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Rick Russell - in conversation

As I look toward the future of conflict management, I see amazing potential and a few big challenges.

The challenge of change

To begin with, I've been persuaded by what I've observed: that if real listening and reflecting is going on, people cannot communicate without changing each other. One big challenge for conflict managers is to address people's very real fear of being persuaded through listening. Many times, when mediation doesn't work, it is because participants have a stated intention of listening and a determined behaviour of not listening. We misunderstand that. We believe that people don't listen because of their values or other barriers. That's sometimes the case. More often, it is that people fear that what they hear will change them.

I think that people change when they identify a conflict within themselves: "What you say causes me to reflect on my values". To be in conflict with yourself, with someone you're not feeling safe with all the time, is to be vulnerable. It means voluntarily entering a place of creative tension, a tension that can move you forward to change. People yearn for resolution both with others and within themselves. Transformative mediation works when people allow conflict within themselves. Once they are conflicted, they can he open to change. People who are too fearful to be open to change, may lie about what they want. Pointing out the tension between what they want for themselves and where they are right now can help them move though the pain of changing, because the desire to have what they want helps to propel them through the risk.

They may be prepared to risk their own comfortable idea of what is right or wrong and who they are in order to accomplish resolution. To allow themselves to do what they need to do to resolve the external conflict may require seeing themselves in a different way. It takes real courage to decide to change yourself. That's what psychotherapy does in months and years of relationship-building. The work of solving the larger conflict cannot begin until people are prepared to listen. Sometimes it is a lot of work to get someone to that place. More and more, I find that three-hour transactional mediation models are missing the hard work of helping people get prepared to listen or prepared to risk change. The pre-mediation work can be more daunting than the actual mediation work for the participants.

Paradoxically, listening is both an end-goal and a beginning point. In some kinds of conflict, and any kind of consensus-building process, the preparedness to listen is almost assumed. I think it may be the hidden big lie. Often people come without a willingness to listen. Our challenge as mediators is to find ways to address squarely this fear of being persuaded. The issue is seldom addressed in training. Yet, we who do mediate often see it in the behaviour of parties in dispute. If they're not there to be changed, the likelihood of fashioning anything meaningful is diminished exponentially. We need to recognize the care and courage it takes to listen and we need to acknowledge it out loud.

The challenge of creating structural support for consensus processes

We now have a number of consensus-building models that operate remarkably effectively, even though the rights-based structure casts a shadow over them. The current structure supports a rights-based approach to everything, but interest-based problem- solving is fundamentally different. So long as the publicly-funded mechanisms are based on rights, we are making a statement about the importance of rights as opposed to interests. We are saying to kids and citizens: "Your rights are the most important things. Your needs and concerns are very nice, but it is rights that we are prepared to protect and give public resources to in the courts." Rights-based models are parental models. Citizens (like children) go before judges (taking the role of parents) to be told whose entitlement is superior. We may remember how that felt for us as children. As we grew up, it became an unacceptable way to solve problems.

Yet as a society, we put almost all our resources into that parental/rights morsel. We could follow a mature citizen model, where people are self-determining, but there is very little public education to help citizens develop the capacity to solve their own problems. Instead, we educate "parents" and spokespeople (lawyers) to speak for people whom we assume cannot solve their own problems.

For parents, the primary role is to make yourself redundant, so that your children will become self-sufficient when they leave. Courts and legislatures have not identified this as a priority as yet. Our society does not yet love and respect its members enough to put those resources into their hands. The state, the system, needs to show respect, love and trust toward its citizens. It now treats citizens as if they are separate from the community that created it. The system was created by us and it can be re-created by us. It is not apart from us, though in its desire for autonomy it wants to be treated as if it were. We have not taken the logical step of thinking through where the rights-based system is leading us. The ladder is against the wrong wall. We are getting quicker at getting up the wrong wall. When we reach the top, there is no satisfaction.

How do we bring society to the point of questioning the priority that we are placing on the current rights-based structure! People will not see the need/value of changing the structure until they can ask these kinds of fundamental questions. Current structures are based on the idea that the appropriate authority can make any problem right. We feed the facts into the appropriate legal formula (precedent, statute, etc.) and it should come out, predictably with the same right answer.

