public and not-for-profit agencies involved in natural resource management.

The Science Impact Collaborative has established a way of applying consensus building in a wide range of resource management situations.

He is director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program that has made the case for mediated approaches to international treaty-making and worked to support the land claims of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

He has held visiting professor appointments at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, University of Hawaii, University of California-Berkeley, European University Institute, and elsewhere.

He has been a visiting lecturer at more than 50 universities in 20 countries.

He and his fellow professors offer multiple training sessions each year to interested participants.

He offers sessions such as Senior Executive Program on Negotiation, Negotiation Master Class, Real Estate Negotiation, Dealing with an Angry Public, Water Diplomacy Workshop and many more.

His expertise in these areas of study allow him to offer innovative information to the public that would not normally have access to his teachings.