HOW DO PEOPLE LEARN MEDIATION SKILLS?

When asked where does one learn mediation skills, the answer is usually “Find a community center or university that offers a class.” That answer, though, really doesn’t reflect reality.

Writing to attorneys, mediator David Henry wrote that “Mediation is a dark art… Lessons learned in mediation pass only by word of mouth, and due to confidentially concerns, have to be sanitized, generalized, and abstracted… Mediation occurs in a black box where there is no public viewing.”

One way to learn from mediators is the book Stories Mediators Tell edited by Eric Galton and Lela Love, published by the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section. In the book, twenty-four mediators tell stories about their sessions. Some are inspirational, some tragic, some funny, and some tell of missteps the mediator made. In a sense, mediators have passed on stories of how to do mediation for centuries and the stories in this book continue that tradition.

One of stories was shared by Ben Cunningham, a mediator in Austin, Texas. A young woman on her bicycle had been killed in a tragic accident involving a truck. The mediation was with the father of the young woman, the driver of the truck, and their attorneys. Ben created an environment where he made it possible for the father to talk about his daughter and for the truck driver to express sorrow and apologize. At one point, he encouraged the attorneys to exit the room leaving the two parties alone. When they came back in the room the parties were still talking. Then the father announced that he would accept the settlement offered by the insurance company under the condition that the money be for counseling and a college fund for the driver’s daughter who had been in the truck when the accident happened.

As any mediator will tell you, such agreements are not all that unusual. How did the mediator know to encourage the parties to speak with one another alone? This approach was not learned in a class or from a book, but rather from years of discussions with other mediators.