This book, as the title suggests, is about a kind of mediation. (Mediation can be thought of as facilitated conflict resolution, or facilitated decision making. It’s more informal than court and the parties decide the outcome, unlike having a judge or arbitrator decide for them.)
While mediation as a concept isn’t new, the professional development of mediation is pretty new – really around 50 years old. Most mediators are “facilitative” mediators, meaning that they try to facilitate a process in which they get at the root of the parties’ issues and help the parties negotiate a win-win solution. This model is supposed to be neutral and portable to many situations, but this model has detractors. First, they argue that this rational, solution-focused approach itself contains a certain kind of bias. Second, they argue that the formal informality of it favors a certain kind of disposition and social expectation. Third, they say that without getting at the emotion of the conflict, the problem-solving focus is surface-level at best. (I’ve painted facilitative mediation and criticism with broad strokes, but you get the idea.)
Narrative mediation, according to Winslade and Monk, gets around many of these criticisms by focusing not merely on rationally solving a problem, but by focusing instead of the reality-making narratives into which the parties in conflict are living and continuously building. It’s a kind of postmodern mediation model, in which it’s acknowledged that what matters more than objective reality is how the parties experience what’s happening.
Cosmology, social expectations, and entitlements inform how parties in conflict view the situation, themselves, and others, and the narratives in which the build must be respectfully examined, deconstructed, and then the parties together can co-create a new narrative together which isn’t infected with the conflict. When the parties have built this new narrative together, this new reality, the idea is that many conflicts dissolve on their own. If they don’t, though, negotiations are much easier because the heart of the matter has been addressed already. The parties have a better narrative in which to operate and continuously build.
It’s a controversial approach, to be sure, because the idea of a neutral facilitator is either modified or discarded. That being said, the approach is more progressive and more directly addressed power imbalances. The book was written nearly 20 years ago, but it feels timely.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in helping ease conflict and bring peace, regardless of whether they’re mediators. Some of the technical stuff may fly over your head, though, since it’s “inside baseball”.