Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all? (Part 3 of 3)

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By Rory Gowers, Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution
This article is 2 of 3 within the series and is re-published with permission. The original publication can be found at www.myrespectability.com

The Intercultural Test

Two blogs into this series we have built a framework, named the smudges, and invited the profession to audit itself honestly. This blog completes the quest – taking LENS into the intercultural space to ask whether it holds, and then in The Crystal Lens, issuing a call to the circle. The Intercultural Test is the hardest test of all. Because if LENS only works in a monocultural room between parties who share the same assumptions about what a fair process looks like, it isn’t a framework. It’s a cultural preference dressed as methodology.

I want to begin with a confession.

Everything this series has argued – role clarity, party agency, the file at the door, the mediator lens, the sanctity of the space – sits within a tradition that has a cultural address. It comes from a specific set of assumptions about the individual as the primary unit of decision-making, about the value of explicit verbal negotiation, about what a fair process looks like.

That address is broadly Western. Broadly Enlightenment. Broadly Christian in its moral inheritance. Broadly Anglo-Australian in its professional expression. Broadly masculine.

I say this not to undermine what has been argued. I say it because intellectual honesty is the foundation for everything LENS requires – and a framework that cannot acknowledge its own cultural situatedness is not a framework. It is an assumption that has forgotten its origin.

Women are from Venus. Men are from Mars.

‘Two people divided by a common language’ was once used to describe the communication challenges between Australia and its long-standing ally United States of America. However closer to home for us all is the gulf in communication between women and men.

If two people who love each other, chose each other, and have shared a life together for decades can still be operating from fundamentally different frameworks – different orientations to the world, different communication needs, different understandings of what conflict means and what a resolution looks like – then the intercultural challenge is not a specialist problem. It is the human condition.

And a better translator does not solve it. Because the problem was never the words. It has always been the world behind the words.

What each person needs – before, during and after – is not just different in content. It is different in kind. Impossible to fully explain in the common language, because the need exists in a register the other framework simply does not have a category for.

Every culture on the planet recognises this problem. Which is precisely why it is the right place to begin.

What Intercultural Actually Means

When most people hear the word intercultural, they think of nationality. Different countries. Different ethnicities. Different customs. Sensitivity training.

That is cultural awareness. It is useful. But that is not what interculturality is about.

Intercultural, in the fullest sense, means any encounter between people whose fundamental frameworks for understanding the world – conflict, resolution, relationship, authority, time, silence, identity, and justice – are built on different premises. It includes, but is not limited to:

Ethnicity, race, and Indigenous identity. Faith and worldview. Gender identity and sexual orientation. Neurodivergence. Disability and chronic illness. Class and socioeconomic background. Age and generation.

Venus and Mars are just the beginning. But it is the example that proves the point. Every culture on the planet has its version of this divide – and every culture knows that the needs of the two parties in the room are genuinely, deeply, and sometimes irreconcilably different.

What all these communities’ share is this: a different framework for understanding the world that may be entirely invisible to the mediator – and a long history of processes that claim neutrality while being built around someone else’s normal. Whatever that really means.

The Box We Were Born Into

What is normal? It is the content of the box that was waiting for us when we arrived on this planet. We did not choose it. We did not examine it. We did not even know it was there – because from the inside, a box with no visible walls does not look like a box. It looks like reality. It contained the values, mores, and understandings about life, and what differentiates our tribe from another tribe, what makes us implicitly the best. And others not so good.

A young American once asked me: “What does it mean to be Australian?” I was completely nonplussed. Not because it was a bad question. Because it was a question I had never needed to ask myself. My box was simply – home – just what everyone does – normal.

We have phrases for this invisible assumption. “You know.” “Everyone knows.” But do they?

The party who does not share the same box will rarely say so. Because admitting you don’t know what everyone knows – in a room full of people who apparently do – is one of the most exposing things a human being can do. So, they stay silent. And that silence is mistaken for understanding. Or agreement. Or consent.

That is not a neutral process. That is a process that has already decided who belongs – before anyone opened their mouth.

The Intercultural Test

Here is the challenge stated directly.

Neutrality is a Western concept. Developed in a Western tradition. Expressed through Western process architecture. Practiced by Western-trained mediators who have in many cases never examined the cultural assumptions their practice carries. That is an honest acknowledgment. The critics are right about that.

The intercultural test is this: does neutrality survive the challenge of the genuinely intercultural room – or does it simply become another form of Western cultural imposition dressed as fairness?

The answer turns on one precise insight.

Neutrality must be neutral to process architecture – or it is not neutral at all.

Consider the Venus and Mars room. A standard Western mediation process drives toward resolution. Closure. A decision made. Forward movement. But resolution is not a neutral outcome. It is a Western outcome. More specifically, it is a masculine-Western outcome – one that preferences the framework that says: get to the answer, close the file, move on.

The party who needs to be fully received before they can engage with any outcome – who needs the relationship honoured before the resolution can be real – is structurally disadvantaged before they sit down. Not by the mediator’s personal bias. By the process architecture itself.

The mediator who enters the room with a fixed process has already taken sides with the fixer culture. Even before the parties walk in.

Adaptive Practice – The Mediator’s Real Toolkit

Genuine neutrality in the intercultural room does not require the mediator to have specific cultural knowledge or language proficiency about every culture. It requires something more fundamental: the capability to design a process from scratch, around the parties in front of them, based on their implicit and explicit needs – before commencing the joint meeting. For more on the preparation and reframing work with each party, refer to Steps 1 and 2 of the myRESPECTability framework.

This is adaptive practice. And it is the discipline that makes genuine neutrality possible.

The mediator’s toolkit is not a library of cultural knowledge. It is a set of capabilities – process design skills, diagnostic questions, relational instincts, and the humility to hold a process lightly enough to reshape it as the room requires.

Think again of the Venus and Mars room. The skilled mediator does not apply one process to both parties. They read – carefully, humbly, without assumption – what each person needs before, during, and after. And they craft the environment accordingly. That is adaptive practice. That is neutrality made real.

But adaptive practice without genuine neutrality is a sham. The mediator who has the toolkit but not the inherent predisposition – who has not examined their own box, who holds a quiet preference for how this should resolve – will default to their own cultural template under pressure. Their cultural competency becomes sophisticated role contamination. More dangerous than the crude version, because it is harder to name and easier to hide behind.

One Principle. Many Processes.

Different cultural frameworks hold different understandings of what a good outcome looks like. The mediator who does not know this has already failed the intercultural test before the process begins.

In a broadly Western, masculine-framed framework – the goal may be resolution. A decision made. An agreement signed. The conflict closed.

In a broadly Eastern framework – the goal may be harmony. The restoration of relationship within which the conflict lived. An agreement that leaves the relationship damaged is not a good outcome. It is a Western outcome.

In a broadly Indigenous framework – the goal may be something deeper still. Perspective. Connectedness. The restoration of relationship with community, with lore, with Country.

A process that rushes toward resolution without honouring the deep context and relational obligations at stake has not resolved anything. It has imposed a timeline on something that does not belong to time in that way.

And in the Venus and Mars room – one party may need resolution. The other may need to feel genuinely received before any outcome can be real. Both are valid. Neither is neutral.

The neutral mediator holds no preference among these. Their process serves whatever a good outcome looks like for these parties, in their frameworks, on their terms.

The Long View

There is urgency in the argument the Western mediation profession has been slow to heed.

The Eastern cultural tradition already practices what Western mediation claims to value. It takes the long view. It advances steadily. It preserves relationship. It protects face. It does not mistake speed for wisdom, or resolution for peace. It knows that the outcome which holds is the one both parties can live with – not the one that was most efficiently produced.

If Western mediation practice does not quickly learn such flexibility – does not demonstrate that its principles can be lived in genuinely adaptive process – it will lose its exalted place in global negotiation training and practice. The process of the future will be what the dominant culture of the day mandates. The privilege of mandating a dominant process has been with the West in the current era. It will not always. As one book title says, “The Future is Asian.”

The hope – and it is a genuine one – is that genuinely adaptive practice offers something the dominant power calculus cannot. A process that preserves face, produces wise outcomes, and protects future relationships is not a concession to any one cultural framework. It is the fullest expression of what mediation was always supposed to be. And it is something any culture, including the most dominant, can recognise as worth having.

The window to show that western mediation can adapt itself is still open. If we move now.

The Standard

Neutral mediation practice must use adaptive process that:

  • Preserves face – for every party, throughout.
  • Produces wise outcomes – not resolution, not harmony, but whatever constitutes genuine wisdom in this room, for these parties, in their frameworks.
  • Provides a respectful experience – so that every party feels genuinely received, not processed.
  • Protects future relationships – because the agreement is not the end. The relationship continues.

Fully respecting the cultural needs of each party.

That is not a Western standard. That is not an Eastern standard. It is the sincere standard – without crack. The gold standard.

And think again of the Venus and Mars room. Even the most intimate intercultural divide – the one at the kitchen table – requires a mediator who can hold all four simultaneously.

LENS and the Intercultural Room

A smudge-free LENS is what makes this possible. Not just in the mediation room – but in preparation, in practice, and in the fulfilment of agreements.

In preparation – the mediator who examines their own lens before entering the room can see what framework they are bringing, what assumptions their process architecture carries, and what needs to be set aside before the design begins. Critically, this preparation includes time with each party in advance – to understand their deep process needs, their framework for a good outcome, and what the space needs to feel like for them to engage fully and safely.

In practice – the mediator with a clean lens can read the room as it is. Not as their framework tells them it should be. They can hear what is not being said. They can recognise when their process is not serving a party. They can adapt – in real time, without losing their role.

In the fulfilment of agreements – the mediator who has held genuine neutrality throughout can ensure that what was agreed genuinely reflects the needs of all parties – not just the party whose framework the process happened to serve best.

The intercultural room does not expose LENS as inadequate. It reveals why LENS is necessary. Because the mediator who cannot see clearly cannot adapt wisely. And the mediator who cannot adapt wisely cannot be genuinely neutral where it matters most.

Because Of

It is because mediation at its best is an expression of a profound commitment. That every person – because of their cultural background, their language, their lore, their neurodivergence, their identity, their relationship to community and to Country – deserves access to a process that genuinely serves their capacity to resolve their own conflicts on their own terms.

