The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Managers and others with authority over the disputants should also be receptive to participating directly in the mediation process if invited to do so, since many conflicts are a reflection of broad dynamics that the parties alone may have limited ability to influence. Authoritative third parties often have knowledge or resources that can greatly expand the opportunities for creative problem solving in such circumstances.

  Accept a Broad Definition of the Mediation Role.

  Mediation comes in a great range of strategies and styles, and all appear useful under some circumstances. We have also seen that mediators with ostensibly the same stylistic orientation may have very different ways of enacting that style (i.e., different schemas of practice). The consumer of mediation services needs to be aware of these complexities. The important thing in judging the suitability of a given mediator—and we are always talking about that, not some abstract, uniform process—is to be able to give positive answers to some basic questions: Does the mediator communicate a reasonable definition of his or her role? appear evenhanded? make you feel safe? understood? free to make your own decisions?

  Implications for the Practitioner

  Mediation Is an Inordinately Stressful Social Role.

  Mediators work under conditions that are often emotionally unpleasant, and they usually work in isolation. The role also contains contradictory and ill-defined elements and is often poorly understood by disputants and referral sources alike (Kressel, 1985; Kolb and others, 1994). Mediator stress is compounded by the lack of proven theory on many central issues of professional behavior. Three practical implications for avoiding mediator burnout can be drawn: maintain realistic expectations, develop awareness of your own role and stylistic preferences, and become a reflective practitioner.

  Maintain Realistic Expectations.

  Like the participants in mediation, the mediator too should have realistic expectations for success. Since so much depends on the motivation and circumstances of the parties, do not expect every case to settle; as many as one-third or more do not, regardless of the mediator’s best efforts. Settlement mania is an unfortunate occupational hazard among mediators, who need to bear in mind that disputants often derive benefits from mediation independent of their ability to reach agreement, and that parties leaving mediation without an agreement but with a good feeling about the process and the mediator often return at a later point when their motivation and circumstances are more suitable to using the process effectively.

  Know Your Own Style and Role Preferences.

  Mediator activity is driven by strong, if sometimes unarticulated, ideas about how the mediation role should be enacted. There is evidence that some of these role interpretations may be superior to others for certain types of conflict, but our knowledge about these matters is sketchy. It is important that mediators become aware of their own role predilections. A mediator without this kind of self-awareness may be particularly vulnerable to unrealistic expectations for success and to social pressure from referral sources and others to produce settlements. Being clear about your own vision of the role also helps you give the parties appropriate expectations of what mediation requires of them—a crucial matter since disputants often enter the process with notions that are either vague or unacceptable (to you) of what will happen. For example, my colleagues and I tried to be clear with the divorcing couples referred to us by the family court that we saw our primary role as helping orchestrate a good problem-solving process, more or less independent of the goal of settlement. We did our best to socialize the parties to this version of the mediation role, but if they had other motives from which they could not be dissuaded (to reach a speedy agreement, or to give cover to a behind-the-scenes deal, or to extract revenge or expiate guilt), we learned to tactfully refer the case back to the attorneys and the court.

  Become a Reflective Practitioner.

  Although not every case can reach resolution, every case can be an occasion for reflective learning. A reflective practitioner can also make an important contribution to conflict theory since practitioners often have much intuitive wisdom about the dynamics of conflict that inform their strategic choices that they are not necessarily able to articulate without special procedures, as I learned in my work with Howard Gadlin and his colleagues in the NIH Office of the Ombudsmen. I have also noted the intriguing evidence from The Angry Roommates study (Kressel et al., 2012) that mediators’ tacit schemas of practice often contradict their explicit stylistic orientations or differ in surprising and important ways from colleagues with the same stylistic identifications. Your tacit schema of mediation practice may, ironically, also cut you off from using skills or knowledge you possess but unconsciously rule out using. Cultivating habits of systematic reflection can make you less vulnerable to such consequences.

  Reflective learning can be done in many ways, but a number of suggestions may be helpful (a detailed account of these ideas is found in Kressel, 1997). First, be systematic. Try to think reflectively after every session where possible, or certainly at the conclusion of mediation. Reflection can be made systematic with the help of even very simple debriefing protocols. Among the items that such a protocol might include are questions about the characteristics of the parties or their circumstances that appeared to facilitate or inhibit the mediation process and interventions or strategies that were particularly helpful or unhelpful. Much of what occurs in mediation is relatively familiar and uneventful. Periodically, however, puzzling, unanticipated, vexatious, or transforming episodes occur for which training and prior experience provide no ready answers. These “indeterminate zones of practice” (Schön, 1983) represent the greatest challenge to professional competence. Reflective case study protocols can be tailored to help identify and understand them.

