The Keystone Conference

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Favored Ideas and Topical Group Reports

Influencing the World

Consistent Strong Message

That the conflict management community develop a system of sending out a consistent strong message - that conflict can be managed constructively or destructively, that conflict itself is a natural part of life and every person makes choices in how they act in conflict with positive or negative results, be these leaders of countries or family members in conflict. It is therefore vital for individuals, families, communities and society to learn how to manage conflict constructively.

Educate US Government

Our work overseas is only credible if it is elicitive and respectful of local cultural contexts. We need to take responsibility for educating the U.S. government about working with cultural sensitivity even while we are taking government funds for the work we are doing.

Share Deeper Lessons with Public

Extract in the form of insights the deeper lessons we have learned about conflict resolution and collaborative work to be shared with the broader public. 

Influence Cultures With Whom We Work

Identify and pursue opportunities to embed the principles, insights and skills on which our practice is based in the cultures of the public, non-profit and corporate communities with whom we work.

Mediators Should Mediate Their Own Disputes

Mediation Participants' Rights

We believe that people who participate in mediation are entitled to these rights:

1. Voluntary Process Without Prejudice. The resolution of a dispute is best achieved in a voluntary process. People should be free to choose voluntary mediation, and be free to withdraw from mandatory mediation, without prejudice to their rights or their other methods of obtaining justice.

2. Confidential Process. It is essential that mediation participants be free to speak truthfully, without fear that their own words could be used against them later in an adversarial process.

3. Informed Consent. Participants must retain their rights to informed consent in all aspects of the mediation process. Disputants are entitled to full disclosure by their mediator of any conflicts of interest. Any agreements made in mediation, especially those waiving claims, must have the informed consent of the parties to be enforceable.

4. Free Choice of Neutrals. Mediators help people agree to settle disputes on their own terms. They don't write findings deciding who's wrong, like arbitrators. People with disputes have the right to jointly select any neutral person or organization to mediate for them. No specific degree or license should be either required or barred, for a person to serve as a mediator.

5. Full and Equal Access. Early voluntary resolution of conflict is both cost-efficient and most consistent with democratic values. Mediation enables people to retain their own decision-making power. It is appropriate for government to promote the informed use of mediation, and to ensure full and equal access to mediation services. We request that these rights be maintained in any proposed laws or regulations.

Attention to Inclusion of Diverse Constituencies

Give deliberate attention to inclusion of diverse constituencies in planning, organizing and implementing all dispute resolution programs and activities, with attention paid to barriers to participation e.g. economics, culture, race, ethnicity, and language. Maria Volpe and Marvin Johnson

Expanding the Market

We need to make a determined, focused effort to engage public officials who continue to resist consensus-based processes for formulating public policy and resolving public disputes.  They perceive us in the field as promoting these processes out of self-interest.  They will accept the words of other public officials who HAVE used consensus much more than our words.

Supporting Quality Practice

Experiential Mediation Training

Re-think mediation training and encourage the development of experiential real-case approaches which integrate theory and practice.

Offer Variety of Good DR Processes

When developing dispute resolution processes, designers should engage representatives of parties and other stakeholders as much as appropriate and consider a variety of processes to satisfy parties’ varying interests and preferences.

Promotion of Reflective Practice

The dispute resolution field should promote reflective practice by practitioners, which involves the self-analysis of their effectiveness in practice situations and a systematic approach to learning from experience. Reflective practice involves increasing practitioners’ awareness of the impact of contextual factors, appropriate responsiveness to actual situations in real time, and experience-based knowledge.

Selection of DR Process Based on Party Interests

Dispute resolution professionals serving clients should help the clients evaluate process options that might reasonably satisfy the clients’ interests and should not simply steer clients to the professionals’ favorite process.

Party Decisionmaking About Substance and Process

Within a given dispute resolution process, dispute resolution professionals should encourage party decisionmaking about substantive and procedural issues as much as the parties desire and is appropriate in particular circumstances.

Integrating Timeless Wisdom to Foster Mastery

Our field is interdisciplinary, drawing on diverse areas such as economics, psychology, anthropology, business, law and international relations.  As we move into the next chapter of our development we should integrate lessons from the sages and masters of various wisdom traditions.  From Socrates to the Buddha, many philosophers and ancient ethical systems have captured deep insights about human nature and the process of transforming conflict. We should engage more seriously with the integratation of their teachings into our practices.

DR as Means to End, Not End in Itself

In general, our field should encourage people to use various conflict (or dispute) management / resolution processes if they satisfy particular substantive goals better than other available processes.  The field should not promote use of particular processes as an end in itself.