Not regardless of who they are. Because of who they are.

A place for all. Peace for all. In our time.

The Crystal Lens – A Call to the Circle

The argument is made. The audit is complete. What remains is something different.

Let me begin with another admission.

I have been in rooms where I dropped the lens. Where the file opened quietly and the outcome I could see began, almost imperceptibly, to shape the process I was running. Where the pull was stronger than the discipline and I told myself it was expertise rather than contamination.

I know what that feels like from the inside. It feels like clarity.

And I know what it feels like to catch it – to notice the drift, name it honestly to myself, and correct. That feeling is different. It is quieter. Less certain. Truer. I sleep better.

You are not alone in that gap.

The Hero’s Journey

There is an old story that runs through every culture, every tradition, every age. The hero receives a call. They resist it, or answer it, or stumble toward it without quite knowing what it is. They face trials that test everything they thought they knew about themselves. They lose the path and find it again. They carry something – a talisman, a truth, a practice – that reminds them who they are when the darkness is thickest.

Mediation, practiced with integrity, is that journey. Not once. Not in a single transformative room. But daily. At every threshold.

The call comes differently to different people. Some hear it clearly – a moment of vocation, a certainty that this work matters in a way that goes beyond the fee and the settlement rate. They answer it with fire.

Some haven’t heard it yet – or aren’t sure they ever will. They show up anyway. They vouch to do their best with honour for the right. That commitment, made honestly without the romantic certainty of calling, is its own form of heroism. Perhaps the purest form.

And some are here because they want to support the ones who are answering the call. To learn from them, encourage them, make the circle stronger. That quiet generosity is as necessary to the profession as the most gifted practitioner in the most difficult room.

All three are welcome in the circle. All three are needed.

The Crystal Lens

After everything this series has argued, the instrument is this.

Looking — at yourself first. At your own box, your own smudges, your own predispositions before you enter the room.

Effective — in service of the parties’ capacity to resolve what only they can resolve. Not your expertise. Their wisdom.

Neutral — to outcome, to process architecture, to cultural preference. The sole and unshared obligation that sits on the mediator’s shoulders alone.

Secure — in your role. Clear about what you brought in and what you left at the door. Fit for purpose. Present.

That is the crystal lens. That is what you carry into every room.

The crystal-clear lens is not the lens of the mediator who never smudges it. That mediator does not exist.

The crystal-clear lens belongs to the mediator who knows exactly how it gets smudged – and who has stood at the threshold, put aside the file, taken three breaths, and entered not with certainty but with discipline, curiosity, and a genuine orientation toward the parties’ wisdom rather than their own.

It belongs to the mediator who stumbles and falls and fights on.

Not for glory in the ordinary sense. For something quieter and more durable. The knowledge that in this room, on this day, with these two parties who came in carrying something heavy and leave carrying something lighter – they did their job. Cleanly. With honour. With the lens as clear as they could make it.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

Looking – Effective – Neutral – Secure

The Circle

I want to invite you, explicitly and without ceremony, into a circle.

Not an organisation. Not a movement. Not a brand.

A circle of practitioners – called or committed or quietly supportive – who have decided, together, that neutrality is worth holding. That the parties in every room deserve a mediator who has put aside their file, picked up their lens, and entered with full presence and genuine trust in the parties’ capacity to resolve what only they can resolve.

A circle of humble heroes. Fallible. Persistent. Oriented toward something larger than their own expertise or reputation or professional identity or recognition.

Some of you have been in this circle for decades without having a name for it. This series was written for you. To give language to what you already knew.

The name is professional discipline. The name is fitness for role. The name is LENS.

The Answer

Should neutrality be scrapped once and for all?

After three blogs. After role contamination and the perfection shrine and the file at the door and the mediator lens and the self-audit and the intercultural test.

After everything.

Never.

Pick up the lens. Enter the room. Trust the parties.

Do your best with honour for the right.

The circle is forming. The quest continues.

A place for all. Peace for all. In our time.

You are enough. You are my hero. You are the hope. I salute you.

This concludes the series: Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all? – Reclaiming Neutrality as Professional Discipline and Fitness for Role.

The conversation continues. Share your percentage. Name your smudges. Join the circle.

Author Biography

Rory Gowers is a Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution, specialising in intercultural dispute resolution. He holds a Master of Dispute Resolution from UNSW, a Master of Education from UTS, and over 1000 hours of mediation practice. He is Australasian Ambassador for Medianos, the innovative Italian conflict resolution game now available in Australia and New Zealand.

Editor’s Closing, By Milan A. Nitopi

This article brings Rory’s concepts full circle. Issues of mediator neutrality are challenged and examined by adopting an intercultural lens, and builds upon his previous research and contributions in this same space. Rory’s framework for reflection is invaluable to a mediator’s toolkit, both in strengthening their own professional identity and further developing their skills for mediation practice.

Rory’s question to you: Are you in the circle? And if not yet – what is your next step toward it?

Editor Biography

Milan Nitopi is an Australian lawyer, mediator and Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner with a Master of Laws in Family Dispute Resolution (LLM FDR). His passion concerns people, law, and resolution, and he strives to equip people with skills for better communication and dialogue to address all kinds of conflict.

Hoffman: The Art of Impasse-Breaking in Mediation

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By John Sturrock
This article has been republished with permission. The original article can be located at Kluwer Mediation Blog.

David Hoffman is a very highly regarded US mediator and an equally authoritative Harvard academic, whose writing about mediation and conflict resolution is always rich and thoughtful. Thus, his book about ‘The Art of Impasse-Breaking in Mediation’ promises much and it certainly delivers.

The underlying theme of the book is achieving fair, efficient, stable and wise solutions. Its aim is to enable mediators, lawyers and other conflict resolvers to fill their toolboxes with techniques for breaking impasses and help people to turn conflict into creative solutions – and to equip them to do the important work of peacemaking more effectively.

The book, written with Hoffman’s customary humility and respect for parties in conflict, is easy to read and full of helpful advice. It serves as both reassurance for experienced mediators, who will recognise many of the author’s suggestions, and an excellent resource for any mediator, whether starting out in practice or looking to add new strategies to their repertoire after years of experience. Hoffman is able to draw on his own years of experience to illustrate his points with pithy stories (his own and those of other mediators) and this adds greatly to the book’s utility. I also found the footnotes useful as pointers to further reading and as evidence of Hoffman’s deep understanding of the field.

Some of the most interesting and helpful earlier sections of the book deal with the emotional and psychological aspects of mediation – there is “no more important area for continuing education” – and the author’s frequent references to the Internal Family Systems Model emphasise how useful he finds this model in practice, to assist mediators in our understanding of, and compassion for, both parties in conflict and ourselves as mediators. It enables the mediator to handle the ambivalence experienced by many of those in conflict where both anger and pragmatism can be strong forces.

Encouraging parties to listen to their “inner mediator” to discover what they can live with enables “Self-led decisions” to be reached, consistent with mediation’s fundamental principles of empowerment and self-determination. I found the sections on Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and cognitive biases particularly helpful, together with the later discussion of Kahneman’s work with Amos Tversky on risk tolerance and risk aversion, in a chapter which also addressed topics such as loss of face and issues of principle.

We often hear mediation described as taking place in the shadow of the law. However, the author underscores his repeated advice not to demonise conflict, courts, judges and the rule of law by preferring the expression “in the light of the law”. That is a nice reframe!

In the chapter on process options, we are reminded that, in the words of a colleague, “Every mediation has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not always in that order.” How true! As is the admonition that if mediators are working harder than the parties to break an impasse, they are working too hard. In that chapter, topics include the use of humour, food, silence, stories and metaphor. Mediators will recognise the difficulty faced by mediators when lawyers expect them to play the “agent of reality” role. And the sections on transparency and authenticity – who we are as people – remind us of our underlying values and that it is ok to be a little nervous and vulnerable at times as we “show up fully as our true selves” in a mediation. We can be, after all, “a positive model for the people whose disputes we are mediating.”

That the chapter on substantive interventions is the longest in the book underscores the richness of its content, with many techniques shared for use in a wide range of situations. Hoffman describes his style as “eclectic” and recognises that, for some, the suggestions here may seem too directive or evaluative (I was interested in Hoffman’s definitions of facilitative mediation as “facilitated negotiation” and evaluative/directive mediation as “assisted negotiation”). Wisely, he counsels that any potential intervention should be presented “with curiosity” as to its appropriateness for the parties and their conflict and might be framed as questions to assist the parties to find their own solutions. Most of the described interventions are money-related but there are non-monetary aspects discussed too and the concluding section and story on ‘A Lagniappe’ – something unexpected and gratuitous – is heart-warming.

In the penultimate chapter on techniques to avoid, the author refers to Judge Wayne Brazil’s reminder that a mediator’s “overarching mandate is not to secure a settlement but to proceed with a visible integrity that inspires the respect and confidence of all participants.” We are not stakeholders in settlement but enablers of the making of wise choices by parties. And of course, as Hoffman writes in his concluding chapter, “settlements are, paradoxically, more likely to occur the less attached I am to achieving them.”

Overall, this is an exceptional addition to the literature on mediation and a ‘must-buy’ for any mediator (and peacemaker) who wishes to expand their repertoire of skills and techniques.

Author Biography

John Sturrock KC is the founder and senior mediator at Core Solutions. He is a pioneer of mediation throughout the UK and elsewhere with his work extending to the commercial, professional, sports, public sector, policy and political fields. He is a Distinguished Fellow Emeritus of the international Academy of Mediators and was also formerly a mediator with Brick Court Chambers in London. John also specialises in facilitation, negotiation and conflict management training and coaching for public sector leaders, civil servants, politicians, and sports and business leaders. He has worked with various parliamentary bodies throughout the UK on effective scrutiny of policy, and led a major review for the Scottish Government into allegations of bullying and harassment in the national health service in Scotland. He also founded Collaborative Scotland, a non-for-profit promoting nonpartisan respectful dialogue about difficult issues. John also has published two volumes of his book, A Mediator’s Musings (available on Amazon).

Connect with John via LinkedIn

Could AI Replace Mediators?

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By John Sturrock KC
The original publication can be found at The Scotsman.

