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REAL WORLD INSIGHTS: Peter Coleman’s “Adaptive Mediation”

Peter Coleman’s research has identified the four most challenging conditions or “derailers” of mediation as:

  1. High intensity conflict: higher levels of destructiveness, emotionality, and intransigence;
  2. High degrees of constraints or limitations on the mediation: including legal and time constraints and constituent pressure;
  3. Highly competitive relationships between the disputants; and
  4. The covert nature of the issues and processes, including the degree to which hidden processes and agendas are feeding the dispute.

This research led to the development of a model of adaptive mediation. Mediators were found to take on dramatically different roles and respond with different strategies and tactics when facing the five distinct mediation situations, including:

  1. The (Standard) Mediator: backing off, observing, and facilitating in a more relational and nonjudgmental way when relations are more moderate;
  2. The Medic: responding in a stronger, more controlling and demanding manner when encountering high levels of intensity and destructiveness of conflict;
  3. The Fixer: responding with more preparation, efficiency, and transparency and by lowering aspirations when the situation is highly constrained;
  4. The Referee: responding like a hands-on referee or arbiter when the level of competitiveness of relations between the disputants was high, and;
  5. The Counselor: responding in a more private, probing, therapeutic fashion when the issues and processes in the case were found to be covert and inaccessible publicly.

Do you relate to any of these roles when faced with challenging mediations?  Are there perhaps other roles that you have identified in your practice?

Coleman, P. T., K. G. Kugler, and L. Chatman. (2017) Adaptive mediation: An evidence-based contingency approach to mediating conflict. International Journal of Conflict Management 28(3): 383–406.

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