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.
Susskind was born with a prominent vascular birthmark (of the naevus flammeus aka "port-wine stain" variety) on his right cheek.
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.
The Science Impact Collaborative has established a way of applying consensus building in a wide range of resource management situations.
[15] 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.
[25] 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;[26] 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,[27] and clean-up of water contamination at a U.S. Department of Defense site in Massachusetts.
[34] At the national level in the United States, Susskind helped the US EPA undertake a series of negotiated rule-making experiments that led to the adoption of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act.
In addition, they have created the Aquapedia at Tufts, an open source advisory tool that describes and analyzes a growing number of case studies of efforts to manage water conflict around the world.
His book (with Jeffrey Cruikshank) Breaking the Impasse (1987) spells out the ways in which mediation can be used to resolve a range of multiparty disputes involving the allocation of scarce resources, the setting of public policy priorities, and the establishment of health, safe, and environmental standards.
Susskind produced a detailed guide that groups and organizations of all kinds can use instead a consensus building alternative to parliamentary procedure.
This book, Breaking Robert’s Rules (2006) has been re-written with co-authors in Japan, China, Brazil, France, Russia, Italy, Argentina and the Netherlands and argues that a consensus building approach can yield agreements that satisfy the competing interests of many parties, save time and money, and improve long-term relationships.
They try to show that the way companies support and enhance their overall negotiating efforts rather than emphasizing individual skill building yields better results.
Based on their work with a range of well-known multinational corporations, they describe an organizational development approach to improving negotiating capabilities.
Nevertheless, as Susskind points out, there are ways that "win-win" negotiators can claim a disproportionate share of the value they helped to create without ruining relationships or resorting to hard bargaining.