The founder of a site where AI models communicate with one another compared them to a “new species that is on planet Earth that is now smarter than us.”

These seemingly apocalyptic words, in a recent email from an American mediator colleague, certainly caused a stir among its recipients. A debate ensued about whether AI will usurp the function of mediators – as it threatens to do with many professional jobs in the near future.

It is interesting that many of these American mediators report the widespread use of AI by parties and lawyers participating in mediations.  Indeed, a number of those mediators are themselves using AI to summarise the mediation papers, structure possible negotiation approaches, help prepare “mediator proposals”, assess emotions and assist with strategies to overcome impasse. Some are even developing their own software programmes (or asking AI to do that for them).

Commenting on the use of AI in recruitment, a legal careers adviser recently observed that “law is fundamentally people-focused and technology should enhance rather than replace human judgment”.

With that in mind, I had intended to write about how mediators and lawyers can adapt to the advent of AI, on the assumption that the strengths we have, such as building relationships and trust over many years, cannot be displaced. And then I read an article by Matt Shumer, entitled ‘Something Big Is Happening’, and watched the first of mathematician Professor Hannah Fry’s BBC documentaries on the subject of AI. The enormity of what could be facing us hit me. Shumer describes it as “like the moment you realise the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.”

According to Shumer, the AI models available today are unrecognisable from what existed even a few months ago. The most recent models make decisions that would have been unthinkable a year ago. They have something that “felt, for the first time, like judgment.” Chat GPT and Claude have released new models that make “everything before them feel like a different era.” AI is now building itself, with the ability to improve exponentially, not linearly. The people behind this technology are “simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet”. One has said that AI models “substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks” are on track for 2026 or 2027. Shumer concludes that massive disruption could occur by the end of this year. We need to prepare, he says.

To those who argue we have been here before, it is said that this is different from every previous wave of automation. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. We know that some law firms are making significant use of AI to do work that associates would once have carried out. One managing partner apparently expects AI be able to do most of what he does before long…

Shumer’s article has been dismissed as self-serving and way over the top. But questions remain. Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years of a relationship? We would hope not. But that some people have begun to rely on AI for emotional support, advice and companionship is illustrated in Hannah Fry’s startling documentary.

So, where might this lead, even for mediators, among whose key attributes is working with very complex human situations? I suspect that we don’t yet know – and that the biggest threat is complacency. We may be facing the biggest change any of us have experienced.

Author Biography

John Sturrock KC is the founder and senior mediator at Core Solutions. He is a pioneer of mediation throughout the UK and elsewhere with his work extending to the commercial, professional, sports, public sector, policy and political fields. He is a Distinguished Fellow Emeritus of the international Academy of Mediators and was also formerly a mediator with Brick Court Chambers in London. John also specialises in facilitation, negotiation and conflict management training and coaching for public sector leaders, civil servants, politicians, and sports and business leaders. He has worked with various parliamentary bodies throughout the UK on effective scrutiny of policy, and led a major review for the Scottish Government into allegations of bullying and harassment in the national health service in Scotland. He also founded Collaborative Scotland, a non-for-profit promoting nonpartisan respectful dialogue about difficult issues. John also has published two volumes of his book, A Mediator’s Musings (available on Amazon).

Connect with John via LinkedIn

Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all? (Part 2 of 3)

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By Rory Gowers, Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution
This article is 2 of 3 within the series and is re-published with permission. The original publication can be found at www.myrespectability.com

Preface

In our first instalment, Rory Gowers named role contamination as the root cause of mediation’s neutrality problem – not bias, not cultural conditioning, but the quiet drift of professional expertise across the boundary from process to outcome. The response from readers was immediate and substantive, which tells me this framing is landing where it should.

This second instalment moves from diagnosis to practice. Rory introduces the LENS framework – Looking, Effective, Neutral, Secure – as the practical instrument for holding role clarity at every threshold. He then turns it directly on the reader with a self-audit that I suspect will be uncomfortable for many of us in the best possible way.

I encourage you to sit with the questions rather than skim them. The percentage he asks for at the end is not a trick. It is an invitation to professional honesty that our community rarely extends to itself.

The File, The Lens, and The Sanctity of the Space

In the first blog I introduced role contamination as the root cause of mediation’s neutrality problem and argued that the parties – not the mediator – are best placed to determine the right outcome for their lives. This blog gets practical. If role clarity is the answer, what does it look like to walk into a mediation space with the right things and leave out the wrong ones?

There is a moment I regard as one of the most consequential in any mediation. It happens before the parties arrive. Before the opening statements. Before the first difficult silence.

It happens at the threshold.

Not metaphorically – though the metaphor is useful. I mean the actual moment of transition between the professional world we have just come from and the mediation space we are about to enter. That threshold is where role clarity is either established or lost. And once lost inside the room, it is remarkably hard to recover.

The instruction I want to offer is simple. Before you cross it – put aside your file. Pick up your mediator lens. Then enter.

But that is only the beginning of what I want to say about the threshold. Because what I am really describing is a complete architecture of reflective practice – one that begins before entering the designated space, sustains itself through the session, and completes itself deliberately and consciously afterward. Each phase matters as much as the others. And together they constitute something that the professional mediation literature has rarely named with the clarity it deserves.

The File

Every professional who comes to mediation from a specialist background – law, psychology, finance, medicine, whatever the discipline – carries a file. Not necessarily a physical one. A professional file. The accumulated frameworks, outcome judgments, and expert assessments that their training has formed and their practice has refined.

That file is real. It has value. In the right room – the lawyer’s room, the therapist’s room, the financial adviser’s room – it is precisely what is needed. These are honourable, necessary, sophisticated forms of professional expertise.

But the mediation designated space is not that room. And the file – carried in through the threshold, open on the table, consulted silently throughout – becomes the primary vehicle of role contamination for the mediator.

The lawyer-mediator whose file is open will evaluate the parties’ positions against a legal template. The psychologist-mediator whose file is open will assess the parties’ emotional states against a therapeutic framework. In both cases the mediator is no longer seeing the parties as they are. They are seeing them through a professional lens formed for a different purpose in a different space. The outcome judgment embedded in the file begins, quietly and often invisibly, to shape the process.

And here is the subtlety that makes this so difficult to self-diagnose. The file, once open, is largely invisible to the person consulting it. You don’t feel yourself applying your professional outcome framework. It simply feels like clarity. Like experience. Like knowing what you’re doing.

That feeling of clarity is often the first sign the file never closed.

Put it aside. It will be there when you need it again. In this room, it is not what we need.

The Mediator Lens

Strip away the outcome judgment and what remains? Considerably more than most practitioners initially imagine.

Our understanding of how people behave under stress, in conflict, under legal or financial pressure – that comes in. Our capacity to read a space, to sense where the energy is, to notice what is being said and what is being carefully avoided – that comes in. Our knowledge of process design, of how to structure a conversation that moves rather than circles, of when to slow down and when to create momentum – that comes in. Our cultural intelligence, our capacity to hold complexity, our ability to sit with discomfort without rushing to resolve it – all of that comes in.

But it comes in directed through a different instrument entirely. Not the professional file with its outcome judgments and expert frameworks. The mediator lens – a chosen, conscious, deliberately adopted way of seeing that orients everything we perceive toward one purpose only.

Not what the parties should decide. How they can best think, communicate, and decide for themselves.

The mediator lens is active, not passive. It is chosen at the threshold, maintained throughout the session with discipline and intention, and set aside consciously when the work is done. It shapes what we look for, what we attend to, and what we do with what we find. Through it, the parties’ wisdom is visible in ways it simply cannot be when the professional file is open and the outcome framework is running.

This is the distinction that carries everything. The mediator who puts aside the file and picks up the mediator lens is not a diminished professional. They are a professional operating at the full height of a different and extraordinarily demanding discipline.

The Practice Architecture

I want to offer something now that I believe is largely absent from standard mediator training – a complete, sequential, embodied practice framework that takes the practitioner from before the designated space to after it, with specific disciplines at each transition point.

Pre-entry: The meditative pause.

We arrive at the threshold carrying everything from the day – the previous client, the last difficult exchange, the professional identity that served us well in other rooms. The meditative pause is the deliberate act of setting it down. Not a rushed mental checklist but a genuine stilling – long enough to release what we’ve been carrying and become present to what we are about to enter. We are not yet in the space. We are becoming the person who can enter it well. The file goes down. The mediator lens comes up.

Entry: Three breaths, look, listen, smile, visual contact, greeting.

Three breaths is not ceremony but physiology. It is enough to shift the nervous system from reactive to receptive, from professional expert to process custodian. Then look before we speak. Listen before we intervene. The smile and visual contact that follow are not social pleasantries – they are the first act of the mediator’s role. The first communication that this space is safe, that we are genuinely present, and that the people in it have our complete and undivided attention. The greeting completes the opening. We have arrived.

During: Curiosity, receptivity, acceptance, belief, attentiveness to flow, positive expectation.

Each word is earning its place.

Curiosity – not analysis. The mediator who is curious about what the parties will find is oriented toward discovery. The mediator who is analysing is oriented toward conclusion.

Receptivity – not direction. What is happening in the space, not what we expected or hoped would happen.

Acceptance – of what is, not what should be. The parties are where they are. Our role is to create conditions for movement, not to judge the starting point.

Belief – in the parties’ capacity, sustained even when it is hardest to hold. This is simultaneously attitude and antidote. As attitude it is outward-facing – parties feel when a mediator genuinely trusts their capacity, and that trust becomes part of the enabling environment. As antidote it is inward-facing – it is what keeps us from the deep propensity to sway. We do not need to steer when we genuinely trust. The trust is the discipline.

Attentiveness to flow – present to the living movement of the conversation, to what is shifting beneath the surface of the words, to where the energy is gathering and where it is blocked.

Positive expectation – not naivety, but a disciplined orientation toward possibility that itself becomes part of the conditions for resolution.

Exit and closure: Affirm, appreciate, reflect, respect — for others and for self.

Whatever the parties have produced, they produced it. The acknowledgment of their work is not conditional on the outcome meeting some external standard of sufficiency or wisdom. We affirm what they attempted. We appreciate what they brought to the attempt. We reflect – briefly, genuinely – on the significance of what has taken place in the room. And we respect – them for the courage it takes to sit across from someone we are in serious conflict with and try to find a way through, and ourself for the quality of presence and discipline we brought to holding the space for them.

