How About Making Mediators More Stupid? A Training Agenda

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“You can’t pour more tea into a full cup.”
Zen Proverb

It seems to me that mediation training is mostly about unlearning. Rather than accumulating more information or knowledge, the trainee has to practice selective forgetting. As a trainer, I actively encourage them to become ‘more stupid’.

Not surprisingly, this injunction is often greeted first by laughter and then by a mixture of disbelief and confusion. They think I’m making fun of their initial attempts to work with conflictual clients. I explain that stupidity and ignorance are essential assets. In fact, they are one of the few means of combating the almost inescapable desire most trainee mediators have to ‘help sort out the dispute’. In spatial terms, this usually entails racing out ‘in front’ of clients and try to ‘pull them’ to some less conflictual position. Even for trainee mediators, it is often clear where salvation lies. Paradoxically, the success of mediation is often in direct proportion to the mediator’s ability to resist the impulse to coax the parties in the right direction.

That mediators have this attitude in the first place, seems to be linked to the notion of conflict as a ‘problem’ which can be solved. There is a strong relationship between solving and salvation. Making the shift to thinking of conflict as ‘problematic’ – insofar as most of us struggle to engage constructively with conflict – is often the most difficult concept for trainees to grasp. After all, trainee mediators often come from backgrounds that reward problem-solving, where being good at your job is about being able to lead others by the hand.

When they start to mediate, trainees quickly become immobilised by trying to ‘figure out’ what they should be doing. They are so often busy thinking about the perfect question or the unlocking intervention that they find it hard to stay focused on the parties sitting right in front of them. They want to demonstrate their competence, to show that they ‘get it’. So when I tell them they are being far too bright, they just look bewildered.

For me as a trainer, I’ve only recently come to appreciate the importance of stupidity. I’ve yet to find a really coherent model or process to encourage its practice. For one thing, most theoretical constructs are put together precisely to counteract ignorance. On a personal level, I have difficulties remembering such frameworks – and even when I do remember them, they seem to be more about locating where I am in the process, then helping me discover where to go next.

So at this point in my training development, I’m still trying to find ways of supporting stupidity as a practice. My belief being that conscious ignorance is often a pre-requisite for the process of discovery, rather than desire to impose. And that stupidity, along with humour, paradox, and metaphor are attempts to outflank all the stuff we think we need to know.

One of my current training injunctions is to tell trainees that they have to find ways of saying whatever occupies the space in their heads. This internal space comprises our capacity to listen and attend to what the parties are saying (or not saying). My experience is that If the space between our ears is filled up by our own thoughts, opinions and judgments (the usual suspects), then attention is seriously compromised. Of course, trainees have to find ways of saying things that the parties can actually hear. While it’s quite normal to believe that one side or the other are behaving like bastards, it is only in exceptional circumstances that telling them flat out will prove to be helpful. Trainees need to learn to translate their perception into something along the lines of “I’m really struggling to understand why this is so important for you and I need to hear more.”

A second approach to stupidity is my suggestion that when they’re mediating, and one party starts to talk about the other (in terms of how bad, evil or incompetent they are) that what they should hear in their heads is basically “blah, blah, blah…” Trainees are somewhat taken aback by this remark, believing that a significant part of their role is to gain a full understanding of the situation. I explain that only when parties are willing to talk about themselves – to make themselves visible – is the static transformed into meaningful words. (I am indebted to my colleague Steve Hindmarsh for this insight.)

Finally, I find myself strongly encouraging trainees to “walk behind the parties and simply pick up the stuff they drop.” For the facilitative mediator, this is the only tenable position – that of humility. It is also the only real antidote to cleverness and the urge to be a productive problem-solver. Parties will always drop an enormous amount of ‘recyclable material’ in terms of their thoughts, feelings and assumptions. Picking these droppings up and with both empathy and real interest is for me the essential task of the mediator. One recent trainee put it very graphically by referring to this as the “pooper-scooper approach” to mediation.

It’s not rocket science to recognise that the practice of stupidity derives from a particular and somewhat personal understanding of the purpose of mediation. For me, the purpose of mediation is to help offset the diminishing impact that conflict has on our fundamental humanity. Conflict ‘shrinks’ us. The stories disputants construct in conflict reflect the simplicity on this side of complexity. They feature clear cut dichotomies of who’s right and who’s wrong. This kind of clarity leaves little room for doubt, ambiguity, mutuality, or interconnectedness – those qualities that life reminds us again and again form the warp and weft of our existence. Nor are those human and humane attributes such as generosity, kindness, compassion, warmth, openness – often accessible to those engaged in dispute.

Mediation offers the opportunity for people to ‘regain’ their fuller human dimensions. And in this process of potential enlargement, size is proportional to stupidity: the more stupid the mediator can be (for stupid read humble, non-intrusive), the larger the potential space they can help create for the parties to ‘grow’ into.

As a mediation trainer I’m not in favour of reducing the complexity of life to a seven-step model, even when trainees might find it useful to for me to do so. From my perspective, this just becomes another mental habit from which they need to be weaned. I can only encourage trainees to develop their ‘invitational skills’ – to make the possibility of being human together in the midst of conflict more and more attractive. And of course, like any real invitation, the parties might still say no. This irreducibility of freedom is what makes mediation one of the most fascinating of all professional endeavours.

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Mitch Gordon,   Boston MA	mgordon@fscm.org      08/31/10
Great article - In my trainings for both beginner and advanced mediators I stress what has been called the Ability to Not Understand. It is known in educational/learning settings as well as psychological settings, and I think it has great value in mediation. Just when we think we understand a party is the time when we need to give ourselves permission to not understand - to ask that next question that probes deeper, then the next and the next always deeper. Once we understand a party's comment we make it our own rather than asking the next question or two or three that allows them to reflect on what it means to them and perhaps develop within themselves a greater understanding of what it means within the context of the conflict. Anytime a mediator thinks they understand, that is the time to ask a question as if we do not understand. ‘So you say she is difficult to get along with, what does that mean to you?’ When we do that we fulfill our role to keep track of where the mediation IS rather than where the mediation is going. Great - thanks! Add New Comment

Katherine ,    UK	katherine@framework.org.uk      08/25/10
Great article. When training I have sometimes used the phrase "dumb mediator" but you develop the concept much further so thank you! I'm in the process of writing an article on how success is defined in mediation and touch on training implications so this was very relevant. I particularly appreciate the point you make about just "being" with the parties and encouraging them to show their humanity - I agree that that's when the potential of mediation really comes to fruition. Add New Comment

Phillip  ,   Dunedin NZ	08/16/10
Thank you Michael. Years ago when working in Industrial relations as an advocate I first experienced a mediator who adopted this approach. It has an immediated and significant effect in intense labour disputes. I learned then that an approach of declared ignorance associated with attentive listening and questioning begets empathy. Add New Comment

David Bogan,   Sydney	david@davidbogan.com      08/11/10
Hello Michael, was great to read your article and find another adherent of "unlearning." I first came accross this wonderful terminology in the writings of Professor Luis Diaz who, as well as being a great thinker and mediator, also believes in the simplicity of mediation and of mediators being 'real'. The other learning I have gained is that I believe it is the irreducibility of 'fairness' rather than 'freedom' that underpins the process. If you are looking for a teaching tool based on these premises have a look at "What's Keeping You Awake at Night?" published by Harper Collins. It's my attempt to try and get mediation back to the organic base from which it grew. Add New Comment

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