  Second, reflect with others. Interaction with others can enrich reflective learning; indeed, it may be a precondition for it. A reflective partner or team can also serve as at least a provisional check on wishful or incomplete thinking and extend emotional as well as intellectual support. There are many ways to structure the interaction with teammates. Ideally, team meetings should be regular and give each member of the team an equal opportunity to debrief using the same reflective protocol to organize dialogue. A useful approach is to build the dialogue around persistent questioning of each other’s tactical choices. The best interrogatory moments are those in which the team is able to simultaneously convey a supportive stance toward the mediator whose case is being discussed, while pushing for articulation of hidden hunches about the conflict or the mediation role that produced the intervention being scrutinized. A typical series of queries might ask: “Why did you do [or not do] X?” “What were you thinking when you did X?” “Can you say more about the cues in the situation that led you to do that?” “Why didn’t you do Y or Z?”

  Interestingly, team discourse of this kind relies on the same sort of skill that mediation requires: empathy, persistent questioning, attentive listening, curiosity about underlying ideas, and willingness to tactfully challenge positions. In this sense, a reflective team can help develop an explicit understanding of mediation theories-in-action, while simultaneously presenting an opportunity to practice the interpersonal skills needed in mediation.

  The third suggestion is to formulate and test reflective hypotheses. No reflective method is immune to subjective bias or distortion, but the insights of reflection can be subject to a crude but useful verification procedure. The approach is essentially this: first, establish a reflective hypothesis based on observed similarities over a number of sessions or cases; second, at the next appropriate occasion, use the hypothesis to fashion a relevant mediation strategy; third, evaluate the consequences of the intervention strategy. Did it make sense to the parties? reduce tensions? lead to creative problem solving?

  My colleagues and I used this procedure to identify the central role of mediator question asking in divorce mediation. We noticed that even though we experienced a strong press to control conflict by u
sing exhortations and advice, they appeared far less useful than persistent and focused queries on topics directly related to the focal conflict. A mediation strategy was formulated reflecting this possibility (“In the next session, try to avoid exhortations and suggestions. Instead, ask as many open-ended, relevant questions as you can think of”) and its effects observed. Several things became apparent. Asking good questions was easier said than done, there were distinctive types of question that were useful for different purposes, and question asking was indeed a powerful vehicle for reducing tensions and moving the parties toward problem solving. Here again, the team discourse reinforced skills needed in mediation itself. In both contexts, it is important to develop hypotheses about underlying phenomena by persistent questioning and to devise strategies to test them.

  Finally, make use of a reflective facilitator where possible. My experiences with the reflective case study method as a research tool in divorce mediation and in the mediation of disputes among scientists at the NIH indicates that, particularly in group settings, reflective learning can be impeded by evaluation apprehension, implicit pressures to maintain group cohesion, a proclivity for talking in abstractions rather than about concrete instances, and the need to tolerate extended periods of ambiguity and confusion about case meaning. The presence of a skilled facilitator who is not a formal member of the group can help the group cope with such obstacles by reinforcing the norms of reflective learning (e.g., concreteness, supportive confrontation), monitoring counterproductive group processes, and helping to coalesce reflective insights in a timely way. The task of reflective facilitation, like any other quasi-clinical role, contains hazards of its own. There is an emerging need to develop the role as a subspecialty in its own right and to train people to meet its demands.

  IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING

  The ability to effectively manage conflict may well be considered one of the basic characteristics of the truly educated person. Training in mediation is an important subset of this ability. There is evidence that such training may profitably begin as early as the elementary school years. Ironically, although there is an extensive cottage industry in mediation skills training, much of it is geared to preparing contractual mediators to handle formalized conflict of the kind that typically ends up in court. Relatively speaking, training in generic mediation skills for the nonspecialist has been left to languish. This is doubly unfortunate, since conflict in the workplace, school, home, and community is ubiquitous and would often respond well to mediation—if only there were a mediator prepared to handle it. Several implications for training nonspecialists in mediation may be derived from the material presented in this chapter.

  Train Leadership

  The most effective way to multiply the benefits of mediation training is to offer the training first and foremost to the leaders of a group or organization. Leaders who understand the mediation process can make effective and meaningful referrals to mediation within the organization, can stimulate others within the organization to acquire and use such training, and are likely to turn to mediation in the event that serious conflict arises. In addition, leaders often need the skills of mediation as much as others in an organization or group do, if not more, because the power and authority that leaders possess often lead them away from collaborative modes of influence for resolving their differences with others. In theory, mediation training can reduce this tendency. In sum, organizations wishing to convey to the rank and file their serious commitment to collaborative conflict management can send no clearer message than to train their leaders.

