Understanding Mediators' Orientations, Strategies, And Techniques: A Grid For The Perplexed
This Article begins with a review of previous efforts to categorize mediation and their shortfalls, including the lack of any widely-shared comprehensive method for describing the various approaches to mediation practice. The Article then offers a new "grid" system for classifying mediator orientations, strategies, and techniques and describes the potential utility of the grid, particularly its effectiveness in selecting mediators.
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Biography
Leonard L. Riskin is Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He previously served at the University of Missouri as Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution and Professor of Law. He has taught both dispute resolution and mindfulness around the world. Professor Riskin has a J.D. from New York University School of Law and an LL.M. from Yale Law School. He has worked as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice and as General Counsel of the National Alliance of Businessmen in Washington, D.C. A practicing mediator, he also has published several books (including the co-authored Dispute Resolution and Lawyers (Westgroup 4th ed. 2009)) and numerous articles on dispute resolution (in some of which he developed the “grids” of mediator orientations—facilitative-evaluative/broad-narrow), several articles on the potential contributions of mindfulness to law and mediation practice, and personal essays in popular publications, such as the New York Times Magazine and the Atlantic monthly. He has won CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution Awards for his writing and for his work to integrate dispute resolution into law school curricula.
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Comments
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| Susan Oberman,
Charlottesville VA |
04/07/10 |
| Riskin's grid |
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While this article has proven to be seminal in the mediation field, it sets up a false dichotomy in the categories of evaluative and facilitative mediation. I contend in my article "Mediation Theory vs. Practice: What Are We Really Doing?" published in 2005, that all mediators both evaluate and facilitate and that Ellen Waldman's analysis naming three categories: norm-generating, norm-educating and norm-advocating, clarifies and differentiates what mediators do in a way that is far more accurate. Riskin's terms while helpful in differentiating a range of mediator practices, do not actually predict what a mediator will do.
Riskin revised this article in 2003, slightly changing the labels for his categories and presenting us with more grids. He stated in a Virginia Mediation Network conference keynote speech in 2003 that he never intended these to be either/or categories. That said, the mediation community has for some reason clung to them as a way to meet the standard for providing parties with information about the mediation process that fulfills the requirement of self-determination of the parties. It doesn't.
In my article in 2009, Style vs. Model: Why Quibble?" I again argue that Waldman's categories are a more accurate and efficient way to inform parties about the mediator's model. It would alleviate the ongoing confusion of and misrepresentation by mediators, to use Waldman's analysis. |
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