We Need to Work Collaboratively

We need to work collaboratively to raise the quality of our practices to protect consumers and to increase social impact without creating boundaries and exclusivity.

Effective Disputant Participation

Institutionalization

Develop a model(s) to help public agencies address key issues of institutionalization, to include topics such as: general guidelines outlining best practices, how to build in flexibility, making go/no go decision, do's and don'ts (as an agency sponsor of a collaborative process), appropriate funding options, etc. 

Are We A Field?

Proposition on Being Professional Field

What holds us together is:

1. We have an understanding that conflict is a natural part of life -- a form of energy that arises out of human beings as individuals and/or groups (and the natural world?) rubbing up against one another.

2. Conflict energy can be harnessed for positive or negative purposes.

3. We want to bring about significant cultural changes in the way society understands the sources and dynamics of conflict and the way society responds to conflict.

4. We are united by a belief that human beings can learn to handle conflict in nonviolent and collaborative ways and that this is preferable to the use of coercion and violence.

Organizing Our Field

Shared Purpose of Field - Help People Resolve Diff

The glue that holds our field together is a shared purpose to help people and organizations resolve differences on their own terms. (This is the product of a small group on Monday afternoon.)

Funding Conflict Resolution

Funding Public Sector Programs

Public sector mediation services should be funded additional to court budgets and funded at least to the extent that courts are funded. 

Ethics & Standards

Nationally Recognized Ethical Standards

Mediator Coercion

There is increasing pressure from courts, agencies and lawmakers for mediations that will clear court/agency calendars. This pressure often threatens a core value of mediation - that any agreement will be voluntary and uncoerced. Mediators have a responsibility to ensure that mediation remains a process where participants are not coerced into alleged "agreements" by mediators threatening to make damaging reports to courts, agencies or other adjudicators.

Mediators frequently hear things in private caucus that the other side never gets to hear or refute. Influencing a court or other adjudicator's decision through statements the other side never hears is a clear violation of due process rights, even if they are transmitted through a mediator.

Section 7 of the Uniform Mediation Act, prohibiting mediator reporting, offers a widely-accepted means of protecting both the integrity of the mediation process and participants' due process rights by enacting protective law.

Use of Technology

Integrating Technology

Mediators should be trained as to options for integrating technology into their face to face processes.

Purposeful Research

Sharing Research

We need better means of sharing and coordinating research.

Awareness of Empirical Research

Education & Training

Obligation to Mentor

Mediators owe an obligation to mentor and foster the development of younger people in the field with a focus on diversity. 

Obligation for Reflective Practice

Mediators owe an obligation to themselves, to the field and to the parties in the cases they mediate to engage in regular, confidential case consultations with peers.  Mediators also should periodically share the lessons learned from reflections on practice through articles, presentations at conferences, and mentoring.  The mediation professional associations owe an obligation to their members to create a system for case consultations that supports this practice.

Proposition

On behalf of anonymous: Since our ADR predecessors (individuals and organizations) have struggled with many of the issues raised in the gathering, a serious examination of ADR history is crucial to advising our successors.

Cultural Competence

Draw on Difference Approaches

Humility is a source of great strength.  Drawing on the experience, skills, expertise and perspectives of people who have different approaches and have worked in different contexts will add to the diagnostic range and the variety tools needed to handle the complexity of most conflicts.  This is particularly true in situations involving diversity of race, culture and economic class.

To Acknowledge/Embrace/Value Differences

Additional Topical Group Reports & Propositions

Cultural Competence

Replace #942 with: Conflict resolvers should have (and conflict resolution training should develop) strong awareness of racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of diversity. Dispute resolvers have an ethical duty to accept only those cases in which the dispute resolver feels s/he has cultural competence or can partner with or draw on others who add the relevant competence. When this is not possible, conflict resolvers have an obligation to refer parties to those who can provide such culturally competent assistance. 

Reframe from Othering

Replace #991 with:

Dispute resolvers should be aware of how their use of language and other forms of expression can inadvertently create impediments to the dispute resolute process by causing others to feel marginalized, excluded, or devalued.  Mentoring to Increase Diversity

Replace #922 with:

ADR practice will not achieve its full potential until we find the will and the resources to share these vital tools with the broadest spectrum of people in our society. ADR practitioners should (a) support initiatives that provide mentoring and enhanced market visibility for experienced minority mediators, and (b) find the funding to situate and support dispute resolution programs in minority communities where the next generation of ADR practitioners can be recruited, trained, and given opportunities to develop experience in the field.  In addition, experienced dispute resolvers should mentor less experienced practitioners who add diversity to the field.

