‘Its hard to survive in the jungle when you’ve been trained in the zoo’. This great quote from Sonja Blignaut is a good way to distinguish between professional mediators and people who prefer to be known as dispute resolvers. Mediators being ‘the jungle’ of human interaction and dispute resolution the more structured solution focused, ‘zoo’, where the humans are caged in a back room. Keep the process structured with everyone staying in their silos. Just cut a deal. The words mediation and mediator are powerful universally recognised terms. They have always sat uncomfortably with the dehumanised legal professions litigious dispute resolution model. For example, there was an attempt in 2016 to change the name of the Australian National Mediation Conference to the National Dispute Resolution Conference, which fortunately was defeated. We now see them creeping into the Australian Mediator Standards. AMDRAS allows the dispute resolvers to continue to distinguish themselves from mediators within the accreditation scheme. This division can be traced back to the legal professions existential crisis resulting from the failure of litigation as a viable business model in our post-industrial, fluid complex adaptive world. The profession can’t quite let go of the concept of the expert dispute resolver to whom you hand all your problems to and, for a modest fee, will sort it out, no problem. They claim to possess more expertise than the people who created the problem. They are the heroic ‘Dispute Resolver’! The bottom line here: People who create the problem need to be given an opportunity to find their own way out. What the fluid, jungle like, term mediation offers the legal profession is a pathway to find a place for humanity in the law and its processes. A chance to intergrate with the humanised interconnected social and commercial world we now inhabit. A post industrial world. One of the great things that has come out of the recent review of the mediator standards of the MSB is that it has brought this distinction to the surface which can be named and dealt with. The jungle is a place of adventure an opportunity and is the world we actually live in. Embrace it.
Dispute Resolution Practitioner, AMDRAS and FDRP. Industry Leader working to educate and support dispute resolution professionals in Australia and beyond. Director and Board Member level professional.
I've been a member of the MSB Board since 2022 but no more. Now I'm a member of the AMDRAS Board. A vote to change the board's name from the Mediator Standards Board (MSB) to the AMDRAS Board was passed at the recent special general meeting. There was always some confusion between the MSB administering the National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS) in the future it will be the AMDRAS Board administering the AMDRAS (Australian Mediator and Dispute Resolution Accreditation Standards) Mediator Standards Board
Well said!
Founding Director at Shifting Sands
5moAs our industry has evolved, the name ‘Dispute resolution practitioners’ embrace a wider range of practice beyond the facilitated Mediation model. However this model continues to sit at the core of my dispute resolution/mediation practice. Also it seems that the name change was not necessarily chosen but legislated given the name change in 2008 from Family Mediators to Family Dispute Resolution practitioners.