Conflict Competence

Being a mediator means being ready for pretty much anything. Normally, as soon as I’m retained, I try to make things happen quickly. Conflicts have a cycle, whether decades or nanoseconds. There may or may not be warning signs. Once people take on the additional identity of party in a conflict, that identity begins to define all the other identities that exist in the relationship. But they are still in a relationship.

People think that once they shift from being just people in a relationship to parties in a conflict that the relationship is over. The conflict actually keeps them tightly bound together although they think of themselves as broken apart. Whether it transformed from a loving relationship into a destructive one, or started as destructive, whether it slowly gestated or quickly exploded, conflict is a relationship. We learn from conflict, grow with it, and change because of it.

For as long as the conflict exists, we expend energy feeling about it, absorb cranial space with wishes about and for those we think have harmed us, and behave in ways that make sense within the boundaries of a conflict relationship. After the conflict ceases we still may not let our conflicts go. It can change our behaviour for the future. The feelings associated with that relationship can come flooding back years later, carried on the smells of a memory, the anecdotes of a friend that remind us of something, a stranger walking by who seems familiar, or an unexpected encounter with someone who knew you back then. Conflicts have a cycle that ends, but their half-lives can resemble radioactive uranium. 

When to intervene in a conflict is, in theory, a question of appropriate timing and is, in practice, part risk and part luck. Being too early or too late makes intervention more difficult. As a consultant there is usually only one time that I can intervene, and that’s when I get hired to walk into someone else’s context.

There is little room for pessimism in a mediator’s mind. A group of mediators is truly a gathering of positive paranoids; mediators can convince themselves that everyone is out to get them to do the right thing. I assume that when the time is ripe, the cycle will be ready to move to a different pattern. My job includes helping the parties reach that ripeness.