Joshua Flax
Senior Advisor
Joshua Flax is CCC’s conflict management and negotiation analysis expert-in-residence. For over 20 years he served as a federal mediator at the U.S. government’s Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service (FMCS), having recently completed his Federal service as the agency’s deputy director for policy & strategy.
Flax was an early adopter of technology-enhanced mediation approaches and has joined CCC to conduct applied research in this space and help to develop more sophisticated technology improvements with the potential to help negotiators optimize outcomes at the bargaining table and avoid or resolve protracted conflict.
At FMCS, Flax mediated collective bargaining conflict for employers and unions in manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, entertainment, and school districts. His practice grew to include leading mediation teams tackling some of the most difficult public policy negotiations between the Federal government and public stakeholder groups, including national rail negotiations between Amtrak, the Federal Rail Administration, and 23 state-owned passenger railroad systems. He has also led mediation of some of the largest Federal-Tribal negotiations, such as those between the U.S. Department of Transportation and tribal negotiators representing all 574 Federally recognized Native American tribes.
Flax completed his graduate work and teaching fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2001, where he served on the faculty from 2013-2016, and continues to lecture on negotiation, collective bargaining, mediation, and tribal sustainable development negotiation processes with Federal and state governments.
