Could AI Replace Mediators?

Posted on 26/03/2026 by Milan A Nitopi

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)

Posted on 19/03/2026 by rorygowers

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

Posted on 12/03/2026 by Dr Kathy Douglas

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 2012 Download

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

Posted on 05/03/2026 by rorygowers

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

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.