News

The Bigger Picture

Recently I took time away from emails and my usual tasks to listen to some of the podcasts we have recorded in the past couple of years. In one we heard from Ann who provides mediation for neighbours in dispute in Fife. One of the things she talked about was how the work as a mediator has changed her view of things – it’s given her another perspective, helping her see “the bigger picture”.

Working life these days is so busy that an opportunity to sit back and to step back and see the bigger picture is very rare. We often share our own views with friends and family and on social media, and in doing so seek out others to agree with us. We build support for our own opinions - our own view of the world. What we don’t do is ask ourselves - is this the only view? Is this the only way of looking at our world? Mediators help both clients in a conflict to find another perspective, another point of view. They do this by creating a safe space to explore people’s motivations, emotions and different points of view.

We can all far too easily fall into the trap that says to understand somebody who has a different point of view is to agree with them. This is false. To understand means simply that; it is to begin to appreciate that someone else has a different point of view and to understand what makes that view different, what makes that person think and feel differently to you. It does not need to change our own view or opinions.

We only have to pick up a newspaper or go online and look at any news story to see how stories are told from polarised points of view. News stories often seek out conflict, seek out differences; you rarely see a news story about people who hold completely different points of view working together. And news stories often avoid subtlety, avoid complexity, portraying ‘good’ versus ‘bad’. This has an effect on how people view conflict.

Instead of being open to another point of view, when we are in conflict, we can often borrow the conflict management style of those in the news - the unreasoned and unreasonable. Mediators find that this can be the biggest challenge – not getting clients to agree a way forward, but before that, before that part of the process begins, getting them to see that another point of view exists. That their neighbour is not deliberately acting in a way to annoy them.

I would argue that the work mediators, such as Ann at Sacro’s Fife service, do in helping people to listen to another point of view, and to build some understanding, is some of the greatest work of mediators. It is something we should celebrate and shout about from the rooftops, except mediators never shout. ?