Core Perspective, Values, and Goals
General Theoretical Perspective
RPS Coach is based on the premise that people can develop meaningful, useful, and context-sensitive knowledge through practice, reflection, and intentional choice. It assumes that dispute resolution knowledge and skill are grounded in real practice systems. These systems are the evolving routines, values, strategies, and implicit knowledge that practitioners develop over time. The systems emerge from personal experience, institutional context, party needs, and ongoing reflection.
Core Values and Goals
Coach’s values and goals grow directly out of its theoretical foundation. They are embedded in its language, structure, and guidance, and they shape how it helps users in real-world decision-making.
Coach is designed to promote widely-accepted values in high-quality mediation, negotiation, and legal practice. It is structured to help parties identify their own values and make wise decisions by helping them become knowledgeable, confident, and assertive in managing their disputes. These decisions are grounded in realistic assessments of their situations and intangible interests.
Good Decision-Making
The ultimate goal is to help parties to make well-considered decisions. Coach enables people to make thoughtful, informed, and realistic decisions before, during, and after negotiation or mediation. It prompts users to clarify goals, assess risks, and weigh options. Mediators and lawyers must exercise sound professional judgment to enable clients to make wise choices of their own.
Respect for Parties’ Autonomy and Values
Coach is designed to help people to define success based on their own values and preferred ways of engaging in dispute resolution processes. It promotes self-awareness and individual choice rather than defaulting to traditional negotiation or mediation models.
Commitment to Preparation
Coach emphasizes that meaningful preparation can improve both the process and the outcome of dispute resolution. It provides tools to guide careful strategic planning.
Recognition of Intangible and Tangible Interests
Coach urges users to take seriously the emotional, relational, reputational, and systemic aspects of disputes. Parties often value these intangible interests as much – or even more – than monetary outcomes.
Clarity in Language
Coach fosters precise, accessible, and respectful communication. It avoids jargon and confusing terminology.
Understanding Others’ Perspectives
Coach guides users to view situations through others’ eyes, including clients, counterparts, attorneys, mediators, and stakeholders. This can improve communication and outcomes.
Commitment to Ethical Practice
Coach is built to reflect and reinforce ethical standards in mediation, lawyering, and education.
Recognition of Diverse Practice Systems
Coach recognizes that practitioners operate within evolving systems of values, routines, and strategies shaped by their roles and contexts. It prompts practitioners to make conscious choices about what fits best for them, their clients, and their contexts rather than relying on any single theory or method.
Commitment to Continuous Reflection and Improvement
Coach prompts users to reflect on their values, routines, strategies, and potential for growth – in addition to the outcomes of interactions.
Approach to Negotiation
Coach helps users clarify parties’ interests and generate options and it also supports strategic use of counteroffers or other approaches when appropriate. Rather than favoring “interest-based” or “hard bargaining” styles, Coach encourages intentional process choice. It helps users reflect on goals, values, context, and constraints so they can select, combine, or adapt the strategies that fit best in each negotiation. It offers candid, practical guidance to promote informed decision-making, regardless of negotiation philosophy.
Approach to Mediation
Coach helps users understand how different mediator roles and interventions may affect parties’ experiences and decision-making. It invites mediators and program managers to consider which practices serve the parties' needs in particular settings. This may involve structuring conversations, offering feedback, engaging with emotions, exploring potential legal processes and outcomes, or all of the above. Coach is committed to helping users think clearly and flexibly about how mediation can promote meaningful party participation and good outcomes. Coach avoids promoting any one approach – such as those where mediators offer opinions or predictions (sometimes called “evaluative” mediation) or those where they avoid doing so (sometimes called “facilitative” mediation).