Mediation Musings: Selling Mediation
By: Sara Barnes
Rain has been around a lot longer than humans. Sun, too. As long as our species has existed there has been weather, and people have found lots of different ways to handle it. Early peoples all over the world created various devices to shield them from the elements. About the mid-1800s, someone invented the modern rain umbrella, originally designating the apparatus for men. As they began to be mass produced, umbrellas became more widely used. What did we ever do without umbrellas?
I lived for 35 years in NYC, and oh boy was I happy to use an umbrella when a downpour came along. For many who have never lived in a pedestrian culture, this may not be a familiar challenge. Here’s how it goes: There you are, walking along, and all of a sudden, the skies open. Then a remarkable example of supply and demand unfolds. An umbrella seller materializes, seemingly out of thin air, selling umbrellas. If I am walking in the city, in the rain, a simple umbrella is a good friend to have.
Mediation
There’s been human conflict as long as we’ve been around. Like the rain it can come without warning, and if it doesn’t settle by itself, it will need handling. Unresolved conflict certainly kept our foreparents up at night, just like it does us. Ancient peoples used third-party neutral helpers to assist, such as an elder clan member, religious leader or teacher. Fast-forward to today’s more formal mediation practice; it has been around for only about a half a century. Although mediation was originally connected to court as an alternative to litigation, over time a movement arose to make it more widely available and for all communities. Thus, community mediation was born.
Mediation is not the only way to help with intractable disputes. There are legal, legislative, activist, arbitrative, religious-counseling, conciliatory and negotiative routes––all with comparative advantages and disadvantages. I am biased, of course, but know that an excellent and proven approach to many types of disputes is mediation. A neutral facilitator helps those who are at odds talk it out and come up with a decision that they can live with. Mediation works in a high percentage of cases. Many more challenges would be dramatically helped by the mediation process.
What’s missing is a system like that of the umbrella seller in the rain. In my view, there’s a huge demand for mediation and an under-tapped supply of mediators in centers like ours. But the mechanism for bringing the cases into mediation in a simple and timely way is flawed. Why? Is it mostly because people don’t really understand what mediation is? Is it a bias against outsiders being brought into a set of challenges, revealing insiders flaws? Do folks just not know about the mediation principles like self-determination or voluntary participation? All of the above, and more, I think.
Imagine in some alternate world that two people have reached an impasse and are wringing their hands about what to do next. In my fantasy land, what would happen is, at just the right time and out of thin air would arrive the mediator, offering neutral facilitation to help those in need of this service. Selling mediation is not as simple as selling an umbrella in a rainstorm. Although there’s so much unaddressed need for conflict resolution and specifically mediation, the invention is still relatively unknown and dramatically misunderstood after 50 years. How can we broaden understanding among more of the population and encourage folks to ask for mediation when they need help with disputes?