Syllabus

A wild number from Fat Boy Slim, to help you throw away your 20 years of learning inhibitions, leads the course into a spaghetti puzzle. Can you work well with others to reach an optimum solution?

Then you face surviving a plane crash in the desert – giving the opportunity to use some newly-learned discussion (and listening) skills.

In the next session you have to negotiate a non-compete clause in a franchise agreement and then handle a meeting about a dodgy property investment involving the directors of the local golf club. Again chance to practice the tactics of negotiation (everyone's a winner!) and the language you need for success.

The course moves on to persuasive language and rhetoric. We start with Aristotle, but not for too long, as you are given opportunity to present a “case brief” using some newly learned voice and body skills.

And then to the underlying rationale….Critical Thinking. Learning How to think, not What to think. The preamble ranges from smart bombs, and Mother Theresa to North Korean healthcare and the Virgin Mary; all to explain why good thinking is important to all, and critical to lawyers.

After that, some analysis of arguments - reasons and conclusions – followed by many problems to solve in groups about assumptions, flaws and over-drawn conclusions. In assessing evidence, we meet a shoplifter and a car thief (or are they?), exterminate dinosaurs, mountain gorillas and albatrosses, and weigh evidence against an egg-throwing student and against an exam cheat. The round-up is PEDs. ??? - well come along and find out what they are.

The final unit is about how our minds are misled through embedded shortcuts (heuristics) - something those old Greek never really got the hang of. But ultimate target here is to help you start to reset your own professional moral compass. Steering a path is easy when it's black or it's white; it's the gray that's difficult to navigate in life.

David Goulden