"Into the Woods: Mediation in Its Adolescence"

Keynote Address by Dr. Joseph Folger to the Australian National Mediation Conference, May 1998. [edited from a transcript]

I really like the theme of this conference, and it is a good starting place to jump off for some of these ideas I wanted to discuss with you this morning. The theme of shaping the future reminded me of that crucial period of all our lives, namely adolescence, when we often shape our own futures for the rest of our lives. And we often have to deal with those decisions and those imprints for the rest of our lives. It is a time when we set the foundation for who we become, how we view people, how we view our role in the world, our aspirations, our goals. And in many ways I see mediation and the mediation movement as being in a stage of adolescence. It has grown and developed significantly over the past 25 years. In the United States, it has expanded into many different arenas that you know about. But, at the current time, there is a lot of inner questioning, a lot of turmoil, a lot of exploration, testing, trying on clothes that don't fit quite well, putting on platform shoes that make it hard to walk in: all the kind of testing out of self and identity that goes on, I think, in adolescence. It reminds me that it is during this period that we are really searching for the deeper insights, the realizations about what we do as mediators and why we do it, and the purpose of practice overall.

I am reminded of one of the plays and musicals, that was written by one of my favorite composers and lyricists, Steven Sondheim. Some of you may be familiar with some of his work and, in particular, a play he wrote about ten years ago, a play called "Into the Woods". It is a wonderful play, where he wove together three different fairy tales. And it is very much about adolescence and characters who are finding what they want and what they want to be. I think in many ways, over the past six or seven years, the mediation movement has stepped into the woods. It is that metaphorical place that many people, including Bruno Bettleheim, have talked about as the inner darkness, where inner darkness is confronted and worked through. Here uncertainty is resolved about who one is and here is where one begins to understand who one wants to be. The metaphor of the woods is often used in those kind of settings.


The Growing Development of Mediation

Why do I think mediation has entered the woods in this sense, in this adolescent sense? There are several reasons. One is there are a lot of questions being raised about whether mediation is being practiced the way we think it is being practiced. The research has shifted, in the last ten years, from research on outcomes, and whether there have been agreements or not, agreements in sessions, to actually looking at what mediators do during the process; that is, raising some questions about what practice is like, and whether it is going on in the way we assumed it would be.

Also, there has been questioning about whether mediation can be practiced from an ideologically-free position or stance. And the whole discussion of neutrality that has taken us beyond that concept, toward looking at what is the ideology we are buying into. We know that any kind of discourse that we engage in is always ideologically driven. And to look closely at where those ideologies rest is an important discussion that is going on right now. There is discussion at every major conference in the United States about what mediation is. There is discussion about grids and classifications of types of mediations that I know many of you are familiar with. There is an argument that we should let a thousand flowers bloom, but at the same time there is a kind of gnawing sense that that kind of philosophy skirts a tougher issue of what happens when we enter the room ourselves, each one of us, and begin to mediate. What do we do and why?

Also, some of the issues of the initiatives around credentialling and certification and training often beg the question of what skills should be taught in mediation. What is it that we want to achieve as we rush to develop these certification routes? If we have not decided yet what are the key premises, what are the key skills, how can we say these are the certified or certifiable skills that are needed to do it well? So, in a way, I think that this period of questioning has led to some healthy discussion and involvement in these kind of issues.


The Pathway Ahead

In a way, we are a bit like Steven Sondheim's Little Red Riding- Hood character before she meets the wolf. At one point she sings, "The way is clear, the light is good, I have no fear nor none should. Into the woods and down the dell, the path is straight, I know it well." That is where we were before the recent questioning of the past five or six years. We were very assured of the path. I think we are less assured right now in terms of some of those issues.

I would like to emphasize that I really see this as a very healthy sign. Right now there is some discussion in the United States that we have to get behind each other, we have to pull together, we cannot have these disagreements. I couldn't disagree with that position more. I believe that an adolescent period is exactly the time when we look hard at these issues: we question, we search for the bottom, we search for the premises. And we find out what we want that to be and move it into the future based upon those premises. I think it's not only good, it's necessary, it's inevitable. And I think we are at a wonderful stage for that reason. It is crucial in a coming-of- age period. And for me, the real question ends up revolving around the premises of practice, the underlying values and ideology that we as individual mediators, in whatever arena we practice, buy into or assume, either explicitly or inadvertently, as we practice mediation. I think it is the discussion of premises that is going to lead to the clarity of choice that I want people to have in mediation and that I want practitioners to have for themselves as they approach practice.


