Tim Hicks is a conflict management professional providing mediation, facilitation, training, coaching, and consulting to individuals and organizations in the private and public arenas. From 2006 to 2014, after 14 years in private practice as a mediator/facilitator, he led the Master’s degree program in Conflict and Dispute Resolution at the University of Oregon to a position of national prominence as its first director. He returned to private practice in 2015, living in and working from his home in Eugene, Oregon. While he continues to provide interpersonal mediation, his practice has shifted more to facilitating effective communication, problem-solving, decision-making, and agreement building within and between groups in organizations and at the public level and assisting organizations in designing or improving their conflict management systems, policies, and procedures. His academic interests involve the intersections of social psychology, neuroscience, and conflict resolution.
Prior to his conflict management career, he and his wife started and managed two successful businesses, one that grew to 150+ employees doing business internationally.
Tim is co-author of the book The Process of Business/Environmental Collaborations: Partnering for Sustainability (Quorum Books, May 2000), a text on collaborative partnerships to resolve environmental disputes between corporations and environmental organizations, author of the article “Another Look At Identity-Based Conflict: The Roots of Conflict in the Psychology of Consciousness” (Negotiation Journal, Vol. 17, #1, January 2001), author of the novel, Last Stop Before Tomorrow that offers a perspective on climate change and our struggle to respond, and author of the book Embodied Conflict: the neural basis of conflict and communication (Routledge, 2018),
His Master’s thesis was a book-length study of the barriers to the use of mediation for the resolution of environmental/public policy disputes.
MA in Conflict Resolution, Antioch University, 1997
BA in English Literature, University of Western Ontario, 1972
Over 800 hours of additional training in communication, mediation, and negotiation.