Walking alongside Our Clients on Their Journey through Conflict Open Access

I picked up Bernard Mayer's new book last spring, and here is the bottom line: its impact on my practice was instant. The first chapter immediately lent insight into one of my current projects and why it had been stalled. More than an “aha!” moment, it was a slap‐the‐forehead‐in‐dismay kind of moment: “Now, why didn't I see that?”

What is more, the impact has been enduring. It has changed how I think about and talk about the work I do, and how I pitch, budget, and manage those projects.

Immediate and enduring? That is a rare combination for those of us who have been full‐time negotiation and mediation practitioners and thinkers for any reasonable length of time.

But let us remember who Bernie is. Bernie Mayer loves to walk about our alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practitioner house and poke at the foundations, to pry up the edge of the linoleum that forms the surface of our central assumptions and peer underneath, questioning whether our adherence to some of these core tenets is not simply masking some deeper, more genuine truth that lies beneath.

In 2004, Mayer took his crowbar to neutrality. In Beyond Neutrality: Confronting the Crisis in Conflict Resolution (see Matz 2005 in these pages for a review), he argued that our rigid adherence to this central tenet is producing a crisis in our field. What if parties in conflict need substantive advice, push back, advocacy, direction, or coaching? Why dismiss these roles as illegitimate if they meet parties' interests and our capabilities?

In this latest book, Mayer pushes this role expansion further. He suggests that the short‐term, transactional lens through which many of us view our clients' conflicts and our engagement in helping them means selling ourselves short. And it, moreover, leaves our parties ill equipped for the journey they must walk over the long term as they leave our offices, pay our bills, and venture forth to continue to cope with their conflicts as they unfold and evolve in their long‐term relationships.

To be fair, all kinds of incentives encourage both parties and practitioners to frame the conflict — and our work together — in a limited and finite way.

Parties in conflict long for an end to the stress, uncertainty, and frustration of their situation. Mayer notes that, “In the face of conflict and stress, people want something to hang onto, such as clarity about the ‘correct’ outcome, a simple view of right and wrong, a belief in the inevitability of victory, or even a conviction that one is part of a noble if doomed struggle” (p. 36). The appeal of some certainty or a hope that things could be sorted out “once and for all” is often what propels parties to seek our help.

And as mediators, we seek to be responsive to their practical needs and emotional interests, as well as their often limited budgets. So, we look for aspects of their conflict that can be brokered, interests that can be met, and agreements that can be made. We work to help parties feel that they have been heard and to provide closure on issues among them. We feel satisfaction at the shift in tone in the room or with the appreciation they express when we help them work through articulated issues.

There is often nothing wrong with this, as far as it goes. But Mayer is pointing out that it just does not go very far. If we take even one step back to look at the relationship landscape, we can see our little mediation incident on a vast and pockmarked tableau. Worse, we may have unrealistically raised parties' expectations and then left them without the coping skills they need to handle interactions with their counterparts next week and next year.

For in most cases, we do little to help parties as they continue their journey together through what are often deeply rooted and enduring clashes in values, philosophies, personalities, foibles, interests, and needs. Divorcing spouses may cut a custody deal but continue to clash in front of the kids over child support, discipline, or visitation schedules. A union and a company's management may sign a new and ostensibly more collaborative contract, but the next employee complaint reignites the entrenched antagonism. Siblings who have begrudgingly sorted out eldercare arrangements soon resurface old resentments in their fight over the inheritance.

Mayer suggests that, as conflict specialists, we have to understand conflict in a deeper and more nuanced way. Expanding on his earlier definition of conflict as clashing perceptions, strong feelings, and objected‐to behavior (Mayer 2000), Mayer now adds that conflict can show up in a number of forms at various times (pp. 21–25). He calls these the faces of conflict:

• Low Impact— These are small and seemingly insignificant incidents that produce annoyance or inconvenience but do not seem to warrant larger‐scale intervention: who folds the laundry, who gets which parking space, or why you always interrupt me.

• Latent— These conflicts fester below the surface but do not have a crystallizing event to bring them to the surface. Resentment over a management decision, racial separation in schools, or growing economic disparity begins to shape narratives that can later become “sides of the story.”

• Transient— These are conflicts that are time limited and can be solved with specific outcomes. These are the conflicts — or aspects of a conflict — that we, as practitioners, often focus on because they offer the opportunity to find an agreement that provides solutions and the parties can move on. Mayer cites contractual disputes, a complaint about a promotion or pay raise, and land use struggles when they can be resolved and do not reflect deeper issues.

• Representational— These are often transient in that they are time specific, but they are a manifestation of deeper clashes. Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat was a time‐specific incident, but it represented a long‐term pattern of discrimination that is an ongoing conflict. Neighbors may work out an agreement about the fence, but the clash itself may represent different preferences for privacy or values around the relative importance of aesthetic appeal.

