Practicing Narrative Mediation

Loosening the Grip of Conflict

John Winslade, Gerald D. Monk

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780470437698
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Arbitration, Negotiation & Mediation in Law
• Index: Law

Practicing Narrative Mediation provides mediation practitioners with practical narrative approaches that can be applied to a wide varietyof conflict resolutionsituations. Written by John Winslade and Gerald Monk—leaders in the narrative therapy movement—the book contains suggestions and illustrative examples for applying the proven narrative technique when working with restorative conferencing and mediation in organizations, schools, health care, divorce cases, employer and employee problems, and civil and international conflicts. Practicing Narrative Mediation also explores the most recent research available on discursive positioning and exposes the influence of the moment-to-moment factors that are playing out in conflict situations. The authors include new concepts derived from narrative family work such as "absent but implicit, " "double listening, " and "outsider-witness practices."

Chapter One

How to Work with Conflict Stories: Nine Hallmarks of Narrative Mediation

This book is about taking stories seriously in the practice of mediation. Taking stories seriously, to us, means treating them as having the power to shape experiences, influence mind-sets, and construct relationships. It also means seeing them as having something of a life of their own, as embarking on a mission that sometimes seems to drag people along behind. It means inquiring into the work being done by such stories in conflict situations, particularly into whether the protagonists in a conflict are happy with the direction that a story is taking them and whether they would prefer to go somewhere else.

Even in these few words, we have departed from some other common ways in which people understand stories. From time to time you may hear people say, “Oh, that’s just a story,” in a way that disparages the truth value of what has been said. The implication is that the account given is not fully accurate or that it is a deliberate distortion or that it is not very objective and therefore not worth much. In some forms of professional practice, stories are regarded as suspect versions of the truth of what has happened, and the job of the professional is conceived of as penetrating beneath the surface to the underlying truth. From this perspective, mediators might hear the different versions of what disputants tell them as layers of camouflage that cover over the facts. If mediators can only see through the stories to those hidden facts then they will be in a better position to help the parties deal with the substantive issues that divide them and move toward resolution.

It is not really surprising that this suspicious perspective is commonplace among professionals. It is, after all, the standard approach in most of social science to search for underlying patterns, foundational facts, or solid, verifiable, or even generalizable truths. Jerome Bruner (1986) refers to this as the paradigmatic approach. So when mediators undertake this search, they are doing what many others in many other branches of the human sciences have done.

Our concern is with the opportunity that might be missed in the process of quickly dismissing stories as unreliable. What might be missed is the work done by stories to construct realities, not just to report on them, apparently inaccurately. Rather than moving as quickly as one can away from stories and toward an emphasis on what is factual, objective, and patterned, we believe there is much to be gained by staying with the stories themselves, inquiring into the work that they do, and experimenting with how these stories might be reshaped in order to transform relationships.

In this first chapter we explain how we have been going about doing this kind of exploration. And we summarize what we see as the hallmarks of a narrative practice of mediation. We have written about narrative mediation before, and this book is intended to develop what we published eight years ago (Winslade & Monk, 2000). Since then we have tried out many ways of describing the practice of narrative mediation, seeking the way that will make it easier for practitioners to entertain embracing this practice. This chapter is in many ways a distillation of that experience.

Some years ago we read an article by Joseph P. Folger and Robert A. Baruch Bush (2001) on the hallmarks of a transformative perspective in mediation. We found this article helpful because it specified some ethical and theoretical commitments and also clearly pointed to some particular practices. Although we have many sympathies with what the transformative mediators are endeavoring to do, we also have some different emphases in our own work. This article sharpened our understanding of a transformative approach and made us notice places of difference in how we think about doing mediation. It also prompted us to identify the hallmarks of a narrative approach to mediation and to consider how we might state these hallmarks in succinct and accessible ways. We are grateful to Folger and Bush for cuing us to follow this line of inquiry.

This chapter results from that inquiry. For those who have not read our previous book, this chapter will introduce you to a narrative perspective relatively quickly. For those who have read our previous book, this chapter distills that work into a briefer statement.

Here then are nine hallmarks of a narrative practice in mediation. We shall list them all together and then expand on each one in turn.

