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Strategic mediation. A plea for an overdue change of perspective.

Part 1 – Reckoning with the future instead of just wishing for one.

Published in Spektrum der Mediation, Issue 70, December 2017, pp. 18-22.

We have published the full text in the blog (2019). Here…

Excerpts from the text:

Instead of enlarging the cake, mediation has so far been primarily concerned with harmonious baking.

 „…astonishing, but it gets even worse for mediators: Having started out as an urgently needed alternative to court proceedings, it is not only stated (in the evaluation report) that conflict parties hardly ever use mediation, but that the number of lawsuits filed with the courts has also been falling sharply for a good ten years. It is precisely the conflict parties who are appearing less and less in court who are not appearing before those who have offered themselves as a suitable alternative! So it's not a question of demand, but of product “

„…The conclusion is probably valid: The mediation movement has grown in the last ten or twenty years, has found a good number of followers who have undergone training and organised themselves into associations, but not clients. Here the access, the lock or the key has simply not yet been found…“

„…But after the fall of Soviet communism and the Eastern bloc states, there was not much left to do but realise that the world is vuka. Militarily, politically, socially and economically…, no thought remained what it might have been until then - an emotional support, perhaps a mental foothold or the basis of some kind of certainty, often coloured by ideology. The world ticked completely differently - and was now completely digital…“

„…For mediation, which wants to be a serious offer for individual, social and societal conflict situations in the world, there will therefore be no lack of opportunities to prove itself, quite the contrary. But it clearly needs to scrutinise its self-image, its strategy and its potential just as unreservedly…“

„…But what does it actually mean to have to deal with volatile circumstances? …Volatility requires more anticipation processes, Doing things today so that they are available when needed tomorrow...“

„…Ungewissheit means that nobody has an overview of even everyday issues any more. The culture of doubt has spread from the world of science into the world of everyday life. Modern science emerged with the revolutionary claim to know nothing and to doubt everything, to gather reproducible evidence and to consciously rely on interim results - until proof to the contrary is provided. Today, there is no area that is not subject to this element of scientific culture. This also gives rise to uncertainty. And it appears It is paradoxical that scientific rigour is emphasised everywhere these days, precisely in the assumption that they are gaining security and reliability. The history of science can show one thing above all: It is necessary Dealing confidently with uncertainty. They have to endure and constantly test their assumptions anew. This is only possible with a constructive error culture, which does not lead to disasters, but to corrections. Mistakes come from what is missing, not from what is wrong. This is exactly what mediation can offer space for, but it must be a space for courageous testing and experimentation and make it clear that we Work on provisionality, not finality. Conflict resolution can no longer prepare the big picture or "get to the bottom of the conflict" …“

„…The world is too complexIt behaves in a way that is neither predictable nor predictable. It is the reason why mediation makes sense – the equal handling of the conflict in a joint context, so that the multi-layered perspectives and differences of the parties involved are heard and have access to the joint conflict management.

„…Ambiguity describes the contradictory nature of the world. Information – even true – are always ambiguous and contradictory in themselves. Mediation offers the opportunity to tolerate these ambiguities and contradictions communicatively and to utilise their significance for strategic conflict management. Ambiguity enables and forces a change of perspective “

„…The (over-?)emphasis on psychological solutions in the spirit of humanistic psychology appears increasingly one-sided. As 20th-century solution tool for problems arising from 19th-century conventionsis the Humanistic psychology alone is not able to tackle the social problems and conflicts of the 21st century.“

Two theses follow from this:

Thesis 1 - Mediation offers the opportunity, to explicitly work out ways out of the current conflict with the (imagined) future. To this end, it can draw on the experience of systemic organisational consulting and process it for the mediation process.

These 2 – Mediation's offer to find "salvation" for itself and the conflict parties in emotional work neglects the second major strand of ideas in the development of mediation, which literally manifests itself in the concept of "cake enlargement". The intellectual-historical tradition outlined by the catchwords "discovery of the future" and "developments in early capitalism" needs to be analysed and made fruitful for mediation. (see part 2 of the article)

„…No one has ever gone to war or to court to change the past. It is "always somehow" about the future…It makes structuralnoneDifference The same applies to the time reference of the conflict management approach, whether judges convict because of a past offence or mediation results in an apology. In both, a balanced and future-orientated approach was taken…However, what mediation can open up, but a court never can, is that the conflict decision itself reckons with the future, that the decision is placed on feet that have already left an imprint in the (imagined) future.

But what characterises this strategic element? Strategy is explicitly concerned with future-orientated issues of a social system that are often relevant to its survival. Strategy encourages people to consider which development is desirable and which future is worth striving for. As a first step, – it is important not to simply state the current wishes for the future, but rather to develop a "Image from the future" out of it.

 „We wanted to make the cake bigger, not just have a good time while baking …What has happened to the straightforwardly capitalist idea of cake enlargement and why mediation can benefit from reflecting on this strand of intellectual history is discussed in the second part of this article “