  Teach a Hierarchy of Mediation Concepts and Skills

  We are still far from a complete understanding of which mediator activities and styles are most appropriate under which conditions of conflict, but for training purposes, it is obviously useful to distinguish between two broad classes of intervention: foundational and higher-order activities. Foundational activities are the reflexive and contextual interventions by which mediators establish rapport and provide a meaningful negotiating structure within a collaborative (rather than adversarial) set of norms. Skill in active listening and the ability to gather information about the dispute and the parties’ perspectives on it are the most salient foundational activities. Foundational activities also rest on mastery of certain basic concepts, such as the importance of distinguishing interests from positions and the primacy of situational forces rather than personality attributes in fostering destructive conflict. In problem-solving models, the higher-order activities are substantive and assertive behaviors by which mediators interject themselves forcefully into a conflict and play an active role in the problem-solving process, including imparting strategic direction to negotiations and shaping the substantive proposals.

  Although the more vigorous higher-order activities are often necessary in an intensely polarized dispute, the foundational skills and concepts are often sufficient to produce a collaborative orientation in the low-to-moderate-intensity conflict that permeates organizational and group life. They also have broad general utility for trainees, quite apart from their usefulness in mediation. For these reasons, the foundational skills should be emphasized in mediation training programs where training time is limited, as is especially likely if the trainees are organizational or community leaders.

  Create a Supportive Environment for Reflective Learning

  Learning the skills of mediation, including the foundational skills, requires direct practice and active learning through role play and simulation. These are often done to greatest collective profit in a fishbowl setting, where the entire group can share the same experience and compare ideas and reactions. Practicing skills in front of others also duplicates some of the tension associated with actual practice; for this reason, it is often highly valued by trainees for its verisimilitude. However, such a context also stirs anxiety and evaluation apprehension, which can be inimical to skill development and inhibit a reflective stance toward the learning experience. There are many ways to conduct experiential learning to produce a supportive and reflective learning environment. A four-stage schema for debriefing mediation role play has proved useful in this regard, and I describe it here for illustrative purposes.

  Reflective debriefing of a role play begins with a ventilation stage, during which the person who has been the mediator is encouraged to describe immediate feelings and impressions associated with the role play. The trainee is instructed to emphasize spontaneity (here-and-now feelings) and de-emphasize cerebral analysis. It is meant partly to be cathartic and partly to begin the reflective process. The other trainees are encouraged to respond to the target person by exercising empathic listening skills; they are also instructed to avoid critical evaluation or advice giving.

  There follows a stage of supportive feedback, during which members of the training group are asked to praise the mediator for things that were done well during the role play, with the injunction to be as specific and concrete in their remarks as possible—not, “You were calm,” but, “When one of the parties challenged your lack of experience as a mediator, you answered nondefensively and reasonably.”

  Once all supportive feedback has been given, a third, reflective, stage begins. The target person is instructed to describe any source of puzzlement, frustration, or surprise that occurred during the role play. Once again, the other trainees are required to respond in an empathic, nonevaluative manner. They are also encouraged to ask questions that may help clarify the underlying issues raised and offer suggestions to the mediator role player on strategies for handling them.

  The final stage, implementation, is a return to the role play and an attempt to make use of any lessons learned from the reflective debriefing. Throughout the process, the trainer ensures that trainees adhere to the debriefing procedures and models appropriate behavior and attitude.

  CONCLUSION

  The empirical and practitioner literatures of more than two decades make clear that mediation is an important and useful instrument for managing m
any forms of social and interpersonal conflict. Mediation is of documented value for conflicts occupying a broad middle range of difficulty, but for highly polarized disputes as well, it can bring distinctive benefits even if settlement is not reached. They include reducing tension, clarifying issues, and humanizing the adversary. Research and practice have also identified the structured, if never precisely predictable, stages that constitute the mediation process and the skills, attitudes, and behaviors characterizing the mediator’s art. Certain of these skills and attributes (such as the ability to establish rapport with angry parties, gather information through sustained questioning, listen actively and empathetically to contending points of view, suspend judgment, and foster norms of collaboration) would seem of such demonstrable value that training in mediation can well be justified as part of the learning experience of the well-educated person.

  My review also suggests some intriguing ironies. Thus, although mediation is an empirically validated process, getting disputants to use it often amounts to a hard sell, requiring the persuasive powers of a court or application of other powerful social and cultural pressures. A second irony is that most of our knowledge about mediation comes from the formal arena of legally definable conflicts; about use of mediation in the informal and ubiquitous conflicts of everyday life we know a good deal less. Here too there is evidence that the process is underused. It also appears to be the case that for all its established value, those who assume the mediation role enter a world of significant ambiguity and stress, some of which, ironically, derives from ignorance about their own schema of practice. A final irony is that the successful mediation process is still something of a mystery, as is illustrated by argument over such things as the meaning and importance of mediator neutrality, the appropriateness of highly assertive mediator tactics, and the relative merits of problem solving versus relational approaches to the mediation role.