Definitions

authenticity | consensus | confidentiality | dispute resolution | training | mediation | neutrality

Authenticity is the convergence of inner belief and outer action.

Consensus

Consensus involves four elements: fairness, listening, hard work, and agreement.

Fairness means that the procedural rules are well understood, evenly applied, and unbiased. The best way to ensure these conditions for your group is to use consensus when developing the rules; that's also an excellent way for the group to start to click as a consensus building team. (Remember, at this stage, honestly to reassess the assumptions made about whether consensus is an appropriate tool in this case.) When working out ground rules, the saying "go slow to go fast" carries a lot of wisdom. Those hours and hours your group spends laboring over the ground rules will pay off — will, in fact, save you from destruction — when it comes time to deal with dioxins or unleashed dogs or whatever divisive issue looms ahead

Listening is the most important element, and is the key to what makes consensus so powerful. Ironically, it is also the most easily forgotten. Listening means sincerely dedicating oneself to the task of understanding another's information and point of view. It also means letting the other person know what one has heard. If you want to help build your group's capacity to build consensus, the strongest contribution you can make is to model the listening skills whenever possible: absorb the information, understand the point of view, reflect back your internal work. Eventually, when people who spend their careers on different sides of an issue listen to one another, are surprised by new information and perspectives, and candidly acknowledge their surprise, then you know the consensus process is doing its magic.

Consensus requires much more hard work than compromise. Compromise implies giving up as little as you can of your (perfected) position, in order to gain or maintain as much advantage as possible. The commitment to listening — to the possibility of learning more — is also a commitment to be willing to let go of one's old position in favor of a position that is actually better for one's own underlying interests. Amazing!

As the group works through consensus, they will start to behave like a team. The team will look for opportunities, wherever possible, to find a way to increase the capacity of the project so that they can satisfy the team's underlying interests as a whole. They will recognize that their varying points of view offer strength and challenge, rather than an invitation to mediocrity. And they will come to an agreement that is stronger, more sound, and more durable than anything they had dreamed possible.

Sometimes people jump too soon to the idea of teamwork, and this may be the reason consensus and compromise are confused with one another. Make sure people are using listening as a way to better understand their own interests. Then go from there to the possibility your group may come to genuinely care about, and identify with others' interests. Doing the second without the first pushes people into compromise. Compromise is a paltry thing by comparison with consensus. It means that people have decided to be more magnanimous (sometimes unrealistically so) about who gets the bigger slice of the pie. Consensus is about making the pie bigger.

Your group undoubtedly will want to wordsmith their own definition of consensus. The definition must contain these four elements. The following is a formulation that many groups have found useful as a starting point: Consensus is a fair process in which parties speak candidly and listen sincerely to one another in order to work out an agreement that is acceptable to all. Once they have worked through the process, the group might be ready for a more bold definition:

Consensus is a fair process in which parties speak candidly and listen sincerely in order to create and implement an agreement to increase individual and collective satisfaction of interests.

Confidentiality

Typically, an agreement to mediate contains a clause in which the parties (including the mediator) agree that whatever is said in the mediation shall remain confidential. In public policy mediation, confidentiality may be inappropriate, unrealistic, or vitally important, depending on the circumstances.

Dispute or Conflict Resolution

This is the tag people use to cover the gamut of facilitators, arbitrators, and mediators. It is synonymous with "Alternative Dispute Resolution" or "Appropriate Dispute Resolution."

The longer I practice, the less comfortable I become with the label. Yes, there are discrete, stuck places of conflict which can, with expert help, be released to the great benefit of the parties and of society. Facilitating that release is a fantastic feeling. It is only a small part of what I do to repay the parties' trust and investment.

Conflict is one of the factors which may limit (or enhance) a group's creativity and effectiveness. Being able to manage conflict so that it morphs into something constructive is the threshold requirement for good mediation and facilitation; but there are also many other factors that determine the resilience, productivity, reasonableness, or — yes — joie de vivre of a group.

Just as there is more to what I do than conflict resolution, there is also less. "Less", because in the environmental field in particular, and in public policy generally, it is not usually conflict resolution people are after, but conflict management. Helping people achieve a resilient equilibrium is a more subtle pleasure than helping them "resolve" a conflict, providing less fodder to the ego, but perhaps it is more satisfying in the long run for all.

Mediation

Mediation is a confidential conflict resolution process in which a trained, impartial third party facilitates the search for a mutually acceptable, self determined, durable agreement among disputants.

Neutrality or impartiality

It is important that the mediator be impartial and be perceived as impartial. If you read the elucidation of what that means in the mediation literature, you will see it is strongly infused with the old legal notions of what it means to be an impartial judge, or (worse yet) what it means to be a dedicated lawyer/advocate.

But a mediator is not a judge, and certainly not an advocate. The challenge for a mediator is not just one of putting aside bias, self interest, or conflicting loyalties. Thus, the discussions about whether a mediator is biased in favor of the party who pays the bill (the party who would mostly likely have need for mediators in the future, the party who is an image shaper in the community, etc.) are important, but barely scratch the surface. After all, if you are a mediator, you are supposed to be in charge of the process but not the substantive outcome.

So at its heart, neutrality doesn't have to do with the mediators' ability to resist leaning towards one substantive set or another. Neutrality has to do with not getting attached to the substance — the "answer" — whatsoever. (Again, compare that to a judge. A judge's job is to decide the substantive "answer" in a fair way — without bias. A mediator's job is to help you arrive at the substantive answer — her personal thoughts about the substance are, and remain, irrelevant.) One of my students explained it best "when you begin to shut down, to refuse to hear someone fully and openly, that is when neutrality is lost." And as soon as you start to form an answer, there is a high probability of shutting down to new and, especially, contradictory information; to resent and bully the parties if they refuse to fall into line, and so on.

Thus, in my practice, I find it much more helpful to think about detachment than I do about "neutrality" in the sense lawyers and judges talk about it. Here are the types of questions I ask myself: am I attached to having this job? (That's a tough one.) Am I attached to being important and valued and appreciated? (Tougher still.) Am I attached to showing the world I, Carie Fox, could bring these parties to agreement? (Sometimes agreement turns out not to be in the parties' best interest at that particular time.) Am I attached to getting good references or recommendations?

Mind you, all of these: gainful employment, agreement, professional recognition, references and future employment, are mighty fine things. And I would certainly worry about a trend in which my clients didn't appreciate me. But there's a difference between recognizing all those reactions as important pieces of feedback and being addicted to them. It is not the clients' role, after all, to fill the empty places of my self esteem.

Another feature of our profession is the attachment to healing others. There are extraordinary healing moments in mediation. It is a wonderful privilege to be a witness to them, a conduit for them. When I look for excellence in a mediator, however, I look for someone who enjoys but does not crave those moments. The need to heal seems to me to have a very high potential for meddlesomeness.