1. Assume that people live their lives through stories.

2. Avoid essentialist assumptions.

3. Engage in double listening.

4. Build an externalizing conversation.

5. View the problem story as a restraint.

6. Listen for discursive positioning.

7. Identify openings to an alternative story.

8. Re-author the relationship story.

9. Document progress.

The first two hallmarks are about the assumptions that a mediator brings with him or her into the room. They therefore involve some preparatory work, reading about the background to these ideas and thinking through the implications of these assumptions. The other seven hallmarks are practices built on the foundation of these assumptions. They involve practice and rehearsal to develop facility with their use.

Hallmark 1: Assume That People Live Their Lives Through Stories (Stories Matter)

This hallmark is about the adoption of the narrative perspective in mediation. Some people who have not come across narrative mediation before respond to the concept by assuming that its focus is on fostering the telling of stories, or on the analysis of stories or on the autobiographical impulse. There is nothing wrong with these focal interests, but they are not what we mean by a narrative perspective. We are referring to the idea that narratives serve a shaping or constitutive purpose in people’s lives.

What do we mean by a narrative, or story? In the first place, we are speaking about the stories that people tell themselves or tell each other. In many social interactions people respond to the presence of the other(s) by telling a story. “How was your day?” is usually followed by the telling of a story. “What have you been doing lately?” produces a different response but still a story. When a lawyer in a courtroom asks, “What did you see happen?” the witness tells a story in response. When a police officer says, “Is there any reason why I should not give you a speeding ticket?” the driver might construct a justificatory story. When a spouse asks, “Why are you so late?” the husband or wife so questioned is less likely to respond with a list of rationally enumerated reasons than with an explanatory story. As people tell stories they establish for themselves, as well as for others, a sense of continuity in life. Stories give people the reassuring sense that life is not just a series of events happening one after the other without rhyme or reason. In terms of individuals’ sense of themselves, stories enable people to have a sense of coherence about who they are. However, as Sara Cobb (1993) has pointed out, some stories are more coherent accounts than others. Some retellings are more rehearsed than others. These differences can influence what happens to the stories that people tell in the context of mediation.

We are also using the word story to refer to the background stories with which each person’s cultural world is redolent. People do not just make up from nothing the stories they tell each other. From the cultural world around them, they draw on a range of resources and borrow ready-made narrative elements, and then they fashion these elements into a format intended to meet a communicative purpose. These narrative elements include plot devices (such as a beginning in medias res; a sudden turn of events; an act of God, or deus ex machina; a complicating action; a related subplot; or an expected or unexpected denouement); story genres (such as comedy, tragedy, melodrama, soap opera, or slice-of-life story); characterizations (such as victim, villain, rescuer, saintly hero, objectified target, flawed genius, powerful controller, or disempowered recipient); contextual settings, each with its typical conflict format (such as the workplace dispute, domestic dispute, community or neighborhood dispute, organizational dispute, commercial dispute, school conflict, or landlord-tenant dispute); and thematic driving forces (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, disability, power, recognition, authenticity, or employee rights).

As narrative mediators observe these narrative elements at work, they often hear the playing out of background cultural scripts of which the protagonists are not the original authors. Seyla Benhabib (2002) recommends, in fact, thinking of culture primarily in narrative terms. For example, if a person refers to a character such as the schoolyard bully, the controlling husband, the punitive boss, or the noisy neighbor, there are a number of stock story lines that will come easily to his or her mind. It is much easier for disputants to attempt to fit themselves and their fellow disputants into one of these well-known story lines than it is for them to make up a completely new plot. Apart from any other consideration, using stock narrative elements makes it easier to garner the recognition and support of third parties (friends, relatives, and even mediators).

