Question:
What do you do when you get the parties to the table and they reach an impasse, and just
can't go forward?
Answer:
I can think of only one case where we actually got to mediation and that happened. It was a
court-requested or court-ordered mediation. And it was after days of work. I did what I usually
do: I usually start with what I would call shuttle diplomacy I hedge my bets. I like to know
what the parties are going to say when they come to the table before they come to the table. So I
do a lot of work with the parties individually before I actually bring them to the table. In this
case, they were in the same building, but in separate rooms. It became very, very clear that we
were not going to get anywhere.
So I ended up just telling the court, "Your honor, I'm sorry, I tried, but it's not going to happen
here," without saying whose fault it was. You know, I had my own perception, and I thought,
quite frankly, that one of the parties was probably foolish, because they could have gotten some
gains and they ultimately lost. I think they could have negotiated some gains out of this. So in
that case, I didn't have a clue of how to get past the impasse. But that's the only one I can think
of where parties agreed to mediate, but where they didn't reach at least some agreement.
There was another one that wasn't court-ordered, but which had been in court, and it included
some hiring and affirmative action-type provisions. The parties reached agreement on most of the
pieces, but not all of them. In this case, I think that part of the reason they couldn't agree on all of
it was that one of the parties was given false expectations by their attorney. The way we left it in
the agreement was that we stated the areas in which they agreed, and the rest went back to the
court and the judge would issue a ruling. In each case, what the judge ruled was what the other
party had offered in the first place. So, unfortunately for the other party the minority party in
this case they really didn't get anything more than they might have gotten if they had continued
to mediate and reach a settlement that way.
One of the things that I always do at the beginning of a mediation session, is get the parties to
agree on what to do if there is partial but not full agreement. If there are ten issues, for
example, and they can only reach agreement on seven, does that mean they go ahead and sign an
agreement on those seven, and leave the other three hanging? Or, if we don't reach agreement on
everything, then do we throw it all out and say that there's no agreement, period? I think you
want to get that understanding before they start. It's much better than getting half-way through the
mediation, only to have one party suddenly say, "I'm sorry, if we don't get such-and-such, then
all bets are off." So getting an assurance from both parties that partial agreements are acceptable
is one of the ways of avoiding a major disaster. Sometimes, just pointing out how much
agreement they've already reached then becomes an incentive for continuing the discussions.
I can think of another case in which there was huge mistrust and even hostility between the
parties. Some of the issues were complicated enough that it would require, or certainly benefit
from, some outside expertise. So in that case, what we did was have each of the parties
recommend a consultant who could provide expertise, and then we picked a third person within
that field of expertise. So we had those three consultants or experts meet, and come up with some
proposed approaches to dealing with the issues in contention. They did that successfully, and
then they were able to sell those ideas to the parties, because they had credibility. So that enabled
us to get them to agree to some approaches, and that would have been very difficult had we
brought in only one consultant. If we'd had only one "expert," both parties would have said, "Is
that consultant on their side, or is she on our side?" So having a panel of three worked very well
in that particular instance. It was expensive for CRS, because CRS doesn't have those kinds of
resources. But we did it in that particular case, and they did ultimately reach an agreement. So
that's another approach to get past an impasse.
