25 and Counting: Where We're Headed

As our 25th year draws to a close, I wanted to conclude our ’25 and Counting’ series by saying a little about where we are headed over the next year or two, and to offer thanks to some of the great people who have got us here.

And as any good navigator should know, if you’re thinking about your direction, you have to start by knowing where you are! You can probably imagine that in 25 years of operation, we have discussed many times who we are and what we do. And although we have sometimes been tempted to diversify our offering, we come back every time to our core identity as a company that resolves disputes by getting people talking.

Our approach has always been to get inside conflict and to resolve it by understanding the people who are in involved in the conflict. So, we have for the last 25 years been taking a deep-dive into the psychology of disputes and disputing behaviour: understanding why it really challenges people to be involved in heated conflict, and thinking about what needs to happen to bring about resolution. We don’t do anything else. We have resisted being drawn into investigations, grievance handling, arbitration, evaluative settlement conferencing, and much more. We are independent, impartial dispute resolvers.

And that determines our direction. We plan to do much more of what we do so well: developing our offer to keep up with changing trends and client needs, but staying true to our roots and sticking to what we know. UK Mediation and EU Mediation have a great offer and we simply want to keep it relevant and up to date, and to make it available to more people and organisations throughout the UK and the rest of Europe.

And we can’t close the year without a massive thanks to our amazing affiliate trainers and mediators: the panel of experts who go out there and deliver what we do, week in, week out. We did get everyone together for an affiliate day and standardisation event recently, which gave me a chance to thank them personally, and I was staggered when I thought about how much expertise we had in the room: an enormously skilled and experienced panel of dispute resolvers and trainers, ready to head off to all four corners of our expanding patch to do what they do so well.

Thanks as well go to our brilliant HQ team of course, for keeping everything working and making sure everyone is where they ought to be! And lastly, as we wrap up our 25th years, thanks to our wonderful clients, many of whom have been working with us since we began in 1999. We look forward to continuing our work with you, and dare I say, to keeping people talking!