Examining Our Values in the Practice of Mediation

To examine certain of these premises, I would like to start with a case that I mediated myself several years ago. And it is one of the real opportunities of being a university professor that you get to learn continually from your students. It is a treasure that you really value. And over the years I can't say enough and give enough credit to the students I have worked with and who have helped question my thinking, have made me advance what I was thinking and learn from them. They have helped Baruch Bush and me as we worked on the Promise of Mediation -- in fact, for about a period of three years -- to think through some of the key questions that we were really after, as we just discussed them and before we ever really decided to write a book together. Questions like: Why do mediation? What makes mediation a real alternative to other available and necessary dispute resolution processes and adjudicative processes? What do you need to preserve about mediation to keep that real alternative open?

It was those questions that we explored. One way we did that was through a clinic for law students who wanted to become mediators. We worked with the law students in such a way that we were doing clinical work, doing mediations in Queens, one of the boroughs of New York City, at a court-annexed mediation program. At the beginning of the semester students would observe Baruch and me, separately, sometimes together, mediating cases. Then we would co-mediate with the students for a period of about one month or two months, and then they would be on their own and we would observe them.


Challenging our Values

During this period when we were working on the questions I just mentioned, we were talking about the basis of mediation, talking about empowerment and recognition as a possible grounding for the practice of mediation. We had students critique us and discuss the cases we were doing, from that framework. One of the cases that I did during that time, while students were observing me was a case that I remember very well. It was a case between two young girls who were about 16 or 17 and who were in high school, and who came through the court system because they were the centers of, and leaders of, two girl gangs at a high school in Queens. The gang fights had broken out into violence. They came into the mediation room with their mothers, and one of the mothers was carrying a young child, an infant, whom I assumed was one of the young girls' child.

As we began to work through the mediation, I tried to get a sense from the descriptions of how the gang dispute got started and what happened between them. What was the cause? What was the root of it? It turned out that the only thing the two young women talked about was a "look" at a basketball came. One person had turned around and gave them a look that they interpreted as extremely negative. It didn't seem to be jealousy over boyfriends, or money that was borrowed, or anything else.

We worked on that issue, and during discussing the issues, the side that had been attacked last made a point of saying that they couldn't move ahead in any kind of conciliatory way until they were able to retaliate. They could not be the last side that was attacked. I caucused with both sides, and I had them think through, or I asked them to think through, what would be the inevitable projection of this dispute if both sides felt this way, if it continued. It had already broken out in violence in their high school. As we got further into it, a couple of hours into the mediation, their mothers were expressing deep concern and I was becoming very concerned that little was happening in the room. I began putting out suggestions and testing out and asking them if they would consider options such as: Why doesn't one of you move to a different high school? Is that an option? Why not do that? The mothers got behind that. But the young women said, "No, we don't want to do that." And I began to try to "rescue" them from this conflict and get them to believe what I thought were, in many ways, feasible solutions to the escalating conflict between them. At the end, very little came of it.


Analyzing the Process Using Our Values

After the session was over, we had a discussion with the students, my students who were observing us, and they lambasted me. They said, "Folger, what are you doing? You are talking about a process of empowerment and recognition. But we don't think that you followed that through at all in that room." And they started pointing out to me the ways that I was getting very directive in the process, that I was trying to get the parties to come to some agreement that I thought would work. They pointed out to me that even if the students had moved from one high school, or one of them had, they could still meet each other in the malls, they could meet each other on the streets. Would it really stop the violence? The solutions that I was pushing for were not the girls'. I was attempting to direct them. My students also pointed out that I was more focused on the outcomes than on the actual interaction that was going on between the two young women. And the students were right.

We ended up talking about the fact that at one point during the mediation, one of the young women who had come in with a small baby said to the other one, "Why don't we not attack each other when we are holding our young children?" Apparently the other girl had a young child as well. And the other woman nodded her head. I barely caught this, did not work with it, did not even include it as part of an agreement between the two of them. Because at some instinctive level I saw it as almost trivial in terms of where the escalation was going, and how I wanted to solve this conflict as a whole. It sort of passed through. I heard it and saw it, but it was not a focus that I worked on. This case was eye opener to me. It was very revealing in terms of the issue of what are the premises of practice, what are we after in terms of mediation, what are we working from.


