IMPLICATIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING AND MANAGING CONFLICT

I divide my thoughts on the practical meaning of our knowledge about media­tion into two segments: the relevance of this knowledge for the user (or would- be user) of mediation and its relevance for the mediation practitioner.

Implications for the Mediation User

Although mediation has become more familiar in recent years, this chapter reviews evidence that its use is often hindered by ignorance, resistance, and a lack of social support. Embroiled parties and the individuals with formal or informal authority over them can do a number of things to offset these tendencies.

Encourage Use of Mediation. Whereas research indicates that mediation is effective in many conflicts, parties are often reluctant to try it because they are unfamiliar with the process and distrustful of their adversary. For this reason, exercising tactful but firm pressure on antagonists to try mediation is often extremely helpful. Those in a position to exercise such pressure can take com­fort from the evidence that it has not been found damaging to the mediation process, so long as the parties retain the right to withdraw from mediation at any time.

A more pervasive issue is the unavailability of mediation in many settings, particularly in the workplace. There are at least two things that people with organizational authority can do in this regard. The first is to promote estab­lishment of formal mediation services. Typical settings for such services are part of a human resource department or ombuds office, but other creative locations can be found (in one university, a faculty development center became the locus for informal mediation of faculty disputes). Such services need to respect con­fidentiality and privacy, and the employee mediators need assurances that their work is valued.

A second way to foster use of mediation in the workplace is to give managers mediation training.

Be Prepared to Participate. Voluntarily seeking or accepting referral to medi­ation is almost always a sensible thing to do in any conflict. Disputants should enter mediation willing to suspend distrust and competitive stratagems at least long enough to give the process a chance. It is also important to keep in mind that active participation in the mediation process is likely to produce benefits even if a comprehensive settlement is not reached. Benefits include such things as gaining a clearer perspective on your interests and objectives as well as those of the other, making progress toward agreement on some issues, and the satis­faction of knowing that a thorough and sincere effort to work collaboratively has been made. In addition, parties who have made a good faith initial effort at mediation often return to the process later in the trajectory of their dispute, with positive results.

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. This fact contrasts with the mythic beliefs—strangely persistent among many mediators—that a proper mediator must be neutral, nondirective, and impartial or that a particular style is suitable for any and all disputes. The consumer of mediation services needs to be aware of the pluralistic world of practice. 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. (Detailed discussion of the nature and consequences of role stress for the mediator may be found in Kressel, 1985; and Kolb and others, 1994). Mediator stress is further 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 your 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 (the problem-solving style discussed earlier). 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. For example, when I began my work with Howard Gadlin at NIH, the ombudsmen were dubious that they had well- defined stylistic preferences. Our reflective case study procedures revealed that in the actual conduct of their mediations with NIH scientists they had, in fact, two implicit, but well-delineated mediator intervention schemas: a strategic style, described earlier, aimed at identifying and addressing underlying sources of conflict, and a more tactical approach, focusing on the issues as identified by the parties and eschewing the examination of any “deeper” dynamics. In addi­tion, our reflective procedures revealed that the ombudmen shared implicit, but discernible decision rules governing which schema to employ in a given case. Cultivating habits of systematic reflection can make this kind of knowledge explicit and available for systematic study.

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.

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 using 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 questions 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 (for example, concreteness, supportive confrontation), by monitoring counterproductive group processes, and by helping to coalesce reflective insights in a timely way. The task of reflective facilitation, like any quasiclinical 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 cope with its demands.