Mediators

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

Mediators and related professions such as facilitators and conciliators are professional (and sometimes volunteer) intermediaries who help negotiators to work through disputes that they cannot solve on their own. They help the parties convene and facilitate meetings, communicate more effectively, earn mutual trust, work through emotional issues, identify mutually beneficial possibilities, conclude agreements, and then implement those agreements. Mediation can be informal, as when a parent helps her children resolve a dispute, but it can also be a very formal and structured process led by the kind of professionals affiliated with the Association for Conflict Resolution and Mediate.com. The focus can be on individual, small scale disputes, organizational and business disputes, or on helping whole communities improve their ability to handle the large stream of disputes that is an inevitable part of contemporary social life, as members of National Association for Community Mediation are doing. Organizations such as Mediators Beyond Borders take this one step further by helping bring these services to countries that may not yet have adequate internal capabilities and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution that has a team of mediators who do cross-border mediations.

Some mediators also work to resolve very large scale, complex, and intractable international conflicts such as Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. However, we are putting them below in the category of "Consensus Builders," as the distinction we make between mediators and consensus builders is that consensus builders work on larger scale, complex conflicts with more parties and more issues. Israel/Palestine would seem to qualify, so see below for a discussion of international mediators.

We also put mediation trainers in this Mediators category. These are the people and organizations who are trying to make sure that the coming generation of young people has access to these skills and that managers and other professionals are able to keep their skills sharp.