Thread by @keikoinboston

I have a friend who is a professionally trained mediator who recently shared this brief Twitter lecture on mediation with me when we were looking at some tweets together. 🧵

I’ve since shared it privately with friends who found it helpful in other situations so I got permission to share publicly so it can have a wider audience.

He’s opting to remain anonymous. ↓

Obviously no one on social media is engaging in professional mediation here but you will often find people claiming to be neutral parties who are very much not what they say are. ↓

This may help you identify when and how someone you’re talking to or observing is not a neutral party and help you understand why they’re not managing to resolve conflicts. ↓

I've made a few corrections for readability (added missing punctuation & words) but otherwise the text in the the tweets below remains unchanged from the screenshots. ↓

Mediation 101 for Non-Mediators

1A: If you have ever advocated for a particular party, you must do a conflict check before mediating between that party and another, which means getting written consent from the new party.

1B: If you have ever advocated for a particular party AGAINST another particular party, you are generally precluded from ever serving as a Neutral between the two. This is consentable only in VERY limited circumstances.

1C: Conflict checks and consent are essential to the practice of dispute resolution because, the whole point is to create a cessation of conflict. No mediator is so individually effective as to be irreplaceable.

1C con't:

A qualified Neutral must value resolution over their own participation AND must inform participants of alternative options for Neutrals. If you don’t have any alts lined up then you are a shitty amateur.

2: Mediation must be by consent. Like sex, it doesn’t have to be in writing, but it does have to be clearly willing and absent coercion.

2A: Mediation requires consent—from ALL parties— to BEGIN. Again, like sex, without clear consent at the start, there may—and SHOULD—be severe consequences for the violator.

2B: Mediation ends when ONE party says it does. The end. A Neutral cannot coerce, threaten, incentivize, etc. a party to continue. Such actions could result in legal and/or professional consequences.

3: Mediation is a CONFIDENTIAL and PRIVATE process. It is not a spectator activity. The outcome is not up to a vote.

3 con't:

Any “Neutral” who agrees to—or worse, SEEKS to—facilitate any such efforts “in public” is not engaging in conflict resolution. They are engaging in conflict GENERATION.

3A: Confidentiality is critical because it is the causal glue of any lasting agreement. It lets parties bring ALL of the relevant information to the table. More information creates a more efficient process and produces more final resolutions.

3B: The whole point of conflict resolution is to find a meeting space between TWO opposed stakeholders. This is why most formal mediation involves a minimal number of parties and a single Neutral.

3B con't:

Every additional party involved, whether active or as a “viewer” increases the variance of “stakes” and decreases the likelihood of a concrete end to the underlying conflict.

If you found this helpful, would love to hear the context. My DMs are open if you’d rather not share in public. Would be interesting feedback for my friend. Thanks!