The Real Reason People Refuse to Mediate

It's not the orange.

The reasons people give as to why they don’t want to mediate are many and varied. I don’t think it will achieve anything. They’re not going to listen. I can’t sit in the same room as them. They're being unreasonable.

Call me an old cynic, but I think the real reason is usually that most people think that mediation means compromise.  

And compromise means giving ground, or making a concession, or – God forbid – apologising for something they don’t need to apologise for, because why should they? I mean, they’re the victim here, aren’t they?

Aren’t they?

We’re all victims. It’s an inherent part of our human psyche. Our brains don’t cast us as the antagonist. Few of us really sit in a dark room stroking a hairless cat cackling manically about world domination. We’re never the bad guy.

Which is why mediation can be daunting – because it might require someone to reframe their own behaviour.

The way around it is the secret ingredient of conflict resolution – empathy.

Crucially, that most elusive of human conditions, empathy, must not be confused with sympathy. Sympathy is easy. It’s taking sides. It’s blind agreement. It’s hollow validation. It’s what someone wants to hear.

Empathy, on the other hand, asks something much more uncomfortable of us: to understand how another person experiences the world without necessarily agreeing with their conclusions.

Empathy doesn’t say, I agree – it says, I’m listening.

That then needs to be combined with another essential mediation ingredient – curiosity.

Most often, people are afraid to compromise because they have a very specific idea of what compromise looks like. They assume what “the other” person wants. And the thing they settle on, whatever it is, is invariably something they are not prepared to give.

The classic example is that of the two children fighting over an orange. They both want an orange, and there is only one left. Neither is prepared to give ground, and neither is prepared to talk about it because they assume the other wants exactly what they want: the whole orange.

The exasperated parent suggests slicing the orange in half, but then, technically, neither child gets what they want. Both are left unhappy and bitter.

That’s compromise for you.

But through discussion, through understanding, through listening and through curiosity, a truth is discovered: child one wants the skin to zest into a cake; child two wants the fruit to juice into a drink.

The answer was there all along, but only through empathetic dialogue was it discovered and, insofar as peeling the orange was any form of compromise, it was not the type anyone first envisaged.

When faced with someone refusing to mediate, asking them why is a good starting point, but it’s unlikely to unlock the problem. Listening to the answer just might though.