How Conflict is Viewed by Clients and Mediators

Talking through this case, and many other cases like it over that two year period, we began to try to articulate the instinctive and sometimes unexamined assumptions or premises that we as mediators make that lead to certain forms of practice. These premises directly lead to the moment-to-moment interventions, responses, behaviors that we respond with during mediation. What are these premises? I think they can be summarized in two categories. The first is: What are people's or mediators' views of human nature? Not a trivial question. And second: What are people's views of the nature of conflict itself.


Compassionate Strength

Let me suggest, first of all, in terms of a view of human nature, that for me the essence of mediation hinges on whether we as mediators can sustain a conviction that people are capable of compassionate strength. That is a belief. That is a conviction that I think if we lose, even for a brief second during the process of the mediation itself, we will begin to move our practice in a very different direction. We have to hold that assumption despite the fact that the parties in the room at the time we are intervening are completely out of sorts because of the conflict, upset; but we need to hold on to the belief that they are still capable of compassionate strength.

By compassionate strength, I mean a combination of being true to oneself, to the choices one wants to make, and at the same time balancing that with concern, responsiveness, interest in the other disputant or disputants in the room. For me, that conviction is very much at the heart of how we will end up practicing. In many ways it is a leap of faith for any one of us who practices in the conflict resolution field. It is sometimes very difficult to sustain. Some people, who have reacted to the book we have written, say it seems to tie into their religious values. I think it is tied to this deeper conviction for some, that it may be consistent with or parallel to some religious frameworks. But it doesn't have to be this alone. It can be tied to personal values about how one sees the fundamental capability of human beings, despite the behaviors we see during a conflict situation.


Conflict as a Process Towards Compassionate Strength

The second premise has to do with the view of conflict that we hold as mediators. And this is clearly related to the view of human nature I just described: whether or not we view conflict as the place where people can find their way to compassionate strength. Is that what we think conflict is about? When Baruch and I were talking about shifting the paradigm away from a more problem-solving, directive form of practice, we had to ask ourselves the tough question. If conflict is not about solving problems with or for parties, what is it?

For us, conflict is very much about the process of moving as individuals from states of weakness, unsureness, uncertainty, and unclarity about what one wants to do in a conflict to states of strength, to states of clarity about the options, the choices we want to make. It is also about movement from states of self-absorption and defensiveness to a willingness to acknowledge that there is another person in the world, another perspective, and a responsiveness at whatever level to that other person. There is a whole continuum of responses that people can make. That is the heart, for me, of what conflict is about, in my own personal life as well as what I see parties going through in a mediation. Problems will be solved by the parties as they move from states of weakness to strength. And as they move from states of self absorption to connection and responsiveness to others. There is no question about that. The focus for me as a mediator is that I am working with those opportunities to allow parties to move from weakness to strength, from self-absorption to responsiveness to other.


Conflict as a Developmental Process

Conflict in mediation is the one arena which really can allow the kind of development that we as human beings go through as we face conflicts through our adolescence and adult life. This is why, for example, Carol Gilligan, who is a Harvard psychologist whom I am sure many of you know, has written about moral development from a feminist perspective and has argued that moral development should be viewed, not in some of the more traditional ways, but as movement from self-centeredness to being centered in oneself, and movement from self-sacrifice to responsiveness to others. That is exactly the framework. So, for her, this process of movement in conflict is a moral development process.

In other arenas, such as political science, there are people like Amitai Etzioni and Michael Sandel, who are talking about the need for political systems, for organizations, for legal systems, to not only place an emphasis on individual rights, but also to balance that with connection and community and responsibility. To me this is the same argument. We have lost that balance between individualism and responsiveness to others, in legal systems and approaches to dealing with conflicts in all sorts of arenas. They are arguing for shifts in approaches to traditional legal processes, apart from mediation, to try to balance those two dimensions. For us, mediation is the arena where this can be and should be the centerpiece of practice.


Bottom-Up Processes

Now, clearly, not all mediators have this view of practice, and not all should. There are different views of human nature and different views of conflict that exist and that need to exist. There are many types of conflict intervention work that can be based upon the need to solve problems for parties, when you make the assumption that they are not capable of it themselves. I think that those are necessary and critical. I would like to make sure there is no misunderstanding about that. But once you start thinking about these two premises, then you begin to see a whole range of conflict intervention processes that go on at all levels in society, whether they are based upon these assumptions or they are coming from some similar place.