The symmetry of “for others and for self” matters. The mediator who honours the parties but neglects themselves in the closure is not completing the practice. Self-respect at the end of difficult work is not indulgence. It is professional sustainability.

The journal: Objective achievement. What went well. What to do differently. What next steps. What we are grateful for — in them, and in ourselves.

Then close the journal. Not as an administrative act. As a deliberate completion. We have reflected, we have learned, we have honoured the work. Now we release it. Set the mediator lens down. Pick up our file. Walk out. The work of this space is done and it belongs to the people who did it.

Our next professional role is waiting at the door, ready to be whoever that room requires.

The Sanctity of the Space

There is a word I want to use here that does not appear often enough in professional mediation literature.

Sanctity.

The mediation space, properly held, is a sanctuary. A protected place. A space claimed and maintained for a specific and serious purpose, where something more careful, more intentional, and more humane is possible than in the ordinary professional world outside it.

Safeguarding that sanctity is the deepest expression of the mediator’s role. The mediator who enters with genuine reverence for what the parties are attempting – who holds them with care throughout, who never loses sight of the courage it takes to sit across from someone we are in serious conflict with and try to find a way through – that mediator is doing something that transcends technique.

The practitioners who do their best work already know this, even when the professional literature has rarely given them language for it. The rooms where something real happened were the rooms where something beyond skill was present. A quality of attention. A quality of holding. A genuine orientation toward the parties’ dignity and capacity that never wavered regardless of how difficult, how circular, or how apparently intractable the conversation became (I think Rooney gives much weight to this capacity in his humanistic mediation).

This is what the mediator lens makes possible. And this is why the file must stay outside.

LENS

Which brings me to something I want to leave us with — not as a technique, but as a distillation of everything this post has been building toward.

The mediator who practices what I have described here is not pursuing perfect neutrality. They are practicing something more honest, more demanding, and more achievable.

They are Looking – with full, curious attention at what is really happening in the room.

They are Effective – with professional discipline, guiding the process flow.

They are Neutral – grounded in role clarity and higher purpose.

They are Secure – grounded in who they are, in what they are there to do, and in the trust that the parties are entirely capable of being at cause in their own situation.

LENS

The mediator who practices what I have described here is not pursuing perfect neutrality. They are practicing something more honest, more demanding, and more achievable.

They are Looking – with full, curious attention at what is actually happening in the room.

They are Effective – with professional discipline, guiding the process flow.

They are Neutral – grounded in role clarity and higher purpose.

They are Secure – grounded in who they are and in the trust that the parties are entirely capable of being at cause in their own situation.

LENS.

This is also a reminder we all need from time to time — that our role is not to rescue the parties from their own situation but to trust their capacity to be at cause within it. The best outcomes are never the mediator’s achievement. They belong entirely to the people who did the work.

Not a label. A practice. A complete orientation of professional attention that the mediation room both requires and deserves.

Put aside the file. Pick up the mediator lens. Enter the room.

Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all?

How Smudged is Your LENS?

The second blog in this series and I can hear what some are thinking. Nice theory Rory. Clean logic. Elegant framework. But let’s take a closer look at the real world – and work out how smudged our LENS becomes when we’re sitting in a compensation room at 4pm on a Friday, processing our eighth case this week.

Fair enough. Let’s look at that.

Some mediators reading this series stopped trying to hold the LENS a long time ago.

Not because they don’t care. Because the system ground them down. The caseload swallowed them. The institutional pressures – the KPIs, the settlement rates, the time-per-case metrics – gradually, invisibly, shifted what “good enough” meant.

I’m not judging that. I’m naming it. Because it’s real, it’s widespread, and it’s the thing this series has been building toward saying directly.

So instead of me telling you where and how that happens – I want to ask you.

The Self Audit

What follows is an invitation to honest professional reflection. Take your time with it. Sit with the questions that are uncomfortable. Those are the ones doing the most useful work.

What is your goal or aim for neutrality in your mediation practice?

Not the textbook answer. Your answer. The one that really guides your behaviour in the room when nobody is watching.

What are the constraints on your exercise of neutrality?

The legislation. The policy frameworks. The industry standards. The accreditation conditions you agreed to. These are not optional context. They are binding commitments.

Who is responsible for ensuring neutrality in your mediations?

One word answer required.

What data informs your neutrality – age bracket, representation, expertise, language, customs, expectations, capability, cultural context, power dynamics?

What are the five to seven key actions you take in every mediation to ensure neutrality?

Specific. Behavioural. What you do, not what you intend to do.

What mechanisms or techniques do you apply to keep yourself on track when the pull toward the outcome is strongest?

In the compensation room. The construction dispute. The custody discussion. The Indigenous community dispute where the entire Western mediation framework may be the wrong vessel. In those rooms – what do you do?

How will the world be a better, more peaceful place because of your commitment to neutrality?

Don’t skip this one. It is the question that separates a vocation from a job.

How would you rate your professional neutrality today?

Not in your career. Not on your best day. Today. As a percentage. Honest. Yours.

The Arrow That Closes the Loop

It was Frank Blount – former CEO of Telstra – who pointed out that a process improvement template ending with Measures was missing something. The arrow. The feedback loop that takes what you’ve learned and feeds it deliberately back into how you begin next time.

Without that arrow the process is linear. The learning sits in your journal and goes nowhere. With that arrow each honest percentage becomes an input. Each commitment closes the loop and opens the next cycle at a higher level of awareness.

What new input will you bring to your next mediation to increase your neutrality?

The Invitation

Share your percentage. Not because vulnerability is fashionable. Because honesty is necessary. Because the profession cannot have the conversation it needs to have while everyone is performing competence rather than practicing it.

The mediator who posts 60% is not admitting failure. They are demonstrating exactly the kind of professional self-awareness that genuine practice requires. That is not inadequacy. That is integrity.

I’ll go first. Today – on balance, with full awareness of the rooms I’ve been in, the pulls I’ve felt, and the moments I’ve held and the moments I haven’t – I’d put myself at 85%. The other 15% is where the work is. It always will be.

That’s not a perfection shrine. That’s a professional discipline.

What’s yours?

Author Biography

Rory Gowers is a Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution, specialising in intercultural dispute resolution. He holds a Master of Dispute Resolution from UNSW, a Master of Education from UTS, and over 1000 hours of mediation practice. He is Australasian Ambassador for Medianos, the innovative Italian conflict resolution game now available in Australia and New Zealand.

Editor’s Closing, By Milan A. Nitopi

Rory reaffirms the importance of mediator neutrality. In this segment, he provides us with a framework – the self-audit – of how mediators, and facilitators alike, can mitigate role contamination and achieve neutrality. His self-audit reminds us of how necessary it is to routinely reflect on our practice and role therein. In that reflection process, we can expect to begin or continue our journey in actualising those values, i.e. neutrality, that are so crucial to our professional practice and identity.

Rory’s next blog will address the LENS within intercultural practice and closes the series with an invitation.

Rory’s question to you: What is your percentage today? And what one thing would move it before your next mediation?

Editor Biography

Milan Nitopi is an Australian lawyer, mediator and Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner with a Master of Laws in Family Dispute Resolution (LLM FDR). His passion concerns people, law, and resolution, and he strives to equip people with skills for better communication and dialogue to address all kinds of conflict.

Announcement: 14th Roundtable at RMIT in Melbourne

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I am pleased to announce the details of the 14th Australian Dispute Resolution Research Network roundtable. It will be held at RMIT University on the 18th and 19th November 2026 at our city campus. Thanks again for the hard work of the organizers for the 13th roundtable which was a big success!

RMIT last hosted our community of ADR scholars in 2014, and after many years, I am so pleased to have the opportunity to again host ADR researchers. In 2012, Professor Rachael Field and I co-organized an important ADR forum at RMIT where we welcomed presentations relating to ADR in Legal Education and Promoting Student Well-Being (see attached agenda). While of course supporting all current ADR research for our 2026 gathering, I would like to devote a section of the roundtable (an afternoon) to the evolving story of ADR in Legal Education. Current links between ADR and Student Well-Being would also be valuable to explore.

Please book a placeholder in your diaries for our annual event.

Best
Kathy.

Conference details 2012Download

Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all? (Part 1 of 3)

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By Rory Gowers, Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution
This article is 1 of 3 within the series and is re-published with permission. The original publication can be found at www.myrespectability.com

Preface

The question of mediator neutrality has been one of the most contested and generative conversations in our field for the better part of two decades. It began seriously with Bernie Mayer’s landmark 2004 work and has since been deepened by the behavioural turn literature, by scholars of genuine distinction, and by the honest frustrations of practitioners who have felt the gap between the ideal and the reality grow uncomfortably wide.

Rory Gowers is a familiar and valued voice in this network – a practitioner with extensive experience in the mediation room who is never content to leave the theoretical debate at the theory level. In this three-part series, published fortnightly on the ADRN Blog, Rory brings that practitioner’s eye to one of our most important unresolved questions.

His answer to whether neutrality should be scrapped is unambiguous. But the argument he makes to sustain it – introducing the concept of role contamination and the LENS framework – is more nuanced, more honest, and more practically grounded than anything I have read on this subject recently.

This first instalment sets out the argument and the stakes. I commend it to you.

Should Neutrality be scrapped once and for all?

There is a conversation that has been growing in mediation circles for the best part of twenty years. It began in earnest with Bernie Mayer’s landmark 2004 book Beyond Neutrality – a loving critique from a practitioner of thirty years who correctly identified that something was wrong with the profession. It has since gathered momentum through the behavioural turn literature, through the work of scholars and professors of genuine distinction, and through the lived frustration of thousands of practitioners who have sat in difficult rooms and felt the gap between the ideal of neutrality and the reality of their own influence.

The argument, distilled to its essence, runs like this: mediators are human beings shaped by bias, culture, experience and unconscious frameworks. Perfect neutrality is therefore unachievable. And a profession organised around an unachievable ideal is building on sand.

It is a serious argument. Made by serious people. And it deserves a serious response.

Here is mine.

Never.

