Transcript

JACKIE:

Hello, I’m Jackie Tuck from The Open University. With me is Katherine Graham, Managing Director of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire, and I’ll be talking to her about the language used in mediation and conflict resolution. Katherine, could I ask you how important it is for a mediator to be aware of the language they’re using?

KATHERINE

It’s really important because it’s one of the only tools they’ve got available to them, and it can be a very explosive matter if you get it wrong. So even a single word like ‘respect’ or ‘professional’ can ignite the conflict that you’ve come to resolve. So, being mindful of the words that you’re using, when you’re using them, which part of the process you’re in, who you’re addressing – all of those different choices make up the personality of the mediation because you’re setting the tone, you’re setting the feeling of the mediation with the language that you use.

JACKIE

Would you be able to give me some examples of the types of language which are usually a good idea for a mediator to employ?

KATHERINE

The types of language that we’d really want mediators to use would be descriptive words, descriptive language. You want to avoid anything that’s analytical or logical or evaluative. So if somebody’s rocking on their chair and looking out of the window, you would say ‘I noticed you’re rocking on the chair and looking out of the window and I’m wondering what’s going on for you’, rather than saying ‘You seem distracted’, which would be a judgement and an evaluative comment.

So you’re constantly looking at ways of reflecting back what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re wondering, using language which is as open and tentative as possible. So mediators will typically use a lot of those fluffy bits at the beginning and the end of sentences, like ‘I’m wondering if …’, or ‘It sounds like …’, or ‘Am I right in …’, because you want them to feel that they can correct you. You want them to give you the steer and for them to end up saying what it is that they’re feeling or believing.

So you’d also use the party’s language a lot as well, but reframe it. So if they say ‘He’s an absolute bully and if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m gonna make a complaint,’ you would never as a mediator say ‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’, because that is almost solidifying their experience and it’s giving it some legitimacy. So you use their language but you reframe it. So you might say something like ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry touches things on your desk and for you, you feel that that’s bullying.’ You might offer it back but with some softenings, some descriptive language.

When you’re mediating you will try and influence the way the parties are speaking, sometimes in very explicit ways. You might ask them to say something positive about each other. So you’re trying to rebalance perhaps some of the negative versus positive stuff in the room. You might quite explicitly tell them to use ‘I’ statements, not ‘you’ statements, because parties are very, very happy to say ‘you’re lazy’, ‘you’re intolerable’, ‘I can’t bear you’, which isn’t what you’re after, they need to really use an ‘I’ statement.

So there’s quite a lot of coaching going on. And you would say ‘Well can you tell me what you feel?’ And the party will say ‘Yes I feel you’re being unreasonable.’ And you’ll have to go back and say ‘Actually that’s a thought. You think they’re being unreasonable. Can you tell me how you feel?’ And they’ll say ‘I feel he's bullying me.’ And that’s another projected, labelling evaluative statement. So you have to say ‘No. How do you feel?’ And eventually they might say ‘I feel overwhelmed’.

You’ll also find that sometimes you need to be more robust, as a mediator. It’s not all pink and fluffy and ‘How do you feel?’. Sometimes you need to stop people who are raising their voice or going off track. And so mediators will also be quite clear and precise. So you’re changing the language according to how much control you should be exerting over the interaction. So when you need to be more authoritative, you’ll shift your tone, you’ll shift your pace, you’ll start using their names, and you’ll be much, much more descriptive about what you want them to do.

And there should be a continuum: you always start with the softest most interactive intervention and save anything that’s a reference to a ‘rule’, in inverted commas, right to the bitter end. So if you can’t persuade them and encourage them to change how they’re talking to one another, for example, then you will ask, and then if that doesn’t work you might explicitly say ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another: Janet you’re not letting James speak. I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen?’ And then they’ll go ‘Yes, yes’.

And then you’ll say ‘Okay, in that case, Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet, James away you go.’ So you’ll be quite tough sometimes.

Another example of the type of language that you typically use as a mediator would be mutual language, so you’ll hear mediators saying ‘we’ a lot, rather than ‘I’ or ‘you’. You’ll hear them saying ‘You both seem to …’, or ‘This seems a shared experience’. So you’re using language to indicate the connection that they should have or that they’re aspiring to have.

One of the things I like to do is to make sure that I’m using really homely phrases, kind of ordinary language. I know that I’ve had it fed back to me from some co-workers that when I mediate I am obviously working in the room quite spontaneously with language that’s occurring to me at the time. So I may well say things like ‘Okay, let’s crack on, we’ve only got another hour left and we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.’ Because you’re all in it together, and you want to allow them to see you as an ordinary person, not a special technical user of grandiose language.

When you train people, they’re always wanting a phrase book and they’re very frustrated that you’re not going to give them one, because the key skill is to be alive and creative in each conversation – in each moment of each conversation. So you’re always focusing on what's happening in the room at the time, and it can be really exhausting. And you need to pull all your language resources together, and concentrate on the moment to say the right thing in such a way that it’s going to be helpful.

And so you are always living in the moment when you’re in the mediation. And that’s why I like doing it, because you can't prepare for it. You just rock up and, you know, you always go with what the parties bring you. It’s brilliant.