Conflict resolution processes that work from these two premises I would call bottom-up processes. They are working from where the parties are, allowing them to move with their own conflict in the way that they can. So that in the case of working with those two young women, on that afternoon, that is as far as they were going to get in terms of moving from states of weakness to strength, self-centeredness versus connection to the other. There was a real connection made there between them in terms of their common motherhood. In the two hours we had that afternoon, that was as far as they were going to get. But that is extremely valuable in terms of the bottom-up type of process.


Top-Down Processes

Top-down processes are clearly ones that do not hold the assumption that people are capable of making clear choices for themselves in the conflict, and at the same time balancing responsiveness to others with whom they are interdependent and have to live with in a diverse world and society. It becomes a kind of litmus test as you look around you and see the kind of interventions that are being done. And I would encourage you to keep an eye to the whole range of intervention work that you see in our society.

For example, several years ago, in Dayton, Ohio, Holbrooke and others were working on the Bosnia agreements, you may recall. If you looked at his rhetoric and the discussion of how he viewed that process, you might have noticed that he said, for example, "We need to lock these people in a room and not let them out -- these were his words -- until they agree." He also said they were not going to be able to change a word of the agreement after they left Daytona. Now there is every reason to believe that a more top-down approach was absolutely necessary to stop the violence in Bosnia. And many of us would totally agree. But I would ask you to think about whether the hard work of encouraging or allowing people to deal with diverse ethnic identity through a process of co-existence was worked on at all during that process. Or whether the fabric of those kind of difficult issues were the focus of any attempt to work through. I would say no, that it was a very top-down process.


Two Useful Examples

In the United States last year, there was a major conflict within the Catholic Church about a project that one particular cardinal from Chicago, who was actually dying at the time, Cardinal Bernardine, had put forward. He wanted to put forward a process of dialogue for American Catholics about differences that they had about the Church and Church disputes and Church issues. He was very out front, wanting to put forward an approach to intervention and community dialogue that was very open. In Philadelphia, Cardinal Bevilaqua was very much opposed to this initiative by Bernardine. In a Philadelphia paper, there were two op-eds, one by Bernardine and the other by Bevilaqua. And if you looked at both of these, you could really see the difference between the underlying premises of what the two men believed about what human beings are capable of if you allow them to talk and you allow them to dialogue.

Just briefly, I would say that what Bernardine pointed out was that the whole issue of whether the Catholic Church in the United States is going to go into the new millennium with some sort of momentum and without defensiveness, is about whether American Catholicism can confront an array of challenges with honesty and imagination and whether the Church can reverse the polarization that inhibits discussion and cripples leadership. American Catholics, he noted, must reconstitute the conditions for addressing our differences and find constructively a common ground centered on faith, marked by accountability to Catholic tradition and ruled by a renewed spirit of dialogue, generosity and consultation. Bevilaqua, on the other hand, protested strongly that such dialogue would never work. He said when divergent opinions on theological matters are examined in a public forum by a group, most of whom are not theologians, and then reported second hand in the media, confusion among Catholics grows. The expression "Catholic common ground" is not ecclesiastical terminology. It is an ordinary, everyday term, open to uncontrolled interpretation, including even the meaning that Catholic common ground signifies the lowest common denominator. He said that kind of dialogue would be destructive for the Church.

When you see these kind of debates, and dialogue, at any level of difference within any arena, you can begin to see the way in which people are buying into different sets of premises about the capabilities of human beings to act with compassionate strength and to work through states of defensiveness and weakness to acknowledgment and connection. It is a conviction, it is an underlying belief.

In the field of mediation, I think the same sort of split is going on in terms of the premises that people start their practice with. I worked in this Queens Mediation Center that I was talking about earlier, for two years. And there was a mediator who was very proud of the fact that he had resolved a lot of neighbor disputes. In Queens, New York, most people live in apartments above each other and below each other. It is almost all apartment buildings. And he said, "I get a lot of those kind of mediations where the neighbors are concerned about the noise between the upstairs and downstairs neighbor. You know, Joe, as soon as I hear those cases, I know right away it is a carpet problem." He said, "I know it is a carpet problem. And I tell them, 'You've got to buy a carpet and you just have to figure out who is going to pay for it.' I can get through these in about fifteen minutes." He was very proud of that in terms of his approach.

To me that is very much operating from a top-down sort of orientation. I don't think he values the fact that what needs to happen in that mediation, whatever the noise issue, is for the parties to work through wherever they are going to end up -- whether it is always a carpet or not -- how they are going to address those differences and the choices they have to make. That to me is the key difference.