Neutrality should not be scrapped. Not redefined into something more comfortable. Not quietly retired to make room for a more sophisticated account of what mediators really do. Not abandoned because it is hard, or because the academic literature has made abandoning it feel like intellectual progress.

Neutrality, like anything worth holding, is tough at times. That has never been a reason to give up on it.

It wasn’t. It isn’t. The aspiration is the whole point.

Over the series let’s remind ourselves what holding that position looks like in the real world.

Not as theory. As practice. In compensation rooms and construction sites, in cross-cultural complexity and child custody hearings, in the daily discipline of a practitioner who has chosen to put down the professional file and pick up the mediator lens – every time, at every threshold, without exception.

Let’s begin.

Reclaiming Neutrality as Professional Discipline and Fitness for Role

There’s a conversation happening in mediation circles that I find both fascinating and fearful. Fascinating because it’s being driven by some of the most thoughtful practitioners and scholars in our field. Fearful because I think we’ve collectively misidentified the problem.

Let me start with a story.

A colleague of mine – an experienced lawyer-mediator working in compensation – was challenged about a practice she openly acknowledged using. Before the mediation began, the more powerful party had made an unfounded accusation about the other party. My colleague not only accepted this without challenge but defended it when questioned. Her reasoning? It was a legitimate way to lower the psychological ballpark for a settlement before any compensation figure was discussed. When pressed on whether this was consistent with her role as a mediator, her response was untroubled and immediate:

“This is what everyone does.”

I want to sit with that response for a moment, because it is more revealing than any academic paper I have read on the topic of mediator neutrality.

Here was a capable, experienced professional – someone who had sat in tens of mediation rooms, who understood the process, who cared about outcomes – casually describing the deliberate pre-loading of a mediation process against one party as industry practice. Not as a lapse. Not as a compromise she was uncomfortable with. As normal. As competent. As what professionals do.

This is not a neutrality problem in the philosophical sense that currently occupies so much of our professional literature. This is something more fundamental. This is what happens when a profession loses clarity about what its role is – and fills that vacuum with derived practices from adjacent professions that have entirely different purposes. Where is true north?

I’ve started calling it role contamination. And I believe it is a major problem in our field.

Over recent years, a growing body of scholarship – much of it genuinely brilliant – has argued that behavioural science has demonstrated that human beings, mediators included, are shaped by cognitive bias, cultural conditioning, emotional responses and unconscious frameworks. Therefore, the concept of mediator neutrality is not easily attainable and may mask the very influences it claims to prevent. Rooney challenges the traditional concept of mediator neutrality on precisely these grounds (Rooney, 2015). Field and Crowe have also developed well-formed arguments on the topic (Field and Crowe, 2020).

I have deep respect for the scholars making this case. They are right about the diagnosis. And the arguments are serious enough to deserve a serious response – not a dismissal.

As Quek Anderson observes in her careful analysis of Field and Crowe’s work, they contend that the reliance on neutrality in current mediation ethics ‘is unrealistic as it ignores issues such as the reality of the mediator’s power’ and that ‘the demands of mediator neutrality effectively incapacitate mediators from responding dynamically to the needs of individual parties’ (Quek Anderson, 2021, p. 68). Their proposed solution is to replace neutrality with relational self-determination as the primary ethical imperative of mediation practice.

It is a carefully constructed argument. And here is precisely where I part company with it.

Self-determination depends on the parties exercising it. Which means Field and Crowe have not merely relocated the ethical burden – they have redirected it away from the mediator and onto the parties. The mediator’s professional accountability quietly dissolves into the complexity of the relational dynamic.

Neutrality does not permit that dissolution. It sits entirely and uncomfortably on the mediator. No external dependency. No shared accountability. The mediator either held the discipline or they didn’t. Their call. Full stop.

Furthermore, if the problem is that mediators carry bias and exercise influence they cannot fully see or control, relational self-determination is subject to precisely the same limitation. The mediator who judges whether parties are genuinely exercising self-determination – or being dominated – brings all the same conditioning and unconscious frameworks to that judgment. As Quek Anderson notes, the contextual ethical method ‘requires mediators to be trained to recognise and reflect on ethical issues and to develop the ability to exercise professional judgment’ (Quek Anderson, 2021, p. 71) – which is precisely the same professional discipline the neutrality principle demands, now applied to a more complex and less accountable standard.

The problem has not been solved. It has been given a more sophisticated name.

And this is where I want to be direct about what is at stake. A profession that responds to ethical failure by replacing an uncomfortable principle with a more complex one – rather than by raising the standard of ethical practice – is not solving its problem. It is providing more elegant intellectual cover for it. The finest literature in the world, if it ends in a lower bar dressed as a higher principle, becomes precious wrapping paper for corrupt practice.

The answer is not removing the bar. It is raising it.

I am not contending that neutrality is practiced well. The evidence in this series suggests it frequently is not. What I am contending is that it is the only principle that places the full weight of ethical obligation on the mediator’s shoulders – unshared, unredirected, non-negotiable. Not the insurance company’s problem. Not the parties’ capacity to exercise self-determination. Yes, squarely on the mediator’s role.

Without that obligation held firmly in place, mediation is a profession without a moral core. It becomes just another product – a settlement technique on the lawyer’s shelf, efficient maybe, but morally inert. And a society that loses its capacity for genuine human resolution of conflict loses something it will not easily recover.

That is why the bar cannot be lowered. That is why the answer is not a more sophisticated principle. It is greater bench-strength in ethical neutrality practice – the role clarity, the disciplines, the tools, and the professional courage to hold what only the mediator can hold.

That is what this series is about. And it is what we are here to build.

Consider: nobody argues that perfect sterility is unachievable and therefore surgeons should stop scrubbing in. Nobody suggests that because judges carry unconscious bias, they should abandon the aspiration of impartiality. In every serious profession, the gap between the ideal and the achievable is understood not as a reason to lower the standard but as the very revered space in which professional discipline lives and grows.

Neutrality is not a state of perfection to be achieved. It is a professional discipline to be practiced.

Like all professional disciplines it will be imperfectly executed. Like all professional disciplines it requires ongoing self-examination, honest acknowledgment of limitation, and genuine commitment to the role it serves. The fact that it can never be perfectly achieved is not an argument against it. It is precisely what makes it a discipline rather than a simple technique.

So, if role contamination – not cognitive bias, not cultural conditioning – is the root cause, what exactly is being contaminated?

The mediator’s role is not to add value to the outcome. It is not to apply professional wisdom toward the right answer. It is not to be a silent co-author of the resolution. Those are honourable roles in other professions – the lawyer, the counsellor, the consultant, the judge. They are simply not what your core role is in the mediation room.

The mediator’s job – distinct from every other professional role – is to create and safeguard the optimal conditions, context and environment for the parties to arrive at the best outcome from their own thinking and their own framework. Full stop.

When that role is clearly held, the neutrality question largely dissolves. You are not neutral or partial about the outcome because you have no business having a view about the outcome. You are the custodian of the process. The solution belongs entirely to the parties, not you.

A simple question has helped me hold this distinction through more than a thousand hours of mediation practice:

Whose problem is this to solve?

Not mine. Theirs. My problem to solve is creating the best possible conditions for them to solve theirs. The moment I lose that distinction – even with the best of intentions, even with genuine care for the parties – I have left my role and entered theirs uninvited. I have entered the drama triangle and become the rescuer, the persecutor/judge, or aligned with the victim. Whatever role I take up beside neutrality is an abdication of my commission.

The brilliant scholars wrestling with the neutrality question are correctly sensing that something is wrong. But the answer is not to abandon the aspiration or redefine it into something more comfortable.

The answer is to get the role right, and to equip and support each other to develop and sustain this critical capability.

When the role is clear, neutrality stops being an impossible ideal – a perfection shrine that leaves practitioners feeling perpetually inadequate – and becomes a natural consequence of doing your actual job well. Not perfect. Not untroubled. But disciplined, honest, and fit for purpose.

That is the conversation I want to have in this series. What role clarity looks like in practice. What do we leave at the door and what do we bring in. How it holds under the pressure of intercultural complexity. And what genuinely clean outcomes look like when the mediator stays in their lane.

For most people who enter a mediation room, this is not one option among many. It is the last genuinely accessible space for an honourable outcome – with full party agency, minimum financial outlay, and without surrendering their conflict to a system that will decide for them, about them, without them. That is what is at stake when we lower the bar. That is who pays the price.

Whose Decision Is It Anyway?

In the argument thus far, I introduced the concept of role contamination – what happens when mediators import the values, practices and judgments of adjacent professions into a space that requires something fundamentally different. We will now get to the heart of why role contamination is so persistent, and why it matters so much to resist it.

Let me ask you a question. Not a rhetorical one – a genuine one that I’d invite you to sit with before reading further.

Who is in the best position to make the right decision in your life?

Take a moment. Because most people, when they genuinely sit with that question, already know the answer. Not intellectually. Viscerally. The answer arrives before the reasoning does.

And yet – walk into a significant proportion of mediation rooms across the country, particularly in compensation, family, and workplace disputes, and you will find a process quietly organised around a different answer. An answer that runs something like – the professional in the room has access to a quality of judgment that the parties do not, and the process will go better if that judgment shapes the outcome.

That assumption – rarely stated, almost never examined – is the engine of role contamination.

The Expertise Trap

Here is the dilemma that confronts every professional who enters mediation from a specialist background – law, psychology, finance, medicine, whatever the discipline. They have spent years, sometimes decades, developing judgment in their field. That judgment is real. It has value. It has helped people.

And then they enter a mediation room where their explicit professional commitment is to a process in which the parties determine the outcome. The tension is immediate and profound. Because everything in their professional formation is saying – I can see what the right answer is here. But the mediation role explicitly states that is not your call to make.

Most professionals navigate this tension by telling themselves they are being facilitative while quietly, incrementally, steering. The reframe that happens to point toward the settlement they’d privately recommend. The question asked at the very moment most likely to produce a particular response. The silence allowed to sit just long enough to create pressure in a specific direction. None of it conscious. All of it real.

This is the expertise trap. And it is sprung not by bad intentions but by an unexamined answer to the question of who is best placed to decide.

What the Parties Actually Know

Here is what the mediator, however expert, does not know.

