Mediation 1: A Retrospective

Find the inflection point and don't stop poking it

Last week, Geof and I completed our first mediation practicum.

Something I forgot to mention (I think?) is that I did get trained in mediation while in college, although the training was neither recent nor comprehensive. So this isn’t my first formal mediation practicum. But it is the first I’ve done with a co, and the first for which I’ve followed such a precise format.

Here’s how it happened. Again, to preserve confidentiality, I will give no content on what we talked about in the session, just give the structure and my reactions. I hope the reflection will be interesting to y’all, and it will also help me reflect on how things went and what we could do the same or differently next time.

Phase 0: Preparation

The morning of the the event, I wrote my article published here on the phases of mediation. It was super helpful for organizing my thoughts, and I copied all the questions I synthesized onto my Remarkable tablet. (I love the Remarkable, btw - it feels like paper writing but you can move things around and translate them to typed text for emails. And because it doesn’t really look like a tablet, it’s not distracting to clients. Whee, shameless promotion of things I like!)

I also went through the pre-call notes in the car with Geof. We brainstormed some questions based on the parties’ content that I could use if I got frozen.

That was my biggest fear in the mediation - getting frozen and not having something to say. When I was young, I used to have a lot of trouble speaking up for myself, so during conflict I would literally become unable to speak. This meant that I “agreed” to a lot of things I didn’t want to. Although it’s happened far more rarely as an adult, it’s still a strong fear of mine.

Based on the pre-calls with each participant, Geof and I chose a topic that we thought would be good to start with, and focused most of the questions around that. After choosing this, we had called the participants again and checked with them about putting our initial focus on this topic, so that they would know why we might seem to be deprioritizing their other content. This pre-checking made the choice a lot smoother.

A question I did sit with all the way through was how much to direct and how much to let the conversation flow naturally. More on that later.

Phase 1: Arrival + Context + Agenda

I will admit, walking into the building, I was a little nervous that one or both of the parties wouldn’t show up. Mediation is a scary thing! But they both arrived right on time. Geof and I moved couches to create a space where the two of them slightly faced each other, and we sat to one side.

We began with check-ins and a 2-minute meditation. I meant to have everyone go around after that and name a goal they held for this session, but I forgot due to my own nervousness, which felt like a miss.

Then Geof and I gave an intro to mediation (principles, phases, suggested norms) that probably lasted 10 minutes. We had been worried about this seeming long and the parties getting impatient, but I actually think it helped settle all of us a bit. One party in particular was very closed off and angry, and I noticed the space of the starting section seemed to have them settle just a bit.

We then grabbed our giant Post-it sheet - our classic facilitation tool - and had the parties brainstorm topics to talk about. We made sure to translate each into neutral language as we wrote it up, and put the sheet in a place they could see.

I think that doing this was helpful in allowing the parties to mentally drop topics from their working memory, and letting us visually point at the topic we wanted to start with. That seemed grounding. We did not, however, get to use this sheet as a list of things to workshop. We ended up going with the initial topic we chose for the session (which was on the sheet), and then having a second topic emerge naturally, which was I think a synthesis of some of the ones on the sheet but I didn’t check.

This leads me to Learning 1 of the session:

Learning 1: Even 4 hours of mediation is not long enough to cover all the topics,
or get parties to change their patterns.

We cover so many topics in 4 hours of neutral facilitation that I guess some part of me expected to cover that many in mediation. Nope! When emotions are running high, the number of potential topics goes down. A less emotionally-charged mediation, or one with participants more willing to move from their initial positions, would likely have covered more ground. But as it was, I felt likely to get to two.

After this intro, which went perhaps 30 minutes total in length, we moved into…