Comparing Mediator Styles

Deborah Kolb, in some of her research, interviewed well-known practicing mediators in the United States. It was more of a qualitative study, but, of the mediators she interviewed, two-thirds she characterized as highly directive. She described their practice in the following way, and many of them described it themselves this way. She said that these mediators interrogate the parties for some period of time until they develop a sense of how to deal with the issues presented or solve a particular problem. The mediators readily acknowledge that they are often ahead of the parties on the issue. They know what should happen, but the challenge is to make it occur. The mediators are quite willing to acknowledge that they make judgments about what is a good and bad agreement and try to influence the parties in the direction of the good.

Some of my research has documented this phenomenon as well. If we look carefully across the contexts in which mediation is being practiced, we see the split of premises and approaches that result from them. For example, in the victim/offender area, there are victim/offender mediation programs in the United States where the offenders are told, going into the mediation, that if they apologize, they will get a reduced sentence. Where is choice? Where is freely-given voluntary recognition and reconciliation? Where is the belief that someone might do it on their own?

I was a keynote speaker at a national Victim-Offender Mediation conference. At that conference they had, as part of a plenary session, a woman who had murdered or killed another young woman in a drunk-driving incident. That woman was on the panel, and the mother and father and sister of the woman killed in the car accident were also on the panel. They talked about the process they went through since the death of the woman and the decision to meet the young woman who caused the car accident and who was convicted of drunk driving. What really struck me about it was that the driver was from a very rural area and was very uneducated. The other family was extremely well educated, very religious. The young woman who was convicted of the drunken driving talked about how she had changed a great deal. She had, even while she was in prison, agreed to go to church every week, ageed to write letters every week to her children, and had made several decisions about continuing to do public speaking. It is a wonderful thing. And it was very powerful. But the question I asked myself was, were those choices made through the mediation process or were those choices that occurred as a result of the year of counseling that went into working with her before the actual mediation started, which is often a part of the victim/offender process?

In terms of the peer mediation area, there are many folks who are doing, wonderful work in that area and creating, processes that are truly transformative in terms of the way young people in our societies deal with conflict. But, just before I left Philadelphia, someone I know on the West Coast said he spent the afternoon at a middle school looking at a peer mediation conference where a lot of mock mediations were being done. He said that he was very dismayed because what he saw happening in these mediations was that the students who were mediating clearly had the agenda that the goal was to get the parties to make up, apologize, forgive and promise never to do it again. The student mediators, he said, reminded him -- and these are his words -- "of reading about the model prisoners in concentration camps who maintained order by disciplining the delinquent". So any process, whether it is victim/offender, peer, divorce mediation, can work from a top-down or a bottom-up orientation or set of premises.


Offering True Possibilities

I think that, for me, the real uniqueness and the real necessity of keeping mediation a bottom-up process is because it is the one area that offers this true possibility. We don't expect it and shouldn't expect it from arbitration, settlement conferences, or adjudicative processes, all of which are extremely necessary and may in fact be parties' choices and are needed and valuable in many contexts. But the premises they start from are some place else. To me, it would be a terrible loss to any arena in which mediation is practiced if these premises are not at the heart of it. If we take these seriously, what does this say about the work that we do? These premises drive the practice that we engage in moment to moment in mediation.

Let me mention a few ways that I think that these premises drive our practice. The first is that, when you are working from a more bottom-up approach, you tend to see conflict as a crisis in human interaction. The reason that parties have not been able to resolve things or reach a problem-solving solution to things is because there has been a breakdown or a crisis in their human interaction. I think that is the vision that one has if one is working in a process from this point of view. Problems get solved easily by people when thev can interact in ways that allow them to feel stronger, surer, and recognize where the other side, the other group, is coming from. It means in this sense that you are looking at the process as a process, not a package. You are not moving up to that global level and saying, "This is a carpet issue." You are looking moment to moment. Or you aren't, as I was doing, in that gang case, saying, you've got to solve the whole thing. You are tuning yourself to the moment-to-moment statements and working with those as they are unfolding.

Second, I think, in terms of practice, you view the conflict as a stream of opportunities for empowerment and recognition. Moment-to-moment, as the conflict unfolds, people are saying things that you, as a mediator, can work with and respond to in such a way that offers them the option of getting clearer, surer about what they want to do -- even the decision to stop the mediation if that is the choice they need to make, or a decision to threaten power or challenge it, or to offer recognition. All are choices that the parties can make as they put issues and statements on the table.


