The McGurk Effect: “The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound.” The video below demonstrates this illusion with the sound ’ba’ that becomes heard as ‘fa’ when the movement of the lips is changed:
This phenomenon has implications for social interaction, including conflict interaction.
A couple of weeks back, Dan Simon drew a comparison on his new transformative mediation blog between the thinking of Carl Rogers, the founder of humanistic psychology, and the premises and principles of transformative practice.
His Holiness The Dalai Lama (Image via Wikipedia)
Now, this week, he looks to the words of His Holiness The Dalai Lama and finds another parallel with our practice’s objective of recognition or openness to the other. This is of particular interest to me given my earlier post of February 7, Transformative Mediation Training and Spiritual Communities. Dan quotes from the HHDL’s Facebook page:
“The first beneficiary of compassion is always oneself. When compassion, or warmheartedness, arises in us and our focus shifts away from our own narrow self-interest, it is as if we open an inner door. It reduces fear, boosts confidence and brings us inner strength. By reducing distrust, it opens us
to others and brings us a sense of connection to others, and sense of purpose and meaning in life.”
This is a perfect summation of what Baruch Bush, the co-author of the transformative framework, calls compassionate strength. Briefly stated, the ‘transformative’ in transformative mediation is about supporting parties who wish to change their conflict interaction from negative to positive, or to one of compassionate strength, i.e., strength of self and openness to (or recognition of) the other.
Read Dan’s entire post here.
Winnie Backlund
I’m just back from taking part as a role play coach in the three-day “Basic Mediation Training – The Transformative Approach to Mediation”.
The training was co-led by Winnie Backlund and Basia Solarz, and was held with hand-picked leaders of a spiritual community located in Halifax.
A strong affinity was found between some of the premises of transformative practice and the teachings in this community. My personal hope as a transformative practitioner is that this seed of interest will find fertile ground in which to grow, and that transformative practice will be found to be helpful.
Basia Solarz
Often affinities that are at first seen between the premises of transformative practice and other practices become open to question under closer examination. See on this point Dan Simon’s blog post on the differences between non-violent communication and transformative mediation.
Distinguished educator and mediator, Tammy Lenski, is celebrating the tenth anniversary of her blog, Conflict Zen. As part of that celebration, she wants to highlight some of her favourite posts and articles over the years. One that caught my eye is entitled, Giving advice is a problem-solving crutch.
In it, she recalls a basic mediation workshop that she co-led at the time that had one rule for its participants: no advice giving. The rule is especially difficult for those participants who have been trained to provide advice to their clients, such as lawyers, social workers, and others.
Tammy then sets out a number of reasons why she refrains from giving advice to mediation parties after they’ve told their respective stories:
- It would be arrogant of me to assume I understand the complexities of their lives and minds sufficiently well to know that my advice is what’s best for them. They know themselves far better than I ever will.
- I could easily insult my clients. If it were such an easy or obvious solution that a mediator (or co-worker or boss) can see it, they probably wouldn’t be stuck in the conflict. Complex problems usually call for less obvious solutions.
- When I’m mediating (or when you’re supervising), I have power I can misuse, even inadvertently. It’s too easy for a participant to assume my expertise is best and to give up control to my ideas. People may say “yes” without fully considering the implications ‘til later. Or they may well know the implications, say yes anyway, and then the advice is ignored or avoided.
- Most of us, including me, tend to follow through better on ideas that are our own. Whether you call it buy-in or ownership, the chances of an agreement lasting are greater when a solution isn’t imposed.
- When I give advice, I risk becoming too enamored of my own creativity and brilliance. When I do that, I’ve started to make the mediation a platform for my own power and knowledge instead of a place for folks to tap into their own.
Many of these points resonate with the transformative mediator’s approach of following the parties, rather than leading them, in the conversation they actually wish to have with each other. We believe that a process that is driven from the bottom-up, with interventions by a skilled practitioner, is much more likely to have a positive impact on the quality of the parties’ conflict interaction than a process that is driven from the top-down by the mediator.
In responding to a court application for divorce of a same-sex couple married in Canada, a federal government lawyer has taken the position:
In this particular action, one of the parties lives in Florida and the other in the United Kingdom, and could not have legally married in either of those jurisdictions.
The implication is that many of the same-sex couples who travelled from abroad to Canada to marry since 2004 are not legally wed.
The mechanics of determining issues such as tax status, employment benefits and immigration have been thrown into legal limbo.
Read the entire news report of this case on-line in The Globe and Mail.
As Rick Weiler notes in a December 22 post on the Kluwer Mediation Blog, the issue of mediation confidentiality “arises before the Courts from time to time and we are fortunate to have the recent, well-reasoned decision of Madam Justice J. Mackinnon of the Ontario Superior Court in Johnston v. Locke et al.”
