The Creative Solution Table of Contents
Summary:
Chip Rose’s chapter “The Balancing Act” argues that effective mediation focuses on each client’s individual needs rather than striving for artificial equality. Rose contends that mediators should provide balance by offering diverse perspectives and solutions, adapting their approach based on the client’s circumstances. He emphasizes the importance of thorough preparation to understand individual needs and advocates for impartiality over neutrality in mediation.
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Two of the most challenging tasks in mediating interpersonal conflict are recognizing imbalance in the process dynamics between the clients and selecting the most appropriate intervention strategy that will best serve the disparate needs of each client. Imbalances may not be readily apparent. Once identified, the mediator is confronted by the dilemma of responding to the clients’ significantly differing needs. The intervention of providing balance is often confused with the misguided notion of creating a level playing field.
There is an important conceptual distinction between providing each client with appropriate balance, and attempting to balance the parties by making them more equal in the process. The latter approach would be most dangerous if one were actually capable of achieving it. How would equality be measured? Whose standards of equality would be used? How would one ascertain the achievement of equality? The reality is that the parties come into the process as individuals and it is not within the grasp of the mediator, nor anyone else, to make them equal. The issue is more accurately one of individual needs, not equality. Neither representation by an attorney nor facilitation by a skilled mediator will make the parties more equal. Framing the circumstance as a matter of equality has the effect of entangling the individual process issues of the parties, instead of distinguishing them and assisting each party to take responsibility for an appropriate process approach for dealing with them.
Considering the individual needs of each party is more clarifying and achievable, for both mediator and client, than the attempt at establishing relative equality. In reinforcing each of their needs as relevant and necessary to their mutually achieving a maximized outcome, the mediator has set the stage for the use of balancing as an appropriate and necessary intervention strategy. In this context, “balancing” manifests itself in the presentation of additional considerations, a variety of perspectives and alternate conceptual frameworks that provide the client with multiple avenues around any perceived impasse or problem.
As with all mediation techniques and styles, balancing responses can reflect the full range of styles within the Riskin grid. From the specifically evaluative to the fully facilitative, the style of intervention will depend on the client circumstances and the mediator’s individual preferences and skill level. Additionally, the variety of sources for imbalance mandate a wide range of skills and strategies for effective intervention. Response to an information imbalance may be to explore the most effective methods for acquiring information and for integrating that information into the shared process. Normalizing, validating, and exploring the need for outside assistance from an attorney, financial planner, appraiser or accountant, allows the facilitation and support of the individual needs of one client without comparison to the needs of the other. For many, a far more challenging imbalance is one that is emotional or psychological. Gauging the appropriate level of empathy and engaged response sufficient to avoid a paralyzing impasse, while at the same time maintaining a connection to and rapport with the other client, requires judgment and skill. The balance of focusing on the issues of one without damaging the connection to the other, is probably most at risk in this circumstance.
An important key to being positioned to respond effectively to each client’s need for balance is to prepare the clients fully, in advance of the need to intervene. Beginning the mediation by discussing their individual process and substantive needs, provides the mediator with the opportunity to describe their individuality as to their perspectives, interests and values. Advising that those individual characteristics will require different skills from the mediator (in addition to those which will be in common), opens the door to securing client permission to respond to those differences as circumstances require. Not only will this approach prepare the clients for the process that will unfold, it offers the mediator an opportunity to demonstrate capacity. Thorough preparation of the clients at the outset of the process distinguishes the need to act impartially from the mistaken notion that the mediator will treat the clients equally in order to maintain balance. As a note of personal prejudice, I have never been comfortable with the term “neutral” as it is commonly used to describe the role of the mediator. There is an inference in the word “neutral” suggesting the mediator will treat each client the same. By contrast, the term “impartial” is descriptively accurate in its application to the mediator’s tasks, while remaining completely consistent with the need for creative and personalized balancing interventions as each client’s needs necessitate.
The Creative Solution Table of Contents
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