A New Chapter at Columbia

Over the past two years I have been quietly carrying around a big personal and professional commitment: graduate school.

This month I officially completed my Master of Science in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.

It feels strange, exciting, humbling, and deeply satisfying to finally write those words.

When I began this program, I already had decades of experience as a mediator, trainer, and conflict resolution practitioner. Some people asked me why I would return to graduate school after working in the field for so long. The answer is actually pretty simple: curiosity. I wanted to keep learning. I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted more language, theory, research, and perspective to deepen and expand the work I care so much about.

And that is exactly what happened.

Over the course of this program I found myself thinking deeply about conflict in ways that stretched far beyond the mediation room. I explored systems theory, organizational conflict, restorative and transformative approaches to harm, negotiation, identity, power, collective action, and social change. Again and again I found myself returning to questions that have followed me throughout my career:

What helps people stay connected during conflict?

What conditions make accountability possible?

How do systems reinforce harm, and how can communities create alternatives?

How do we support communication that increases dignity, agency, and understanding?

One of the greatest gifts of the program was the opportunity to learn alongside brilliant classmates from around the world. Lawyers, activists, educators, organizational leaders, psychologists, diplomats, artists, community organizers, and peacebuilders. People working in very different contexts, asking many of the same human questions. I leave this experience with a broader understanding of conflict and a deeper appreciation for the many ways people are working toward justice, healing, and change.

Although it wasn’t always easy completing my coursework while managing the demands of life, it felt doable because of how my studies supported the reinforced the work I was already doing. My studies helped me see my professional purpose with greater clarity and depth. The theories and frameworks I studied gave me new ways to understand dynamics I have witnessed for years in mediation rooms, organizations, classrooms, and communities.

I feel grateful to my professors, classmates, clients, students, friends, and family who supported me throughout this journey. And I feel especially grateful that after all these years working in conflict resolution, I still feel inspired by the possibility of people learning to communicate with greater courage, care, and intention.

I’m excited to carry this learning forward into the next chapter of my work.

My Wish for 2024

There is no doubt that most days it feels like the world is on fire. Sometimes it is hard to even see a way forward through all the fog of self-righteousness, willful ignorance, rigidity, and empty platitudes. While it can feel scary how easily many people seem to be drawn toward old fashioned polarizing propaganda, there is also hope in noticing how many people are able to hold nuance and tolerate ambiguity in the face of pressure to conform to a false binary narrative.

The people who can exist in the both/and, recognizing that rarely is any person simply one thing - they give me hope. And my wish for 2024 is that more of us will be able to meet in this place, the in between space, to share ourselves, our values, our needs. And to do so without vilifying the other, without falling into the old patterns of clinging to rules for the sake of rules.

Let us surrender to the ambiguity and uncertainty of life. The truth that none of us are in control, but that collectively we can bend the arc of history. We can hold ourselves and each other to higher standards, while also extending grace, being accountable, and practicing acknowledging and repairing the harms we will inevitably commit.

For we are all human. Fallible and animal. Operating primarily through our unconscious needs, desires, and biological systems. We can hold both truths - that we are only animals and also that with human consciousness comes greater responsibility. We can wake from the hypnosis of colonial imperialism and the belief that any of us has the right to control anybody else. We can live into the truth of interdependence and that each of us is accountable to and still autonomous from each other. We can learn reciprocity in relationships without resorting to transactional objectification.

Mediation practice is a tool that deepens and expands my capacity to exist in the in between. I know to expect and listen for multiple truths. I can maintain equilibrium in the middle space, between problem and solution. I can allow the unfolding, knowing that the most successful and satisfying resolutions come through patiently untangling the threads until everyone can clearly understand the problem. And I know that finding a resolution does not always mean solving the problem.

My wish for 2024 is that more and more of us can embrace the nuance, the ambiguity, the living in between that characterizes the human experience. I wish for more and more of us to refuse empty platitudes and false promises of perfect answers, which almost always require the annihilation of someone. I wish to deepen our roots of practice and expand the branches of community as we grow this culture of the in between. Let us continue into 2024, facing forward toward our vision of a brighter future, arms linked and feet planted firmly on the ground of the present moment.

Client Satisfaction vs Settlement (no, they are not the same thing)

The client wanted to go back to mediation to revise their custody agreement. “My ex-wife was happy with our last mediator because she was really on my wife’s side. I had a lot going on at the time. I should have really stood up to them, but I needed to settle so we could move forward. But now things have changed and it’s really not working for me.” The client was hopeful that their ex-wife would say yes to another mediation, with a different mediator, because he really didn’t want to go to court.

Unfortunately I’ve had variations on this conversation quite a few times. Sometimes it’s a conversation with one of my mediation students who shares that they tried mediation one time, but it wasn’t anything like what I was teaching. They remembered the mediator doling out advice and putting pressure on the parties to settle.

The lack of public awareness about mediation, and the common misconception that it’s all about encouraging people in conflict to “compromise” and settle, creates a challenge in terms of quality assurance. From the outside perspective, a mediator who has a high “success” rate (meaning most of their cases settle) is a “good” mediator. And sometimes they are. But when we equate settlement with success, we miss some critical elements of client satisfaction and undermine true quality of process.

If individuals in a dispute simply wish to negotiate a settlement, there are processes for that. Settlement conferencing is one of those. But mediation is really about supporting parties in resolving not just the tangible issues in dispute, but also in feeling resolved emotionally and psychologically. Sometimes the pathway toward a satisfying resolution does not involve a settlement, or at least not right away.

When a mediator is primarily settlement oriented they may minimize or override the reservations or objections of the parties. They may apply an arbitrary, or legal precedent, of “fairness” in assessing an appropriate outcome for the parties, instead of doing the work of creatively crafting a resolution that meets the needs of the parties in the moment, as well as takes into account possible necessary changes in the future.

The parties walk away with an agreement, the mediator can add one more “successful” mediation to their tally, but can they say that the parties are actually satisfied?

The skills of a mediator are difficult to quantify - the capacity to deeply listen and understand different perspectives; the ability to remain impartial while actively supporting the parties in their communication; keeping their own opinion, values, and ego out of the equation while facilitating collaborative problem solving… These cannot be accurately confirmed by a mediator’s training resume, or by their settlement rates.

Mediators themselves have to commit to ongoing self-reflection. We need to open ourselves up to professional feedback and hold each other accountable. We need to continually check our egos. And we need to interrogate the practice of defining success in mediation primarily by settlement rates.