They do not know what this dispute has cost the parties in ways that never appear in a brief – in sleep, in relationships, in self-respect, in the story each party tells about who they are. They do not know what a resolution needs to feel like for it to hold. They do not know what the parties will live with five years from now, nor what they will regret.

The parties know all of this. They know it in their bones. And any outcome that is genuinely theirs – reached through their own thinking, in a process that trusted their capacity – carries that knowledge inside it. It fits their lives in a way that an expertly guided settlement, however skilfully constructed, simply cannot.

The mediator who stays in their lane isn’t producing lesser outcomes. They are producing more durable ones.

The Agency Principle and Its Limits

I want to be honest about something here. The principle that individuals are best placed to determine the right outcomes for their own lives is not a universal truth. It is, to a significant degree, a Western cultural inheritance. In many cultures – Confucian, Indigenous, collectivist in various forms – the family, the community, the ancestors, or the collective hold equal or greater legitimacy as sources of the right answer.

And here is something the scholarly literature has been slower to acknowledge. The very framework that has sought to replace neutrality – relational self-determination – carries this same Western cultural address. As Quek Anderson observes in her analysis of Field and Crowe, self-determination in the Western mediation tradition is ‘rooted philosophically in the ideals of democratic participation and personal autonomy’ and ‘may not hold similar dominance’ in non-Western societies (Quek Anderson, 2021, pp. 69, 72). The scholarship that claimed to liberate mediation from one unattainable Western ideal has quietly replaced it with another – the autonomous individual as the primary moral agent – equally invisible to those inside the tradition, equally problematic to those outside it.

The relational self-determination framework, for all its sophistication, is still the gift of the Western ‘Me’ – wrapped carefully, given generously, and received by much of the world as someone else’s present.

Neutrality, properly understood as professional discipline and role clarity, does not carry that same cultural baggage. Its mandate is not to impose a framework of individual agency on the parties. It is to safeguard the conditions for whatever form of wisdom the parties authentically bring. That is a genuinely universal aspiration – not because it has no cultural roots, but because its orientation is always outward, toward the parties, rather than inward toward the mediator’s own tradition.

But – and this is the crucial point – it does not change the mediator’s role. Not one degree. The mediator’s job is to create conditions that allow the parties’ own decision-making process to happen – in whatever form that wisdom authentically takes. The mediator’s cultural template stays at the door along with everything else.

The agency principle, properly understood, is not about individualism. It is about the mediator’s fundamental orientation – toward the parties’ wisdom and away from their own.

A Practice, Not Just a Principle

What works – what has worked for me across more than a thousand hours in the room – is a simple, repeatable act of role recalibration.

Whose problem is this to solve?

Not mine. Theirs. My problem is the process. Their problem is their lives. The moment I feel the pull toward the outcome – the moment I notice myself thinking the right answer here is clearly… – that question brings me back.

Most mediators fail it occasionally. The ones worth learning from are the ones who notice when they’re failing it, name it to themselves honestly, and correct.

That is what professional discipline looks like. Not perfection. Honest, practiced, self-aware commitment to a role that puts the parties where they belong – at the centre of their own resolution.

Author Biography

Rory Gowers is a Transformation Architect and Principal of The Constructive Solution, specialising in intercultural dispute resolution. He holds a Master of Dispute Resolution from UNSW, a Master of Education from UTS, and over 1000 hours of mediation practice. He is Australasian Ambassador for Medianos, the innovative Italian conflict resolution game now available in Australia and New Zealand.

Editor’s Closing, by Milan A. Nitopi

Rory reminds us how important neutrality is to a mediator’s role, purpose and practice. His concept of role contamination is an invaluable addition to this discussion illustrating how multidisciplinary professionals can adopt a role or approach that obscures the traditional ‘pure’ principles of facilitative mediation. However, an important distinction must be drawn to acknowledge that other forms of mediation may require the mediator to adopt a different role or approach.

Rory’s next blog will introduce the instrument that he has developed to hold that boundary: the LENS framework. In that article, he will ask us to look honestly at how smudged our lens has become.

Rory’s question to you: Where in your own practice do you feel the pull most strongly? And, what do you do about it?

Editor Biography

Milan Nitopi is an Australian lawyer, mediator and Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner with a Master of Laws in Family Dispute Resolution (LLM FDR). His passion concerns people, law, and resolution, and he strives to equip people with skills for better communication and dialogue to address all kinds of conflict.

Four Rs for Practicing Conflict Transformation from the Inside Out 

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By Susan L. Brooks 

Toward the end of November 2025, I had the great honor and pleasure of facilitating the opening session of the ADR Research Forum. The theme I chose was Transforming Conflict from the Inside Out: Exploring the Inner Work that Supports Our Outer Work. I introduced several approaches emphasizing the need for researchers and practitioners in the field of alternative dispute resolution, which I prefer to think of as conflict transformation (shoutout to John Paul Lederach), to engage in ongoing, deep, and critical self-reflection to ensure their efforts are effective and contribute to positive social change. 

As a follow up, I want to offer here what I have called the “Four Rs”: Relational Consciousness, Radical Acceptance, Realignment, and Repair. In other writings, I have discussed these ideas and practices as ways of embodying what it means to repair the world, or Tikkun Olam as it is known in the Jewish tradition. Repairing the world requires us to engage in daily and lifelong practices that can contribute to our own healing and heal our relationships, and have broader ripple effects that ultimately can heal the larger systems and even whole societies we inhabit. 

The first R stands for Relational Consciousness, our interconnectedness and interdependence with all beings. Much of my scholarship and teaching has focused on promoting what I call relational and wholehearted lawyering, an interdisciplinary framework consisting of habits of mind and tools we can cultivate to help us engage in meaningful conversations across differences in order to generate new and creative possibilities. We can bring relational lawyering into the work of conflict transformation by pursuing our roles as researchers and practitioners in ways that affirm all participants’ mutuality and connection rather than contributing to greater separation and disconnection. Using the term relational consciousness reminds us that being relational in our professional lives can only happen if we bring those practices into every interaction and every aspect of our daily lives. 

The second R stands for Radical Acceptance, a term I learned from the work of Tara Brach. The two components of radical acceptance are awareness, the ability to see clearly what is happening within us, and compassion, which Brach describes as embracing fully whatever is present, including our pain and our desires. Radical acceptance includes the ideas of approaching ourselves and others with unconditional friendliness and accepting that everyone carries within them elements of brokenness along with the things that make them shine. This combination is what truly makes us whole and is an intrinsic part of our shared humanity. By practicing self- compassion, we strengthen our ability to see the light in others and the living world around us. 

The third R stands for Realignment, which we can also think of as return. The premise is that we all have a great amount of innate wisdom, including all the knowledge we have accumulated from our lived experiences. Many challenging aspects of our society and culture create separation within and among us that often leads us to distrust ourselves and the wisdom we carry. When we forget our interconnectedness, our path, and our inner voice, we become distrustful toward others, which leads to further disconnection, pain, and even cruelty. The good news is that we can always “re-turn” or turn again toward to our core values and aspirations of how we want to behave toward others and how we want to be in the world. Importantly, the practice of return is always available to us regardless of how far we have strayed from the values connected to relational consciousness. The more we can accept this process of forgetting as part and parcel of what it means to be human, we are engaging in the practice of radical acceptance, which in turn helps us come back into realignment. 

The fourth and final R emphasizes the importance of the work of Repair. Taking action toward repairing historical and ongoing harms is an essential part of conflict transformation at the personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. In other words, we need to take concrete steps toward repair to heal ourselves, our relationships, and our world. The idea of repair brings to mind the work of Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book CASTE. Wilkerson compare the current conditions of systemic racism in the U.S. to purchasing an old home. When we buy an old home, of course we are not responsible for having created all the challenging issues that come along with that purchase. And yet, it is still fully our responsibility to address every one of those concerns. If we fail to address what is broken, we are the ones who suffer as much if not more than anyone else. 

Speaking more broadly, all of us who are alive today throughout the world are not responsible for originally bringing about our current injustices connected to the history of oppression and marginalization of certain individuals and groups. And yet we must embrace and act on our responsibility to take concrete steps to address oppression and marginalization wherever we can. This notion of repair reminds us that we need to pursue conflict transformation as a habit of mind and practice in our everyday lives. Even if we do not experience ourselves as being immediately impacted by injustice, unless we take an active role in the work of repair, the foundation of our house, and, indeed, our entire global society, will be in danger of collapse. 

I want to close with these lines taken from the poem and song called Anthem by Leonard Cohen. They speak to how by doing our inner work and embracing the wholeness of who we are along with acting in alignment with our values toward everyone we encounter in our work and lives, we make a meaningful contribution toward repairing the world.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. 

Author Biography

Susan L. Brooks has over three decades of experience as a creative educator, scholar, facilitator, and presenter in the areas of experiential and community-based learning, professional development, and cross-cultural communication. She recently retired and has been appointed Professor of Law Emerita. Professor Brooks received a Fulbright Global Research award to study culturally sustaining forms of conflict transformation, including restorative justice, mediation, and facilitated dialogue. She holds a J.D. as well as a M.A. and B.A. in clinical social work, and is a licensed attorney, mediator, trained restorative justice facilitator, and a certified yoga and mindfulness teacher.

Negotiation and a Virtual Reality Simulation for Immersive Learning

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Alvedi Sabani and Kathy Douglas

Negotiation has always been a practical skill best learned by doing. For decades, negotiation education across law, business, and the social sciences has relied on roleplays and debriefing as its signature pedagogy. These activities remain powerful because they immerse learners in conflict scenarios, expose them to different perspectives, and create space for reflection, a point long recognised in negotiation scholarship on learning through experience and transfer of skills.

But the context in which negotiation is practised is changing.

Today, many negotiations happen online, through digital platforms, hybrid meetings, or technology-mediated environments. At the same time, universities are grappling with larger cohorts, hybrid delivery, and growing expectations that learning experiences be authentic, inclusive, and scalable. Against this backdrop, we have been exploring a simple question: can immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) meaningfully extend negotiation pedagogy without replacing its core strengths?

This blog reflects on our experience using a VR negotiation simulation in higher education, and what it might offer educators working in dispute resolution, mediation, and negotiation more broadly.

Why revisit negotiation pedagogy now?

