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Of Curiosity

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

Having worked alongside and got to know many mediators over the years, one of the themes that emerges from conversations is their ability to ask good questions. What do I mean by ‘good questions’? I have previously blogged about the value of open questions, however in this context I’m talking about something different.

Using open questions is a good way of finding out a lot of information from a neighbour in a conflict. But using an open question that is carefully phrased and occurs at the right point of a conversation, can reveal a lot more than the question itself would suggest. To understand a person’s perspective, to fully appreciate their point of view, it can be at times necessary to explore their underlying motives and concerns. What drives an experienced mediator to do this will be the desire to get the full picture and understand what the key interests of that person are in their dispute, or it may also be driven by an innate curiosity.

Curiosity is not something that we normally talk about. We go about our lives, interacting with others, asking often superficial questions, and focusing on specific topics, all the time asking questions relating to a particular need. What curiosity does - when fully fledged- is it allows the listener and the speaker to explore areas that would otherwise remain unspoken. I would go as far as to say that being curious, whilst not necessarily a mandatory skill in a mediator, is a helpful characteristic. In our mediation skills training, I often find myself saying - and this always seems a complicated yet simple thing to say - that we don’t know what we don’t know. In other words, we can guess what the gaps are in our knowledge, what the missing pieces of information are in a narrative of a conflict situation, but until we allow our curiosity to fully generate those exploring questions, we do not know what information and what story there is to be told. So in many ways curiosity is a helpful thing.

By discovering the underlying issues and needs of neighbours in dispute, a mediator can help them find ways to fix those issues and meet those needs. The mediation process itself is a rare occurrence in people’s lives – it’s an opportunity to sit down with someone unbiased, helping them through their issues, with the mediator not giving advice or suggestions. An experienced mediator will ask questions that explore motivation, concerns, needs and hopes.

So, curiously, there’s a lot to the concept of mediators being naturally curious.

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.”