Interviewer: Tell me about your company.
It was started specifically to mediate conflict...
Susan: Yes, to mediate conflict and to
work with organizations to open up dialogue. Also, to bring
groups together to build stronger teams and find ways to do
group problem-solving. So if organizations, or if we take
it to the context of countries as well, have protracted problems,
there is a specific process that I use which involves a lot
of brainstorming. We establish ground rules which is how the
parties will interact with each other. And we try to come
up with certain criteria or standards by which the parties
themselves can determine what options they’ve proposed
would make sense. And when I say criteria, I mean things like
- is it fair?
- is it cost-effective?
- is it feasible?
- has it been practiced elsewhere?
- will it be acceptable?
And what happens in that process is that criteria becomes
more objective. And in fact, I do certain flipcharts and grids,
working with the parties to see visually what it is they are
coming up with and then they winnow it down to the various
options that they’ve suggested in terms of what they
think makes the most sense.
What I have found to be very effective is to co-mediate.
To work very closely with people in the country I’m
working in. For example, for the work I did in Russia, we
had counterparts there who were obviously much more knowledgeable
about the culture than I could be as an American. What is
very important to me, and others in the field, is that we
share our model of mediation, which is a specific process,
but then we make sure that it’s adaptable to the country
in which we’re working. The way I like to do it is to
enable the people I’m working with, as in Russia for
example, to decide what adaptation to take into account --
the cultural issues, the values, the approaches to interacting
with each other -- so it needs to be quite a collaborative
process between Americans - in this case, for example, myself
and my counterparts in the other countries where I work.
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