Negotiation education has long been anchored in experiential learning. Whether in law schools, business programs, or professional development courses, learners typically practise through roleplays followed by structured debriefing. This approach is effective because negotiation is not just about tactics or frameworks; it is about judgement, emotional intelligence, communication, and adaptability, which are capabilities that develop through cycles of action and reflection, as articulated in David Kolb’s experiential learning theory.

However, traditional roleplays also have limitations:

  • They are labour-intensive to run well
  • Quality depends heavily on participant engagement
  • Experiences vary widely between groups
  • Opportunities for repetition and skill mastery are limited
  • Accessibility and equity can be uneven

At the same time, negotiation itself is evolving. Online dispute resolution (ODR), legal technology, and AI-mediated communication are increasingly part of professional practice. Students need opportunities to practise negotiation in environments that resemble how difficult conversations now occur in real workplaces.

This combination of pedagogical pressure and professional change prompted us to explore immersive learning as a complement to traditional approaches.

What does VR add to negotiation learning?

Virtual Reality is often associated with novelty, but its real value in negotiation education lies elsewhere. When designed carefully, VR can support three things that are difficult to achieve at scale with traditional roleplays: presence, consistency, and repetition.

In a VR negotiation simulation, learners step into a scenario where they are physically and emotionally “present” in the conversation. They sit across the table from a virtual counterpart who responds to their words, tone, and decisions. Facial expressions, pauses, and emotional cues all matter. Research on immersive learning suggests that this sense of presence and emotional engagement can be particularly valuable for developing interpersonal and professional skills

Equally important is consistency. Every learner encounters the same scenario, the same counterpart, and the same decision points. This allows educators to design learning and assessment around a shared experience, while still allowing individual agency in how the conversation unfolds.

Finally, VR enables repetition. Learners can replay the same negotiation, try different approaches, and immediately see how alternative choices change outcomes. This aligns closely with how complex skills are developed in practice: through cycles of action, feedback, and reflection.

The negotiation scenario

In our case, the VR simulation places learners in the role of a technology consultant meeting with a senior executive who is sceptical about a proposed organisational change. The executive is concerned about employee resistance, workload, and unintended consequences. The learner’s task is not to “win” the negotiation, but to work collaboratively toward a solution that addresses shared interests.

This framing is deliberate. The simulation is grounded in integrative negotiation, where the aim is to create value rather than claim it. Throughout the conversation, learners make choices about how to respond: whether to acknowledge concerns, ask clarifying questions, provide evidence, or push too quickly for agreement. Each choice influences the direction of the conversation and the executive’s reactions.

Figure 1: VR Experience

What makes this powerful is that learners experience the emotional consequences of their decisions. A dismissive response leads to defensiveness. A well-timed question builds trust. A failure to listen can derail the conversation entirely. These dynamics are difficult to convey through lectures alone, but they become immediately visible in an immersive setting.

Reflection remains central

One concern often raised about technology-enhanced learning is that it risks prioritising experience over understanding. We would argue the opposite: without reflection, VR is just a simulation; with reflection, it becomes learning.

Figure 2: Conversation Recap with Evaluation Points for Learners

In our design, the VR experience is always paired with structured reflection. After completing the simulation, learners receive detailed feedback, including a transcript of their conversation and indicators of strengths and areas for growth. They are then asked to analyse their performance, connect it to negotiation theory, and articulate how they would approach the conversation differently in the future.

This reflective component does several important things:

  • It slows down the experience and turns action into insight
  • It connects practice back to theory
  • It legitimises “failure” as a learning opportunity
  • It encourages learners to think critically about their own habits and assumptions

In many cases, students who struggled in the simulation produced the most thoughtful reflections. The technology does not replace judgement; it exposes it.

What did students experience?

Learner responses to the VR negotiation have been strikingly consistent. Many describe feeling nervous before starting, as they would before a real workplace conversation. Others note that the executive’s reactions felt “uncomfortably real”. These emotional responses are precisely what make the experience valuable.

Students frequently highlight three benefits:

  1. Confidence building – practising difficult conversations in a safe environment reduces anxiety about real-world negotiations
  2. Insight into their own behaviour – seeing how small choices affect outcomes is eye-opening
  3. Opportunity to improve – replaying the scenario allows experimentation without real-world consequences

Importantly, accessibility has also been a design priority. The simulation can be completed using a VR headset or on a standard computer, ensuring that no learner is excluded due to equipment or physical constraints.

Lessons for ADR and negotiation educators

Our experience suggests that VR is not a replacement for traditional negotiation pedagogy, but a complement. Roleplays, clinics, and live simulations remain essential, particularly for developing interpersonal sensitivity and peer learning. However, immersive simulations can extend what is possible, especially where scale, consistency, or access are challenges.

Several lessons stand out:

  • Pedagogy must lead technology. VR works best when grounded in clear learning objectives and theory.
  • Reflection is non-negotiable. Immersion without reflection limits learning.
  • Blended approaches are powerful. Combining VR with roleplays, discussion, and debriefing enriches all elements.
  • Staff capability matters. Educators need support to design, facilitate, and interpret immersive learning effectively.

Looking ahead

As negotiation increasingly takes place in digital and hybrid environments, it makes sense that negotiation education evolves alongside it. Immersive learning offers a way to rehearse difficult conversations, develop emotional intelligence, and build professional confidence in settings that feel authentic to contemporary practice.

For ADR educators, the challenge is not whether to adopt new technologies, but how to integrate them thoughtfully, in ways that preserve the reflective, human-centred core of the field.

Virtual Reality is not a silver bullet. But when used carefully, it can open new possibilities for learning how to negotiate well, ethically, and with empathy, skills that matter now more than ever.

Authors Biography

Dr. Alvedi Sabani is a Senior Lecturer and Program Manager of the Bachelor of Commerce at the College of Business and Law (CoBL), RMIT University, and the EdTech Project Lead. His research interests are broad and interdisciplinary, spanning artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, digital transformation, electronic government, gamification, innovative pedagogy, and inclusive technology adoption. As a co-founder of the RMIT GamifiED Hub, Dr. Sabani has been instrumental in driving scholarly innovation in learning and teaching through gamification. This initiative has produced cutting-edge resources that enhance the student learning experience, aligning closely with RMIT’s strategic emphasis on Active, Authentic, and Applied learning.

Professor Kathy Douglas leads the College of Business and Law learning, teaching and quality portfolio including governance, student satisfaction, program development and innovation in pedagogy. She is an experienced Executive leader who has focused on developing transformative educational experiences and impactful research. She was a member of academic board for several years and in 2020 chaired the Higher Education Committee. Previously, Kathy was the Dean of the Graduate School of Business and Law at RMIT (2018-2022). She led a high performing school focused on industry engaged learning and research. Kathy was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s leadership award for Imagination in 2020 for her innovative practices. Kathy has a passion for impactful leadership that benefits students, staff and the communities that RMIT engages with, including industry. In 2025 she was awarded the Francis Ormond Award for Innovation at RMIT.

The “Behavioural Turn” in Mediation: Rethinking Autonomy, Choice and Ethics

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This post summarises and reflects on ideas first developed in the co-authored article, “The ‘Behavioral Turn’ in Dispute Resolution: Implications for Mediation Theory and Practice”, originally published in the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 41(2) (2025).

Across many disciplines, behavioural insights have transformed how we understand human decision-making. Psychology, behavioural economics, and social neuroscience increasingly reveal the extent to which human choices are shaped by cognitive biases, stress, fatigue, emotional load, social norms, and the framing of options. In a field such as mediation, which has long placed party autonomy and self-determination at its heart, these insights have (and will continue to) be transformed by these behavioural insights.

What is the “Behavioural Turn”?

The “behavioural turn” refers to a shift towards scientific explanations of human behaviour that highlight how decisions are influenced by context, environment, and cognitive processes rather than by unfettered individual choice. Much of this is familiar to mediators, reflecting many of their existing practices and enriching rather than disrupting existing practice.

Concepts such as confirmation bias, priming, loss aversion, and the endowment effect describe patterns practitioners see daily in the negotiation room. Neuroscience gives additional insights, showing how stress and heightened emotion increase reliance on mental shortcuts, making it harder to engage in the type of rational, future-orientated decisions that resolve disputes.

These theories help explain why tools such as reframing, structured processes, and careful management of tone and environment have been such effective skills for mediators to help guide participants towards management of conflict.

Beyond the Toolkit: Theoretical Implications

Behavioural insights do also have implications for mediation theory – challenging some of mediation’s foundational assumptions, particularly voluntariness, neutrality and autonomy. (See also the fantastic post on this blog by Jon Crowe and Rachael Field).

New behavioural knowledge challenges the idea that mediation can be a purely voluntary process in which the mediator is a neutral facilitator. Behavioural determinism also raises the question of whether mediators can ever truly “stand back” and avoid influencing outcomes. Mediators have multiple tools at their disposal to nudge or encourage the parties’ choices through subtle cues, phrasing, or tapping into or triggering particular cognitive biases.

“The ‘behavio[u]ral turn’ prevents us from naively accepting the convenient fictions of mediator neutrality and participant autonomy within conflict resolution activities.”

Rather than undermining mediation, this shift calls for a reassessment of its ethical foundations. We suggest a “compatibilist” understanding of autonomy. This recognises that people act with a sense of agency even when choices are shaped by antecedent factors, and we believe this offers a more realistic and conceptually honest approach. It also acknowledges that mediators inevitably influence the process, and foregrounds that this influence carries ethical responsibilities.

The Ethical Challenge: What should mediators do?

There is plenty of scope to use behavioural insights in a positive way: reducing cognitive load, supporting informed decisions, minimising the impact of bias, or helping parties regulate strong emotions. But they can also be misused. Poorly designed processes or overly directive behaviours can prime parties towards settlement in ways that privilege efficiency over genuine engagement or fair outcomes.

This highlights the need for a strengthened ethical framework. Approaches grounded in contextual and relational ethics offer a way forward and are developed in the work of Field and Crowe as well as Zhao and Hardy and Rundle. These frameworks see self-determination not as atomistic independence, but as relational participation supported by the mediator’s awareness, reflection, and transparent engagement with ethical considerations.