Transforming Practice

It is interesting to me that the ground rules of mediation that many of us were taught and follow don't really reflect this emphasis on empowerment and recognition in the way that they could. When we were writing the book, we were brainstorming, just in a sort of beginning way, on what new ground rules we might add if we really wanted empowerment and recognition to be at the heart of the process. One of the ideas we suggest at the end ofthe book is this: you know how in mediation, typically after the parties are giving their opening statements, you often tell them, "Please don't interrupt, and if you have anything you want to say, we don't want to lose it, so be sure to write it down." Oftentimes we give people pads of paper in order to do that to ensure that they will be able to say what they are thinking during the time the other party is speaking.

What I have started doing, and I find very useful, is handing them a sheet of paper and dividing it in half. I say, "On one side, write down anything you object to, any questions you have, any concerns that you for sure want to get back to. But on the other side of the page, put the word 'news' at the top of it and mark down anything you hear that is new information that you haven't heard before or haven't heard before in the same way." That is, for me, a way of saying, "We are going to be as interested in recognition and achieving understanding as in moving to any particular concrete resolution." The route to that is to start hearing things in new ways.

What is interesting to me about that idea is that it is extremely simple. It is very basic. But, until we put it forth, no one had thought to do it that I ever heard of. And I would ask you to think about, why is this so? Why haven't we taken the fundamental process of recognition and perspective-taking more seriously in the kind of ground rules that we have developed? I think the reason is that many forms of practice are coming from somewhere else.

Another aspect of practice that changes when you accept these premises is that the past, as parties talk about it, is very relevant to what is going on. I no longer believe that mediation is future oriented in the sense that many of us were taught. I don't want to run past the discussions of the past so quickly, because I find that there are as many opportunities for empowerment and recognition when people are talking about the past as when they are moving towards what they want in the future. And that is the ground work for where they are going to head. It doesn't mean you get bogged down; in fact, the very beginning to the session many times seems more productive because of that.


Redirecting Research

Lastly, working from these premises means that we think of different accomplishments or outcomes for mediation sessions, that we have a broader vision of what we have been accomplishing during a session, when we are actually doing it and when we are done. One of the vital areas that people need to research, and I would encourage people here in Australia to do this, is to look at what happens between parties when they do not reach agreement, but when a significant amount of empowerment and recognition has occurred during a session. I think that we will find that in many cases, parties continue the dialogue, continue to move in constructive directions, if that ground work has been laid during whatever time we have for a session. It would be useful to just check back after a week, two weeks, a month or two, whatever is appropriate, on whether "agreements" have been reached at some later date, and count those in our assessments of outcomes of the process. It is a more realistic view, I think, of the way conflict unfolds in terms of our ability to move on issues after we hear new information, needing time for that to happen but walking back in and saying, "Now I see it differently." That is the kind of research we need that is more consistent, I think, with this view of practice.


Challenges

There are many challenges to holding this vision and these premises. There is no question about that. Some of the challenges that we face fall along the following lines.

Many of us feel, as mentioned earlier I did in the gang case, that we need to resolve or fix conflicts, for all the right reasons -- because we are afraid of the destructiveness that could occur afterward, because we will feel that we have failed, because the significant power imbalances that we see in front of us won't be overturned. But I do not take those as my mission as a mediator. I allow those issues to emerge, if the parties want them to emerge. And I follow the parties as they do it. But if they choose not to threaten the balance in power, I don't believe I should be the one who takes the risks for them. They know their risks much better than I do. And they have to live with those risks. And yet, in mediation, time and again, I see parties raising the difficult issues that do challenge fundamental power differences between them, like the landlord/tenant case in our book, where the tenant basically questions income distribution and says, "Landlord, you have a lot more money than I do; you own three buildings in Queens, New York. I am struggling, I am a single mother who has a substance abuse problem and is really trying, and you know that. Why can't you give me four months rent?" Discussion can occur that is power shifting. People will take those risks when it is comfortable for them. But I don't think it is my job to come in with that agenda.

We also get challenged because we supposedly have unrealistic objectives in terms of what we think can be accomplished during a session. I think we need to be very careful to say that we don't see conflict as a linear process that takes place within two hours and goes from complete animosity to complete agreement. We need to accommodate a kind of back and forth movement through a process that we know is what people go through in significant conflicts. Sometimes we lose optimism in general. We don't believe human beings are capable of compassionate strength. Sometimes with my faculty at Temple University I come to that conclusion, or we just see too much.