• Stubborn— Not to be confused with enduring conflict, stubborn conflicts have the potential to have closure, but this is difficult because of the complexity of the issues, the intensity of the emotions, or the communication styles of the disputants. These conflicts may take time to resolve and involve an array of issues, such as a conflict between a contractor and a subcontractor over interpretations of their contract, cost overruns, delays, and defects in workmanship.

• Enduring— Finally, enduring conflict is long lasting because of its nature, not because of ineffective efforts to resolve it. It is “embedded in structures, systems, values, or identity” and cannot be resolved through “short term, resolution‐oriented conflict interventions” (p. 24). Mayer gives a rich range of examples throughout the book, from climate change efforts, tensions between ranchers and wolf protection groups, union–management relationships, neighbor disputes, business partners with different priorities or work habits, to ex‐spouses who need to coparent over more than a decade. Parties are tied together through geography, contract, family, or choice. And they must be able to engage their differences constructively in various ways at various times, even as they often want to throw up their hands and walk away.

As the “Six Faces of Conflict,” this list is intriguing, but I also found it to be overlapping and a bit confusing. Over the last few months, I have come to think of it in terms of two larger categories of conflict — transient and enduring — with subcategories that may indicate ripeness or degree (low impact, latent), or explain a confusion between them (this conflict is transient but representational of deeper, enduring issues; this conflict appears intractable/enduring but, in fact, is just a stubborn transient conflict).

Any enduring conflict is likely to have overlapping combinations of these facets, and to evolve over time. Latent conflict can erupt with a crystallizing event. Irritations that have previously been low impact become representational as deeper differences begin to come into focus. As Mayer points out, every enduring conflict will have a rhythm of engagement, with periods of “emotional intensity and high interaction interspersed with periods of relative calm and distance” (p. 209).

Mayer's big point here is that as conflict specialists, we have a bias toward seeing and addressing the transient conflicts, simply because they fit our engagement model and feel more satisfyingly “solvable.” But the conflicts that our clients are more often engaged in are actually enduring, and by treating them as short term and transient, we fail to equip clients for the long‐term task of learning to stay with and manage those conflicts in a constructive way.

Persevering on this long‐term journey requires a much broader set of skills than we traditionally have brought to the ADR table or have offered to parties we are trying to help. Perhaps most poetically, Mayer suggests that to stay with conflict, parties and practitioners alike need a combination of hope and realism, of confidence and humility. He writes that:

It is a daunting challenge. But Mayer singles out seven key arenas where we, as practitioners, need to be adept:

1. See the faces of conflict, in its many forms, and be thoughtful about which to engage, and at what time.

2. Understand avoidance— its purposes, forms, and disguises. This includes moves that may appear to escalate or settle the conflict but that really function to sidestep the deeper issues. Slamming the door in someone's face might appear to escalate the situation, but it also may be an attempt to short‐circuit exploration of troubling topics.

3. Help parties write and rewrite the narrative of conflict. How parties tell the story of what is going on can help or hurt efforts to coexist. Every narrative implicitly or explicitly assigns the parties roles (hero, victim, villain), frames the depth or breadth of the conflict (Is this a spat or a clash of values? Is it about curfews or a range of parenting issues?), and contains inclusive or exclusive language, and more or less certainty about who is right (Is he unprofessional? Or merely unorthodox?). Practitioners can help parties rewrite their own narratives to provide more acceptance, more hope, more room to work toward solutions, and less accusation and defensiveness. Mayer shows how this reframing of the narrative can be transformational for parties' ability to stay with conflict over time, whether the issues are hot societal topics, such as abortion or animal rights, or painful private struggles, such as losing parental rights.

4. Create ways for parties to stay in intentional, constructive communication with each other. How parties communicate (or refuse to) can cause as much brouhaha as what they communicate. Making thoughtful choices about how (in person, phone, e‐mail, via third party) and how often (daily, weekly, annually) to communicate is critical. Considerations such as predictability, efficiency, flexibility, mutuality, and physical and psychological safety are crucial if the parties are to catch up and work through problems before they escalate. And Mayer is particularly insightful about the ripple effect that bad communication patterns can have on colleagues or family members who witness the communication dysfunction and are affected by it.

5. Thoughtfully use power and make choices about escalation. Perhaps because he has been involved in a number of public disputes, Mayer offers a wonderfully complex and intriguing discussion of power. He recognizes that the power lens is a tempting default that can polarize parties and produce stalemate but also that parties often need to make unilateral choices about whether to escalate the situation by filing suit, going public, staging a walkout, or threatening to quit. This kind of escalation may be needed to bring parties back to the table. Ensuring that parties use power constructively means helping them to be clear about their goals, responding proportionately, building in limits to escalation, checking their behavior against their values, and having an exit strategy for de‐escalating the situation.

