Mediation: Bringing Design Thinking to Legal Disputes and Conflict Resolution

 

 

Traditionally, when two parties have a dispute that involves the law, they resolve it as follows: pay a lot of money for a lawyer or legal team and engage in a time and resource intensive process through either an administrative or court proceeding, or both.  Then, after years spent entrenched in this dispute, a fact finder, usually a judge or jury, decides that one side is entirely right and the other entirely wrong.  It is a strict process with well-defined channels.  The legal process for dispute resolution can be a rigid, calcified behemoth, requiring a huge outlay of time and money without allowing responsiveness to specific problems.  In this way, it is a one-size-fits-all model that often leaves parties in dispute unsatisfied.  Fortunately, alternative dispute resolution offers a better way.

Recently, the term “design thinking” has been making its way through the business zeitgeist.  Born and raised in the innovative worlds of Silicon Valley and the IDEO lab at Stanford, design thinking refers to a new way to engage in problem solving. Tim Brown defined design thinking in the Harvard Business Review in the following way:

 

Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

By engaging in design thinking, we can look at new ways to resolve disputes by designing a process specifically to address what the parties need.  This is exactly what mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution allow: by working with a conflict resolution professional, you have the opportunity to develop a unique method of dispute resolution designed to address the specific elements of your dispute.

Alternative dispute resolution allows the parties to identify what is most important and design the conflict resolution process accordingly.  For example, when I work with companies to help improve communication between their employees, I can utilize a more facilitative model to figure out what the problems are and help coach parties to communicate more effectively.  When I am mediating a dispute regarding a complaint of discrimination, I can tailor the procedure to allow the parties to work towards repairing their relationship for better workplace functionality, or to resolve the dispute by reaching a monetary settlement that allows all parties to move on from the issue without court intervention.  I have also worked with parties using a med-arb model to present certain pieces of evidence in order to make an informed decision regarding how best to resolve a dispute.  

Whatever the conflict, by working with the parties to understand the nature of their dispute and their goals, we all benefit from the flexibility of alternative dispute resolution to design a conflict resolution process that is tailored to the particular dispute at hand.  As a result, the parties are able to resolve their disputes in a much more cost-effective, time saving, and energy saving manner than resorting to a court or administrative proceeding.

I always remind parties in mediation that this has the potential to be an empowering process.  For parties facing a drawn out legal dispute, mediation is the last chance they have to control what the process looks like and what the solution could be.  Once they are in the judicial system, they are relying on a finder of fact to tell them what to do and what the solution is.  But mediation, because of its flexibility, can be designed to more directly address their issues and lead to better solutions to their problems.  In that way, mediation is truly and innovative and useful process.