Arbitration & Mediation

It's Not You, It's Me-diation: the Dim View from Across the Pond

By Victoria Pynchon

Thanks to Diane Levin of The Mediation Channel for passing along Six things I'd Change about Mediation from the U.K.'s Mediator Magazine.

At present, if the total number of civil mediations were shared out evenly among accredited mediators, on average, mediators would manage fewer than one mediation a year.

Astonishingly, there are now half as many mediators as there are independent barristers in the UK. Even so, training organisations proliferate - and are encouraged to do so - and more mediators are accredited each week.

Let's be clear: this is a scandal. 

If 3% of trained and accredited mediators get any work as a mediator, I'd be surprised. The excuse that training mediators is a good way to spread the word about mediation, to my mind, stinks. Ripping off everyone who shows an interest in mediation - it hardly needs saying - is no way to grow the market. This brings me to the third thing I'd change: we must accept that there is no connection between training mediators in greater numbers and the throughput of cases in greater numbers.

As a post-script to that point, I should add that some organisations have already changed tack. Faced with the moral dilemma of taking money and delivering absolutely nothing, or ceasing to train until demand has risen to merit it, some organisations have a new wheeze. This is mediation as - and I quote - "a life skill." Life skills, in my view, belong to the fashionable genre of self-help and bring mediation into the orbit of New Age spirituality, bioelectric shields, energy cocoons and magic crystals. I find the life skill argument disingenuous and mildly embarrassing. This is a direction from which mediation should turn sharply away.

 

Read entire article.  Rinse.  Repeat.  Comment here.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on November 04, 2009 (boomark / email).