Conclusion

The behavioural turn may ultimately shift how we see the mediator, moving away from the dated idea of a “neutral helper” to a skilled conflict specialist who guides, coaches, and supports parties in understanding their own responses to conflict. This reframing aligns with long-standing critiques of neutrality and may offer a more coherent account of the mediator’s real work.

At the same time, new behavioural insights remind us to be vigilant. Without a robust ethical foundation, behavioural tools risk becoming mere techniques of persuasion. We should instead be using them to gain a richer, more honest account of how humans make decisions, and using them to support parties in mediation in an ethical way.

As we say in our article:

“Behavio[u]ral insights hold particular appeal for people whose daily work is the business of managing conflict… yet they also present an interesting dilemma for the mediator’s professional identity as an agent of self-determination.”

Behavioural insights do not diminish the value of mediation. Rather, they invite deeper reflection on its philosophical underpinnings and ethical commitments. The challenge ahead is to articulate frameworks that acknowledge influence without slipping into a mechanistic view of human conflict (one where conflict experts can simply push human ’buttons’ or nudge towards outcomes).

What we need is to embrace a more nuanced understanding of autonomy and redefine the core theories of mediation to reflect new scientific insights.

This conversation, already underway within mediation communities of practice and scholarship alike, is one of the most important that we as dispute resolvers can have.

Full text of the article in the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution is in the PDF below.

Toohey Behavioural Turn.pdfDownload

Self-Sacrifice in Mediation: Exploring the Work of Costly Moves

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By Elenne Ford

When people find themselves locked in conflict, the usual advice is to stand firm and assert their position, interests and rights. Self-assertion dominates our cultural playbook. The titles of popular conflict resolution books give the flavour succinctly: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In;1 I Wanted Fries with That: How to Ask for What You Want and Get What You Need;2 Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your Life and Relationships.3 Yet in many situations, insisting on one’s way only deepens wounds, escalates hostility, and pushes relationships into deadlock.

Alongside this dominant self-assertion pathway, mediation practice sometimes relies on a different cluster of actions and behaviours. Rather than demanding rights or ‘repayment’ for wrongs, parties make concessions, offer conciliatory gestures, apologise, or forgive—sometimes as strategic compromises, but at other times in ways that involve voluntarily bearing a meaningful personal cost.

These voluntary and costly moves, when they involve the relinquishing of something deeply valued or rightfully held, are not standard objects of analytic focus within negotiation theory. Rarely have they been grouped together and analysed as a distinct category with their own  logic and relational impact. While concessions are a routine feature of mediation, here the term self-sacrifice is used to refer to a narrower class of actions involving the voluntary relinquishing of something meaningfully valued or rightfully held at a cost to the self without expectation of reciprocal gain.

Understood as forms of self-sacrifice when they involve such cost, these actions require giving up something meaningfully connected to the self for the sake of another or the relationship in response to conflict. While seldom named as self-sacrifice or analysed as such in mainstream conflict-resolution theory, self-sacrificial actions quietly operate in everyday life—and, I suggest, within mediation practice—where they may help restore trust, soften hostility, and open pathways toward reconciliation that may otherwise remain inaccessible.

Mediation theory has largely noticed the moves—concessions, apologies, forgiveness, and other costly actions—but has paid less attention to the deeper work some of those moves can perform—the voluntary absorption of cost, the relinquishing of rightful claims, and the re-ordering of relations between parties.

Self-Assertion vs. Self-Sacrifice

Self-assertion is widely understood as a personal right—the act of standing up for one’s interests or opinions. In moderation, it can be healthy and necessary. But when used indiscriminately, especially in high-stakes disputes, it often backfires, triggering retaliation, escalating emotions, and entrenching divisions.4

By contrast, self-sacrifice is commonly defined as the giving up of one’s interests, or wellbeing to help others or advance a cause.5 It might sound extreme, yet even modest sacrifices—conceding a point that matters deeply, offering an apology, or forgiving an offence—when voluntary and appropriate to the relational context can alter the dynamics and relational fabric of a conflict.6 In contrast to the prominence of self-assertion, however, self-sacrifice rarely appears as an articulated option in a mediator’s conflict resolution toolkit.

Accordingly, my research asks: What is the relationship between self-sacrifice of parties in the mediation of seemingly intractable interpersonal conflict and potential pathways for resolution of such conflict?

Sorokin’s Five Dimensions of Creative Altruism

To explore this question, I draw on the work of sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), who described five dimensions of ‘creative altruism’:7 intensity, purity, adequacy, duration, and extensity. Among these, intensity—how costly an action is to the self—relates most directly to self-sacrifice. It captures acts that impose real loss or risk on the giver, such as apology, forgiveness, surrendering rightful claims.

Rather than abstract virtues, such costly gestures may form part of the often-invisible infrastructure through which reconciliation becomes possible in mediation.

Transactional and Relational Mechanisms

Self-sacrifice may operate through two broad mechanisms:

1. Transactional Mechanism

Conflict often produces a relational deficit—a sense that something is owed. This debt can be ‘collected’ through self-assertion or ‘absorbed’ through self-sacrifice.8 To forgive, apologise, or concede is to bear the cost oneself, thereby discharging the debt.9

2. Relational Mechanisms

Beyond the act itself, self-sacrifice can set relational dynamics in motion. These may include trust activation, triggered reciprocity, empathy arousal, re-interpretation of the other, and a cooperative orientation—each of which can reshape how parties engage with one another.10

Together, these mechanisms may help explain why costly gestures sometimes succeed where negotiation stalemates persist.

Why Cost Matters

Across disciplines, scholars suggest that costliness matters. An apology is often perceived as more credible when it carries risk or vulnerability; a conciliatory gesture more persuasive when it involves sacrifice. As conflict scholar Christopher Mitchell11 observed ‘The greater the sacrifice involved, the more likely it will be evaluated as a credible change.’

Costliness, however, is not determined solely by the scale of an action. Even small sacrifices may carry significant personal or relational cost to the person making them. Offering patience when irritated, extending kindness when resentful, or taking the first step toward reconciliation all involve relinquishing pride, comfort, or control. Such acts can initiate meaningful relational shifts.

Ambiguity and Risk

Self-sacrifice is not without danger. It may be ignored, resisted or exploited, and can harm the giver if it reinforces unhealthy dynamics. Sorokin’s adequacy dimension captures this ambiguity by asking whether an act of sacrifice actually produces constructive outcomes.

Conclusion

Intractable conflict often appears irresolvable because parties are locked in cycles of self-assertion. Yet interdisciplinary research suggests another possibility worth examining: self-sacrifice as a distinct but under-theorised pathway. By absorbing costs rather than demanding repayment, parties may alter the dynamics and relational balance of conflict.

In mediation, this does not mean encouraging people to become doormats. Rather, it raises the possibility that costly, appropriate, voluntary acts—risky, and often counter-cultural—may function as meaningful interventions. Because self-sacrifice remains underexplored in conflict resolution scholarship, it warrants closer attention. My research seeks to analyse whether and how such actions shape pathways towards resolution, through fieldwork with mediators and parties to conflict.

Author Biography

Elenne Ford is a dispute resolution consultant with a long-standing background in law and mediation. Elenne brings a sustained commitment to transforming conflict into pathways for connection and growth. Elenne’s professional experience spans several decades as a barrister and mediator, complemented by ongoing study in counselling and peacemaking. Elenne is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Queensland, examining intractable interpersonal conflict and the role of self-sacrifice in mediation, with a particular focus on how relational repair may be enabled through voluntary, redemptive self-giving. Grounded in a relational understanding of human wellbeing, Elenne’s research and practice centre on fostering constructive, relationally attuned responses to conflict.

References

  1. Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to yes: negotiating agreement without
    giving in (3rd , updated and revised ed.). Penguin. ↩︎
  2. Fish, A. (2020). I Wanted Fries with That: How to Ask for What You Want and Get What
    You Need. ↩︎
  3. Alberti, R., & Emmons, M. (2017). Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your
    Life and Relationships. ↩︎
  4. Pruitt, D. G., & Nowak, A. (2014). Attractor landscapes and reaction functions in escalation and de-escalation. The    International journal of conflict management, 25(4), p388. Hargie, O. (2021). Skilled Interpersonal Communication : Research, Theory and Practice. Taylor & Francis Group p339,340. ↩︎
  5. Axinn, S. (2010). Sacrifice and Value: A Kantian Interpretation (1 ed.). Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. P3,5. Bahr, H. M., & Bahr, K. S. (2001). Families and Self-Sacrifice: Alternative Models and Meanings for Family Theory. Social Forces, 79(4), 1232; Rosati, C. S. (2009). Self-Interest and Self-Sacrifice. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, p324; ↩︎
  6. Molander, P. (1985). The Optimal Level of Generosity in a Selfish, Uncertain Environment. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 29(4), 612,613,617. Cloke, K. (2001). Mediating Dangerously: the frontiers of conflict resolution. Wiley/Jossey-Bass p90. Barkat, J. S. (2019). Reaching for ripeness: promoting negotiation through unilateral conciliatory action. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 30(2), 184 ↩︎
  7. Sorokin, P. A., & Post, S. G. (2002). The Ways and Power of Love : types, factors, and techniques of moral transformation:pbk (Timeless classic paperback ed.). Templeton Foundation Press. ↩︎
  8. Keller, T. (2022). Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? (1 ed.). Penguin Publishing Group p59 ↩︎
  9. Keller, T. (2022). Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? (1 ed.). Penguin Publishing Group p209,210 ↩︎
  10. Coleman, P., & Deutsch, M. (2015). Morton Deutsch: a pioneer in developing peace psychology. Springer (Vol 30) pp. 24, 50,51); Van Lange, P. A. M., & Righetti, F. (2009). Willingness to Sacrifice. In H. T. Reis, &, & S. Sprecher (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships. Thousand Oaks Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. p. 1690; Barkat, J. S. (2019). Reaching for ripeness: promoting negotiation through unilateral conciliatory action. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 30(2), p. 181,184; Schumann, K., & Dragotta, A. (2021). Empathy as a predictor of high‐quality interpersonal apologies. European Journal of Social Psychology, 51(6), p906 ↩︎
  11. Mitchell, C. R. (2000). Gestures of Conciliation : factors contributing to successful olive branches. Macmillan. p157 ↩︎