There was a woman in California at a conference that I spoke at last fall, who was a former judge, and who said she is now a mediator. She said, "You know, when people call me to mediate, I know what they want. They want me to tell them what a fair settlement is. So I tell them." I think for me there is some real strength to what she said. She is very clear that she doesn't hold the premises I have been talking, about. I think, probably, from the years of practice sitting on the bench, she doesn't believe people are capable of compassionate strength. She is practicing exactly the way she feels she should. And there is clarity and strength in some ways in that position.

We also are bombarded with a lot of images of top-down approaches to intervention. A colleague of mine looked through Hollywood films for a period of two years trying, to find really good and clear illustrations of the hard work people go through In conflict settings to work from the bottom up. And they are very difficult to find. One of the best films, which is of course based on a true story, is "Dead Man Walking". The nun in that case really kept a conviction that this man was capable of compassionate strength and never let go of that conviction. But we also looked through training videos, in the United States, to see if there were many, or any, clear illustrations of practitioners who worked consistently and clearly without being either subtly or explicitly directive. I can tell you, they are extremely hard to find.


Mediation as a Genuine Alternative

So why should we face up to these challenges? What is really at stake? I think the future of mediation is really at stake in a very significant way. These premises help, I think, to clarify and allow you to make the choices you want to make in terms of the forms of practice. I think we need to realize that our clients, and people in society generally, know whether mediation offers a truly alternative form of dispute resolution. And if it does not, they will not use it.

Several years ago when I first came to Philadelphia, I was asked to help set up a community mediation program that was going to be annexed to a county court. My students and I did some anthropological work initially, interviewing judges, police officials, religious clergy, about the needs for mediation in the community and who could make referrals. When we first got into the interviews, we began to hear from the informants, that they wanted no part of this new mediation center. So we started asking them why. We found out there had been, a few years back, a small claims mediation program which was annexed to the court. It was one of these programs where there were cases on the docket and disputants were told, "Go try to mediate. You have half an hour and if you don't settle within that time, with the court appointed legal aid person, you have to get back on the docket and get in line." People said, "We didn't see the point. Why should we have a mediation program in this community?" It was very eve opening to me to see that people know what they want, and won't use a process if they don't see it as different from the processes that are already available and, in many ways, excellent processes.


The Marketing Challenge

People also worry about whether there is a market, whether we should face these challenges, because they wonder if there will be a market for our services. I can tell you that I firmly believe there is. You can look, for example, at different types of evidence that would suggest it, in unusual places: if you look at the New York Times best-seller list of non-fiction books, over the past ten years, there is a predominance of books that deal with empowerment, choices, people's ability to make choices for themselves, do things on their own. This is a major sort of impulse that people have and want to work with. I heard last year, for the first time, that more people in the United States used alternative forms of medicine then traditional medicine. That is an amazing fact, because it says people want choice. They want to make decisions, have control over the outcomes. I believe these opportunities are extremely highly valued.

We need to rethink, however, the way we present ourselves, and the markets where we can use these processes that are based on empowerment and recognition. We can't keep it in one sort of package. I am currently doing a lot of work with team-building, in corporate organizations, and I am using empowerment and recognition as the basis for designing processes that teams can use to work through tough issues of diversity that impede performance and create all different types of conflicts. And I have more work than I could possibly do. It is packaged, however, differently. I never mention the word "transformation", God forbid. I never even mention the word "conflict". It is "team building". But when people ask me to do team building, I soon realize that they have significant conflicts that they want to address. For that, this process is really what people value.


Conclusion

So I would say, in conclusion, that the difficulty in life, as George Moore once said, is choice, and that, in many ways, the kind of choice we are making, in terms of the premises we are going to use is the basis for our practice. It will affect our views of clients, and our view of conflict, and our fears about what we will and will not accomplish. Any interventions are going to be shaped by the premises that we buy into. We are definitely entering the woods, and I would encourage you to go deep into those woods, to examine the premises of your own practice, to think about what is at stake in terms of the future of mediation, and to be committed to the kind of premises you are most comfortable with. Go deep into those woods and, as Steven Sondheim said, "Into the woods you go again, you have to every now and then. Into the woods to get the thing, that makes it worth the journeying."