The popular The Mediator's Handbook presents a time-tested, adaptable model for helping people work through conflict. Extensively revised to incorporate recent practice and thinking, the accessible manual format lays out a clear structure for new and occasional mediators while offering a detailed, nuanced resource for professionals.
Starting with a new chapter on assessing conflict and bringing people to the table, the first section explains the process step by step, from opening conversations and exploring the situation through the phases of finding resolutionâdeciding on topics, reviewing options, and testing agreements.
The "Toolbox" section details the concepts and skills a mediator needs in order to:
Understand the conflict
Support the people
Facilitate the process
Guide decision-making
Throughout the book, the emphasis is on what the mediator can do or say now, and on the underlying principles and core methods that can help the mediator make wise choices.
Long a popular course textbook for high schools, universities, and training programs, The Mediator's Handbook is also a valued desk reference for professional mediators and a practical guide for managers, organizers, teachers, and anyone working with clients, customers, volunteers, committees, or teams.
Jennifer E. Beer, PhD, mediates organizational conflicts, facilitates meetings, and offers related workshops, regularly teaching a negotiation course at Wharton (University of Pennsylvania).
Caroline C. Packard, JD led Friends Conflict Resolution Programs for fifteen years and is an organizational conflict response specialist and mediator based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Eileen Stief developed the mediation process presented in the Handbook, training a generation of mediators to work with community, multi-party, and environmental disputes.
âWhy are they behaving like this? âWhat do they really want?â This chapter offers a few perspectives on conflict to help mediators assess whatâs going on and facilitate effectively. Some participants may also find these concepts helpful in understanding their conflict differently.
Disputes: The flashpoint of conflict
The surface of life is full of annoyances, limited resources, dislikes, clashing needs, surging hormones, cultural divides, put-downs, opposing opinions, and irreconcilable interpretations. These are organic, an inevitable part of everyday human experience, not an aberration or an interruption.
Most of the time we negotiate our incompatible needs and perspectives as best we can, and keep going. âDisputesâ are open disagreements about specific incidents and issues that have proved difficult to resolve or let go. They may arise from a one-time event, such as an accident. More often they are a visible flashpoint in an ongoing state of tension and distress we define as âconflict.â
Disputes can potentially be reconfigured or resolved through decisions made by the parties or for them. Resolving underlying conflicts is more challenging: business partners can decide to share profits 50-50, but canât just decide to feel trusting toward each other.
Interpersonal disputes often expand into conflicts when:
âąThereâs significant emotional investment because they believe something important is at stake.
âąCommitment to the relationship is not strong enough to hang in there and try to communicate and problem-solve. Or thereâs no relationship to begin with (conflicts between strangers).
âąPeople lack conflict-resolution skills (not IF they argue, but HOW).
âąPeople lack the resources to create solutions that work.
âąThey need the other partyâs cooperation.
Conflicts arenât broken parts that can be fixed up as good as new, like replacing the transmission of a car. Parties may believe that if the other side just did X, all would be well, but this is usually wishful thinking. There are people, relationships, networks, and systems involved. Major conflictsâand their resolutionâtend to leave marks. They change how people see themselves and feel about each other. They alter the trajectory of our lives.
Metaphors for understanding conflict
Weather
Being in a conflict can be confusingâwho is involved, what are their motives, who knows about this, what are the rules, what is this thing about anyway? In this way, conflict is like the weather, with its cycles of hot and cold, storms and sun, rain and ice, its unpredictable waves and winds. It forces you to pay attention. To disputing parties, interactions with the other party can feel similarly capricious and out of control. Episodes come and go, lightning bolts flash, the sun comes out for a while, and their emotions ride up and down.
Mediation will not leave them in a permanently sunny universe. Ultimately neither party is going to do exactly what the other wants, or be who they want them to be. Ideally, the parties leave mediation with the protection of a workable plan, and a willingness to communicate enough that they can live with the ebb and flow of the irrec...