6. Utilize agreements strategically to build bridges, create boundaries, and define processes. Treating agreement as the goal of the mediation has a variety of dangers, Mayer points out. It can distract time and attention from more important issues. Even if achieved, they tempt parties to think that they are “done” with the dispute, creating frustration later when new issues or behavior crop up. Agreements can also lead parties to perceive that the other party “isn't holding up its end of the deal,” sparking renewed mistrust. But agreements are also necessary along the way to provide stability and move things forward. In fact, in many cases clashing parties have developed implicit agreements as a coping strategy, such as avoiding each other. Mayer suggests that we can help parties make implicit agreements explicit and use interim agreements to create safe boundaries, define processes, set up communication patterns, solve transient issues as they arise, and build trust and a working relationship.

7. Help parties sustain their energy and well‐being through protracted conflict. The uncertainty and emotional roller coaster that accompanies staying with conflict is a long and exhausting journey. Parties need support systems, healthy interests, escapes from the conflict, and an identity that is not enmeshed with the conflict or their counterpart. Mayer also suggests that if parties can understand a particular conflict's natural rhythm of escalation and relative calm, they can feel more control and perspective, and use the calm periods to regroup emotionally.

This is a terrific set of places to focus our attention as conflict specialists, where we often give inadequate assistance or simplistic assessments. Mayer provides a wide variety of fascinating case examples that sharply illustrate the dilemmas and trade‐offs as parties wrestle with their conflicts.

The issues that Mayer raises are not, of course, entirely new. In pockets here and there — particularly in family and divorce mediations, and in reconciliation work — conversations about how to help people walk the journey through conflict, reconciliation, and managing the ebb and flow of issues over time has been part of the discourse. But Mayer puts it into broader terms and sharper focus.

Densely packed with complex ideas, it is not always an easy read. I found some of the early chapters hard going. Lists of ways in which people creatively avoid engaging could have used more examples and stories to bring them to life. I found myself having to read and reread at times, and finally flipped to the back of the book to try to get a sense for where he was going and how quickly. In doing so, I discovered the epilogue, which is terrific, and sharply captures the essence of the book.

I then turned to the last chapter — a concrete exploration of exactly one of the questions I was being distracted by in my head — how do you market this? When do you bill? How do you talk to parties about the various roles you could play, and how do you choose? Mayer's thoughtful discussion in chapter nine includes concrete language, client case studies, and a menu of approaches for playing the role of conflict ally. This overview was helpful as I continued this reading pattern, backing up one more chapter. Thus, I stumbled on a recommendation: read this book backward.

I think that if I had figured that out earlier, my margin notes in the early chapters would not look so confused or even fickle. I can see again what I was thinking as I read a book simply by flipping through my underlines, questions, and notes to myself in the margins. In this case, I find many pages dotted with positive markups, such as starred passages, “great!!”“nice insight,” and “well said.” Other pages, however, are littered with expressions of confusion or frustration: “??”“why here?” and “How is this different from #3?” Mayer's examples in the later chapters are terrific: They are vivid, self‐deprecating, and bring to life many of his points. What I wished for were more examples in the early chapters as I struggled through long lists, having to turn back and forth to remember which category and list we were still describing.

Most of all, I wanted to hear some of Mayer's first‐hand examples. He does describe his dilemmas and self‐doubts at various points as a mediator wonderfully. I recognized many of those conversations we all have with ourselves as we are trying to decide what to do next and how deeply to engage the conflicts between our parties. And I was, of course, relieved to know that other seasoned mediators grapple with the same issues and wonder whether they have made the right call.

I would love to have heard a little bit about Mayer's personal experience struggling to manage some of his own enduring conflicts. Like surgeons who get new perspective on their patients once they experience being surgery patients themselves, I think that as conflict specialists, we have to keep our eye on this inside perspective. From the outside, I can quickly assess, analyze, and make recommendations about your conflicts. But we all know how difficult it can be to do that same task for ourselves when we are in the middle of our own conflicts. Mayer poignantly acknowledges this but is focused mainly on how we can apply what we have learned from being professionals to the challenges for us personally.

I also want to hear what he has learned from his personal conflicts that helps him as a professional. The empathy we extend to clients is often deeply rooted in remembering our own struggles with colleagues, clients, or family members. Mayer is pushing us — appropriately and wisely, I think — to become even more sophisticated about the large‐scale challenge of conflict and the roles we should be playing for our clients. So, if we are going to help guide parties through the challenges of remaining both optimistic and realistic, strategic and empathetic, then talking about our own experiences in those struggles would add to the richness of the discussion.

But ultimately, I chose to stay with Staying with Conflict. It was a worthwhile journey, and I know that the book's insights will stay with me as I travel with my clients on the long and winding roads of their own conflicts.