The people at the apex of these structures realize that they routinely don't get it right or make it right. Justices and judges do not believe in a legal Formula that will give a just result whenever you pour the facts in. If you change any one of any number of variables - the trier of fact, quality of witnesses, the emphasis of the legal arguments - the outcome will change. Everyone involved intimately with the justice system recognizes that the idea that the system routinely produces just outcomes is simply a fallacy. In England they call them the Law Courts and not the Courts of Justice, because they say, people know the difference!

Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, describes a poor system as one that defeats good people all of the time. Even if everyone does what they can do, the best way they can, some systems will yield perverse outcomes that harm everyone in the system. A system operates that way if it hasn't been thought through thoroughly to begin with, and if it has been added to along the way. One example might be our prison system. If the primary goal were to hiring people back into society, how different would this system look! Should we be investing our resources somewhere else? I am not saying that entitlements don't have their place, merely that no one has questioned the pre-eminent place they have had for centuries. Now there is not room for everyone's rights; they overlap and conflict with each other, and increasingly we need to call on "mom/dad" to decide whose rights are superior.

In my view, what we need is more "green space" around rights - to negotiate what will work. We need good, effective, predictable (where possible) rights-based back-ups to make the system work. But I would like to see society and the policy-makers move, in a consensus-based way, from a concentration on substantive outcomes to designing processes that are consonant with our value system. Consensus-building processes yield better systems. The process of designing new systems should be undertaken, not just by conflict managers, but by everyone who has a stake. Otherwise, those affected will throw a monkey wrench in the works, as is already happening. Citizens say, "Ignore me at your peril!"

The challenge of cooperative discourse

Times of transition demand a readiness to explore other ways of thinking. Can we move our society away from the idea that, in order to discuss, we have to debate! We think about ideas by debating them - we hammer out a synthesis. This is the Hegelian dialectic: thesis + antithesis = synthesis. It is struggle-oriented. The principal image is one of combat.

Can't we explore together, without a need for one to overcome another? Can't one inform the other! Let us develop new patterns of thinking and deciding growing out of a desire to explore, rather than a desire to debate. Aboriginal "talking sticks" and circle processes, for example, place a value on contribution rather than on advocacy. Each person contributes to the greater understanding. This leads to a more appreciative process. As we deal with larger group issues, it becomes more important to consider paradigms other than batting a tennis ball back and forth. People have a strong yearning to be listened to and appreciated for who they are, so much so that in California you can now find "listening bars" where you can pay people to listen to you. My wife, Darlene, uses the following group exercise in her coaching-training.

The facilitator invites someone to come to the front of the room to talk about something they feel strongly about, (usually a win or a personal triumph). She then asks the others in the group to acknowledge what they have heard, to ask questions for clarification or understanding, or to provide feedback on the feelings they're observed or the content they feel they've understood. The facilitator then asks small, powerful questions, such as: "What did you feel as a listener in your body; what did you hear in her voice besides the words? What did timbre of her voice mean to you: what did that tremor mean?"

It is salutary for the people who have been listened to. They feel very gratified And the people who have been picking up the information are gratified to be able to share it. The key is that not just listening, but demonstrating listening is what creates the buzz. We are reluctant lots of times to demonstrate listening, because it can seem patronizing or "touchy/feely", which circles back to the question of being prepared to be "out there" to be changed. I try to genuinely congratulate people on the courage that it takes to face the problem, their fears, and the people who have led to their pain and fear.

In all of the structures we've been talking about, people make this choice - against all the odds. It is like grass breaking through a paved schoolyard. People are alive and divine, and their divinity breaks through like the life force. It's coming! Conflict resolution is not about generating a force, but managing a force that's coming anyway. It's there - an irresistible force that we all yearn for, so that despite the fact that there's every good reason never to get into a room with someone you're in conflict with, people do and they grow and grow. It's wondrous. Mediators get invited to this miracle of people choosing to do what is painful and what they are fearful of. It's clear why so many are attracted to this profession. This is what I feel is at the heart of the remarkable changes that we can look forward to in the new millennium - it's exciting to be part of it!

Rick Russell is a mediator, facilitator, trainer, lawyer and former ombuds for McMaster University in Ontario. He is a founding member of Agree Dispute Resolution, a full-service conflict resolution, training and consulting firm located in Dundas, Ontario.