Søren Viemose

Candidate for IACM President - 2012 Elections

Søren Viemose is owner and executive director at the KALØVIG Center, also known as “The Consensus Building”, north of Aarhus in Denmark. The center is a place where theory and practice can link together by providing a venue for negotiations, mediations, seminars, training, meeting and research. Søren works as an advisor in negotiations as a neutral and independent consultant and has extensive experience in leading large-scale development initiatives centering on the implementation of negotiation systems and new negotiation cultures involving innovative approaches to negotiations based on theoretical insights and best practices. He led the development of the Danish Victim Offender Mediation System and trained mediators for that system; the Joint Negotiation Education aiming to train 40,000 negotiators in the Danish sector and the new Academy of Workers Participation involving labor and management in a yearlong effort to create a joint initiative – the Academy.

He works for large companies and with most of the public and private Danish union and management associations. He has provided negotiation advice to local, regional and state, organizations in Denmark including The Ministry of Education, The Ministry of Labor, The Ministry of Finance, The Ministry of Research and Innovation, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Ministry of Environment, The Ministry of Social Affairs and The Ministry of Health. As a neutral he works on both sides of the table and often assists as a Mediator. Currently, Søren is facilitating negotiations between the Danish Government and numerous unions trying to renew the whole negotiations-system on the public sector labor market.

He has authored five books (in Danish) on labor-management relations and negotiations. Lobbyisme (Lobbyism), Forhandlingsteknik – Nye muligheder gennem påvirkning og opbygning af tillid (Negotation Technicque – New possibilities through influencing and building of trust) Konstruktive forhandlinger (Constructive Negotiations) Konstruktive Lokale Forhandlinger (Constructive Local Negotiations) Konstruktive forhandlinger – på arbejdspladsen (Constructive Negotiations at the job-level). He has authored articles and training materials dealing with negotiation, conflict management and consensus building

He teaches at Master of Conflict Mediation at Copenhagen University and frequently serves as a keynote speaker on issues of change, negotiation, gender in negotiation, organizational negotiation culture and mediation. Søren holds a Master of Science degree in Technological and Socio-Economic Planning from Roskilde University Center.

For more than 20 years Søren has worked closely with researchers in and outside Denmark. He has been an active member of IACM for many years and served as Local Arrangement Chair for International Association of Conflict Management (IACM) in 1995.

Key Initiatives during Søren Viemose´s term in office

Ever since I joined the IACM group I have enjoyed the vast amount of research done by the people here. Like others, I have engaged in the ever-running discussion on how to use more of the insights from research in the practical negotiations and conflict management processes that everybody encounters. I would like to develop many different kinds of initiatives - internally in IACM and externally between members of IACM and practitioners – to enhance the collaboration between research and practice.

This goes both ways: It is not only researchers that should reach out to practice. I hope to develop initiative that initiates a demand from unions, from diplomats, from business and other negotiators – a demand for knowledge and insights, tests and evaluations, developments and new training curriculums. Questions that we do not know the answers to yet can be the common starting-point for this kind of dialogue. I would like to develop a much easier transfer of real live data to research. Open the doors to the meeting rooms and inviting young and experienced researchers to look into the nuts and bolts of the negotiation room. I would like to develop IACM as a source of evidence-based advices and at the same time open for healthy doubt and a forum for further development of answers to the problems that are dealt with by negotiation and by negotiators of all kinds.