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On 10 September 2008, the Office of the Insurance & Savings Ombudsman ("ISO") held its third biannual conference. Recognising that all facets of communication are vitally important where matters are in dispute, we adopted a theme of "Communication" for the conference.

The day was focussed on workshops conducted by Allan Parker, Managing Director of Peak Performance Development Pty Ltd, and Nina Harding, of Nina Harding Mediation Services Pty Ltd. Both Allan and Nina, who are based in Sydney, are well known and well respected international practitioners and trainers in the dispute resolution field. In their respective workshops, Allan and Nina provided in-depth presentations which will assist the attendees in learning how to handle complaints more effectively

Additional sessions were conducted by Christine Smith, of the Write Group, on the power of plain English in today's business documents and an ISO update was provided by the ISO, Karen Stevens and the ISO Team Leaders, Lionel Hinton and Iain Opray.

The feedback received from attendees was extremely positive with comments such as:

• "Very informative, very enjoyable"
• "It reinforced skills already being used and introduced new ones"
• "All speakers very engaging"
• "Great idea to invite people from outside the insurance industry with a similar interest in good communication"

The ISO would like to acknowledge the contribution of our guest speakers and to thank those organisations which provided sponsorship or support: AA Insurance Ltd, American International Assurance Co (Bermuda) Limited trading as AIG Life, AMP Services (NZ) Limited, CIGNA Life Insurance NZ Limited, Farmers Mutual Group, ING Life (NZ) Ltd, ING (NZ) Ltd, Medical Life Assurance Society Ltd, and Sovereign Assurance Company Limited.

Conference - Communication

Nina Harding: Power point Presentation

Allan Parker: All attendees were given a copy of Allan's book "The Negotiator's Toolkit", which covered material from the workshop.

Christine Smith: Power point Presentation