Miscellaneous

Wisdom of Past

Education and Training

Topic Group Report

Emphases:

• Diversity
• Mentoring
• Continuing mediator education
• Curriculum design
• Including and very important à multi-disciplinary approach

Rewrite of 720 (will also cover 772)

An adequate training/teaching program in conflict management should be multi-disciplinary drawing from the hard and soft sciences.

Regarding proposition 720, the second portion regarding public officials etc belongs in another proposition area, perhaps Influencing the world.

The mediation community should work to mitigate any economic barriers to access to mediation training.

Trainers and educators have an ethical obligation to inform students about the economic realities of the market place.

Re 955, we would accept as long as reference to community is stated as an example rather than the sole option.

Amend 743 to change “younger people” to “new entrants”

Amend 743 to change the obligation from individual mediators to “individual practitioners, trainers, educators, and professional organizations.”

 Unanimous support for 873

Re 972 we see three separate and distinct parts:

1.  need for ongoing research re training efficacy

2.  educational program curricula requirements for profici

3.  training program certification

We would re-word as follows:

Mediator training be based on best research available on content that demonstrates successful performance as a mediator.

Unanimous support for 979

993 too vague to address.

1008 – this is a another example of reflective practice that we endorse and we are in agreement that case history stories should be passed along in training and otherwise.

Effective Disputant Participation

Advice and Representation

Mediators should encourage and enable parties to obtain the advice and representation they need in order to make sustainable decisions that achieve their individual and collective interests.

User Friendly Lexicon

Mediators should develop and widely disseminate to the public a user-friendly lexicon that distinguishes the vocabulary and definitions of different styles and types of assisted negotiation and dispute resolution processes thus better enabling parties and the public to understand which mechanisms will best suit their needs.

Public Access

Courts and agencies should make access to and participation in publicly funded mediation programs less restricted to the public and thus easier to use.

Expand Use of Restorative Justice

Expand the use of restorative justice principles, models, and practices outside of the criminal justice system.

Full Array of Processes

Current and future generations of mediators should take advantage of the full array of approaches to improving multi-party dialogue and encouraging input so that the most appropriate mechanism is used, and decision-making and outcomes are improved.

Quality of Practice

Quality of Practice Topical Group Report

Supporting Quality Practice Small Group Notes:

Process:

­       Read the propositions out loud

­       Small groups listening for groupings or themes

­       Identify additional themes that don’t have any propositions

­       Synthesize/integrate categories (themes)

Categories (topics and themes):

1.  Roster or organizational responsibilities

2.  Institution, particularly with respect to the courts  (recognizing the tension between keeping it a creative process and the need for regulations)

3.  Credentialing (including licensing, professionalization, and enforcement)

4.  Professional Development:  Training, supervision, coaching, mastery, reflective practice, quality assistance and evaluation, integrating deeper wisdom and holistic approaches

5.  System design:  (valuing pluralism, respect for range of different approaches, party focus and self determination, public policy about d.r. and evaluation)

6.  Standards (drawing on existing documents – don’t reinvent the wheel, but give them new life – and question the assumptions, research basis and what’s come since)

Influencing the World

Topical Group Report

Influencing the World
Report (humbly submitted for the group by amy glass) The Group cast propositions in terms of a Vision for the next generation (“Legacy”)

Group’s Definition; Perimeters of this topic:

Consider How to Best Influence

1. Engage in the places we should be but are not yet influential (ala Meyer, Beyond Neutrality);

2. Change the political behavior of leaders and citizens

3. Make collaboration the norm in institutions and systems (governments, courts, educational systems, etc.)

4. Expand international & global reach

5. Start at “home”; walk the talk

Propositions (as modified by the group):

1. ENGAGE more directly and effectively in the political process;

2. BUILD capacity (home and abroad) for constructive handling of disputes through public and civil education;

3. LEARN from other sectors to be more organizationally effective;

            (Think, plan, act strategically)

4. LEARN from other cultures and countries;

5. CULTIVATE HUMILITY for what you do not know;

6. CONSIDER (CREATE, INVENT) new structures and systems to make mediation a viable choice;

7. FORM LEARNING COMMUNITIES with others (different from you) to share/receive accumulated knowledge & wisdom regarding conflict handling;

8. #997 (as is)

9. #926 (as is)

10. DEVELOP an INTERNATIONAL VALUE STATEMENT for mediators