The ruling was on an objection to the admissibility of an email written by a party during an ongoing mediation. The Court ruled, correctly in my view, that the communication was covered by settlement privilege and therefore inadmissible. The decision provides an excellent summary of the Ontario law in this area as it stands today and rather than paraphrase it, I urge you to read the full decision [...]
Following Rick Weiler’s advice, I will not attempt to paraphrase the decision either, all the more so because I am not in any sense qualified to do so, not being a lawyer myself. I would simply note that one of the matters dealt with in the decision is the jurisprudence on settlement privilege as a class privilege, and as a privilege that is established on a case-by-case basis.
The difference in approach affects the burden of proof. If mediation is part of the settlement privilege, the party seeking disclosure must establish that the circumstances fall within an exception such as to prove the existence or terms of a completed settlement agreement. On the other hand, with a case-by-case privilege approach, there is a presumption of disclosure unless the party seeking privilege can establish that the Wigmore criteria have been satisfied.
Justice Mackinnon rules that “[a] case by case analysis does not adequately support the policy underlying settlement privilege”, and she cites a summary of the policy interest:
§14.313 It has long been recognized as a policy interest worth fostering that parties be encouraged to resolve their private disputes without recourse to litigation, or, if an action has been commenced, encouraged to effect a compromise without resort to trial.
§14.315 In furthering these objectives, the courts have protected from disclosure communications, whether written or oral, made with a view to reconciliation or settlement. In the absence of such protection, few parties would initiate settlement negotiations for fear that any concession they would be prepared to offer could be used to their detriment if no settlement agreement was forthcoming. (In Bryant, Lederman, & Fuerst, The Law of Evidence in Canada, 2009, p. 1030)
Again, as Rick Weiler urges, the full decision should be read.
In transformative mediation circles, we often speak of ‘listening like a cow’. (See my two previous posts on this quality of attention here and here.) In brief, this simile is referring to the type of listening that is non-judgemental while not being internally busy as to what to say in reply to the talker; it’s about presence and attention to whatever it is that the talker is saying, verbally and non-verbally.
Diane Levin
Here’s an excerpt of a wonderful story by Diane Levin of what she describes as “one particularly miraculous mediation”:
Just hours before their meeting with me, the wife called to ask if they could bring their dog with them. “He’s very sweet and well-behaved,” she said, “and I think we’d both feel better if he were there with us.” An animal lover myself, I had no objections and encouraged her to bring the dog along. [...] their dog [...] curled up in the corner of my conference room with his head on his paws. He didn’t close his eyes but remained watchful, looking from one of his humans to the next.
The mediation began. [...] Not surprisingly, the discussion became emotional. First, the wife raised her voice, pressing her case against the husband’s proposal. The dog suddenly stood up from his corner, strode to the wife’s side, sat down beside her and leaned against her, resting his head in her lap. She stroked the dog’s head, and her voice assumed its normal tone. After a few minutes, the dog returned to his corner. Soon it was the husband’s turn to become agitated, and as the volume of his voice began to rise, the dog once more stood up, came to his side, leaned against him, and rested his head in the husband’s lap.
And so it went. Sensitive issues were raised, one spouse or the other became upset, and time and again, there the dog would be, leaning against the person who needed his comfort most in that moment, the great furry head resting upon a knee. The moment would pass, clarity would come, the anger would evaporate, the discussion would progress, and back the dog would go to his corner.
We took up a particularly difficult issue next.
[...]
[...]
As I was about to speak, I felt something warm and heavy lean against me. I looked down, and there was the dog, his head resting in my lap this time, looking up at me with his dark brown eyes. Evidently this time I was the one who needed support, at least in the judgment of this wise dog.
The husband and wife both stopped in mid-sentence, their voices falling silent. In amazement, they gaped at the dog with his head in my lap. Then, tension broken, they each smiled, shaking their heads. In an instant, the moment had changed. They were laughing now. “How about if we…,” said one. “Great idea,” said the other, “how about if we also…”
A few minutes later, they were standing up and hugging each other, the most difficult issues addressed to their mutual satisfaction. Their dog bounded about the room, his tail wagging.
When seen through the lens of a relational perspective, what happened here was distinctively human. The relational view of human nature sees people balancing needs for individual autonomy with needs for connection to others. The pure act of listening, whether by the trained conflict specialist, or, in this case, the dog, allows the participants to shift from agitation to calmness, to experience differences in how they see themselves and each other. This movement, in turn, allows the participants to move beyond their negative, unproductive interaction to make the decisions they each want to.
You can read Diane’s entire post here.