Along with these background scripts come built-in assumptions about how the world is, how people should be, and how people should respond when the “rules” are broken. It is for these assumptions that we find it most useful to employ the terminology of discourse theory. The word discourse can be used in a variety of ways. We are using it to refer primarily to the conceptualizations of Michel Foucault (1972, 1978, 1980, 2000), who emphasized the function of discourse as repetitive practice out of which people form their understandings of the world they live in. These understandings then work in turn to inform the practices (both linguistic and behavioral) that people engage in. The motion of discourse is thus circular and works to seal off the possibility of thinking otherwise. Discourse is a function of the way that people use recursive patterns of language to embody social norms and to establish taken-for-granted understandings about how things are in the world. Discourses can be represented as statements of meaning about the ordinary and everyday aspects of life: eating fruit is good for you; it is polite to say thank you when offered something; family loyalty is of primary importance; it is important to stand up for yourself when attacked; hard work brings rewards; infidelity ends a marriage; and so on. Behind each of these statements lies a story that people have heard repeated many times or that they can slot into when it applies to their life circumstances. Many of these pieces of discourse are not at all contentious, but some are strongly disputed: for example, a man should be the head of the household; white privilege is based on natural superiority; homosexuality is not natural; disabled persons should be grateful for the charity they receive. Each of these meanings serves an organizing function in a power relation. It sets up exchanges between people as individuals and as social groups. Notice how the word natural is used in some of these statements. This illustrates the way in which discourses work to make some assumptions appear to have such undisputed ordinariness that they can scarcely be questioned. They appear to be, and come to be treated as, part of the natural order of the universe.

Hallmark 2: Avoid Essentialist Understandings (It’s Not All in the Natural Essence)

Essentialism is the habit of thought that invites people to always look for explanations in the intrinsic essence of things or of persons rather than in cultural influences like narratives. This has been a tradition of thought in Western culture since the time of the ancient Greeks. In recent times, however, it has come under constant critique, and alternative perspectives that are more dialogical, more relational, and more constructionist are being promoted.

Essentialist, or inside-out, approaches to conflict ascribe people’s behavior to their nature, whether this nature is thought of as personality or as an internal state involving emotion, attitude, and mood. “He’s an aggressive person!” “She’s manipulative by nature”; “He’s a victim type”; “Those two have a personality conflict”; “She is disturbed”; “He is ADHD.” Rather than understanding people as motivated by internal states, instinctual drives, forces immanent in the core self, or personality, we prefer to start from a different psychology, one that is built on an outside-in approach. From this perspective, we can see people’s interests, their emotions, their behaviors, and their interpretations as produced within a cultural or discursive world of relations and then internalized.

Thinking this way leads to a study of how power operates through discourse to produce expectations of people’s places in the world. It also leads to an understanding of narratives as setting up positions in a conflict, as constructing relations, as producing the feelings and emotions in these relations. This approach to emotional experience does not make a person’s feelings any the less real or any the less painful, but it might alter how others conceptualize their responses. Rather than assuming that a person’s feelings or thoughts are essential to who he or she is, one might think of them as essential to a narrative in which the person is situated and, therefore, when the story shifts, or the person’s position within the story shifts, the emotions will follow.

There is a delicate distinction here that needs to be stated with care. We are not suggesting that people’s strongly held feelings should be ignored. We agree with the emphasis in other approaches to mediation on empathetically acknowledging feelings and on encouraging disputing parties to recognize each other’s perspectives. But at the same time we want to be careful in how we think about just what is being recognized or empathized with. It is a position in a narrative rather than an essence of who the person is. It is constructed more than natural. It is real in its effects but it may be subject to change. Any one individual may be part of more than one narrative, may shift tracks to another line, may become something other than “who he is” or “who she is.” This leads us into the next hallmark, which is built on the rejection of the assumptions of essentialism. It is the beginning of a narrative practice in mediation.

Hallmark 3: Engage in Double Listening (There’s Always More Than One Story)

Double listening starts from the assumption that people are always situated within multiple story lines. It is a recognition of the complexity of life. We do not have a bias in favor of integrating a person’s multiple story lines into a singular or congruent whole, as some psychologies would argue one should. We do not believe that the integration of disparate narratives is a worthwhile goal for social practice. It is sometimes assumed that integration is necessary to combat confusion. In practice, however, people are well used to shifting seamlessly from one narrative to another, as they go from home to school, from home to work, from the peer group to the family, or from one relationship to another. Far from being confusing, multiple narratives often give people a range of narrative options within which to situate themselves and from which to respond. They are a resource to be treasured, rather than a complication to be integrated away.

In mediation we are, on the one hand, particularly interested in the conflict-saturated relationship narrative in which people are often stuck. And we are, on the other hand, also interested in the alternative relationship story out of whic...