What just happened?
None of us saw this coming. A matter of weeks ago, we were running face-to-face mediation cases and mediation training courses all over the place: up and down the UK as well as overseas. A couple of our trainer-mediators had just landed back from St. Helena and were getting packed to go to Austria when lockdown hit!

We needed a good think about how we were going to operate the UK’s most active, quality-driven, and diverse mediation company.

Going online as mediators
The obvious choice for mediation cases has been to go online. So, we are now conducting large volumes of mediations for workplace, neighbourhood, commercial, family, and complaints mediations over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Skype. International referrals have shot up, and people who would never have contemplated attending a face-to-face mediation with their adversary have now taken the plunge because of the relative safety of sitting at a laptop, ready to close the lid if the going gets tough!

Is it as good as doing it face-to-face? Not really. Some of the drier commercial disputes that boil down to a final agreement over an amount of money, goods, or services that must be handed over are pretty straightforward even when done face-to-face and are no less so when carried out online. Incidentally, I notice that a lot of lawyer-mediators on Linkedin appear to be relishing the online forum, in which they don’t have to leave their offices (or homes) to conduct what in any case verges on evaluative settlement conferencing. ‘Why haven’t we always done it this way?’, I hear.

But, for me, the ‘real’ mediation caseload – dealing in all kinds of settings with relationship issues such as betrayals of trust, allegations of bullying and harassment, communication breakdown, resentment, anger, and vengeance – is far better carried out face-to-face, and I want to explain why.

What we can and can’t do as well online
True – in an online mediation, we can see each of the parties’ verbal and non-expressions to a large extent; we can, peering down our webcams, get some sense of how they are feeling and what they are thinking. We can even express empathy, use active listening skills, re-frame, and future-focus, etc.

But what is far less available when working online, to both the practitioner and to the parties, is an acute sense of the ‘between’: the interpersonal dynamic, the relationship between the two (or more) people, the quality of their interaction, the degree of psychological contact that exists between them, the strength of their interpersonal bridge.

My attention to, and interest in, the ‘between’ comes from working as a gestalt psychotherapist and especially from reading Martin Buber’s work in the area*. In Buber’s way of thinking, the ‘between’ does not belong to either one of the parties in an interaction, but as the name implies it only arises as an artefact of their relationship and interaction. And moreover, I believe, their interaction and relationship are further affected by the mediator’s ‘Presence’: his or her genuine, congruent, empathic, and impartial relating to the parties. From Buber’s ideas come a lot of contemporary notions about dialogue-building, as relevant to mediation as to psychotherapy, which is for me is what interpersonal mediation is essentially all about.

And how do we know if we are building dialogue and increasing (even to a small degree) the quality of psychological contact between two people? Well, there are some more mundane aspects to this, such as whether the people begin to express any understanding or empathy for one another, whether they begin to turn-take better, whether they move away from blaming and accusing each other and start to acknowledge a shared responsibility for making the situation better, or even whether they start to demonstrate that they are listening to what the other one has to say. And it is fair to say that, with close attention, we should be able to spot these things even when working online.

But, as a psychotherapist-turned-mediator, there is so much more involved in building dialogue and working well with Buber’s notion of the ‘between’, and there is a wealth of information that can get missed when we and the two disputing parties are not in the same physical space: the furtive glance that indicates surprise, the flared nostrils that suggest ‘I’ve heard this before and it’s still not true’, the brief look-away that can say, ‘And I’ve heard this before and it still IS true’; the slight, sometimes sub-vocal ‘tut’, the ‘huh’ that the microphone fails to pick up because the other party is ranting at volume, the briefly-raised eyebrow that can say so much and yet get missed.

And not only are these behaviours and micro-signals flying around all the time between the disputing parties, but they also come in the direction of the mediator. How the fully-present practitioner responds to them also affects what happens between the mediation participants.