Success - After more than 30 years of conflict, in the courts, the legislature and newspapers on the management of a river designated as a wilderness waterway, the recently elected state governor requested that the stakeholders come together to create a plan for the river that they could all get behind.
A two day retreat was designed and facilitated to forge consensus between 23 disparate groups. They were able to craft an agreement by the end of the retreat that met both the need to preserve the wilderness character of the river as well as recreational access.

Stuck - The board of a non-profit that I sit on went through an unpleasant separation from two of their longstanding board members. Three strong voices on the board were in disagreement. One person felt it was essential that there be major changes in the operations of the organization. The other two wanted to do things like they'd always done them. The disagreement went on for months. They never changed what they were saying or how they were saying it and they wouldn't bring in assistance to deal with the problem. The running dispute had a high cost in the board's effectiveness and everyone felt drained and upset.
Eventually there were requests for and threats of resignation. Two excellent members were lost to an organization they cared about deeply, because they couldn't find a way to talk about an important issue.

Success - I can't describe the details because the setting was confidential and it's not unique to a single mediation. The experience of being in the same room with a conflict that shifts to resolution is what inspires me in my mediation work. You start out with tension, stony silence, or perhaps anger or even shouting. Gradually as each person has a chance to say what's going on for him or her the feeling in the room starts to change. It opens up, softens. I can feel my own body relax. There's noticable relief in the room when people start to let down their guard and say things you realize they've never been able to say before. When that happens, even when we don't reach a clear resolution on a specific issue, you can see that the channels of communication have opened.

Stuck - There is a member of our congregation who is always willing to help with different church activities and sits on the board. The problem is that he always has to have his way and ends up, quite often, alienating other members of the congregation. The voices and ideas of others are lost. No one knows what to say for fear of offending him. In the end this one person is shaping the tone of activities and quite often the direction of the church by default.

Success - I walked into the office one day to find two of the staff members in a conflict that seemed to be getting worse. I started asking them questions. Each one had an attitude. Each one had decided that what the other person was doing had some meaning other than the simple act that set them off. By listening carefully to them both and then asking each of them in turn whether such and such meaning was true, they discovered that the action was innocent of any underlying meaning. They also learned more about what was important to each of them.

Stuck - Gary objected to the way Brandy completed reports, and the way she socialized with co-workers and clients. Even though she had been doing things her way for years, and even though Gary was made aware of the power she had in the local community, he was insistent on her following standard policy. He would not back off and they ended up in a nasty confrontation. Gary's youth forced him to test his power as "the boss".
Two years later both Gary and Brandy are gone. Brandy quit and went to work for the competition. It now takes two people to do what Brandy accomplished, and they can't do it as well.

Success - I had been separated for 5 years. I was now about to enter into a court ordered mediation with my estranged husband. This was the last leg of a long journey to sever marriage vows. For many years "George" was very angry and would only address me with short, curt sentences or with aggression. I was grief stricken to have lost my friend. And, we have a beautiful daughter that has joined us forever; we needed to work things out.
During the first 45 minutes of the mediation session George spoke only to the mediator. He wouldn't even look at me, which was nothing unusual given the past 3 years. Then all of a sudden he turned to me and started to talk to me, really talk, in a nice voice, making sense. I could feel my entire body shift and I knew right then and there that we would be able to work through this. And we did. George and I talk regularly and consider ourselves family.

Stuck - Randy finally received the promotion he was longing for. That was the good news. The bad news was his inability to focus on his job. He was going through a messy child custody battle with his ex-wife. That stirred up all of the anger he was holding about their past relationship. She wanted to mediate the dispute, but randy was set on winning. Unfortunately he lost - he lost his job. It was a position that required all of his attention. He missed two important deadlines because his mind was focused on the past.

Success - For three years an environmental organization and a power conglomerate duked it out in PR campaigns over a power generating plant that didn't meet emissions standards. After three years they and the Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) were deadlocked. About 2 months after I learned of this I got a notice saying that they had come to an agreement...all parties cited it as win/win. I called to find out what had changed.
Two things. The environmental agency had done some footwork for the power station. And, they had an odd bit of serendipity work in their favor. Because the conflict had moved into the arena of the BEP, the DEP (The Department of Environmental Protection) had fallen into the position of being an informal "neutral". They were able to get the power company and the environmentalists to sit down in the same room for the first time in three years. They acted as the neutral and the win/win scenario emerged.

Stuck - A business came before the planning board to get a building permit for a dormitory for a program that involved at-risk-youth. As is standard, a public hearing was held. While the meeting proved more mild mannered than many such meetings there was still no opportunity for people to dialogue. A dialogue would have involved not just raising concerns, but working together to come up with a strategy to address those concerns.
After the meeting there were quite a few individuals who remained concerned about the project and started writing letters to the board. The pressure caused the business owners to scrap their plans and run their program out of an existing building that would not require a permit process. The discussion was over. Now they operate in the town with hard feelings on both sides that went completely unaddressed. These at-risk-kids now come into a community of generalized hard feelings with no forum for resolving them.

Success - A group member was struggling with a group that never seemed to move ahead. This was a group that never argued; they were always polite. They had points of disagreement, they just didn't verbalize them. Consequently they never worked through them to decide on a course of action.
This group member decided that she was going to be break the silence. She simply told them what she was noticing - that the group was always polite, and they were not moving forward. She asked them what they thought would happen if they agreed to be little more forthright? It was a simple gesture, but it took courage to break the cycle...and it worked. They were all relieved at the breath of fresh air. And they began to move forward.

Stuck - Two colleagues designed two innovative forms of management "technology." These processes were significant additions to the knowledge base about personal productivity and leadership. They battled for over a year about who owned the intellectual property they had developed. The productivity loss from their feud boggles the mind. Instead of many students and clients getting the value of what they discovered, their time was devoted to fighting. The direct loss was their loss in revenue. The opportunity lost was the value of any new innovations that might have been developed in the time they had been in conflict.

Success - A participant, at one of my workshops described an argument with her mother. I know these women to be thoughtful, articulate and caring people. And still their argument had escalated to shouting. They had used every strategy they had to convince the other of their views. Finally the daughter remembered the NonViolent Communication model. She had not yet given it a test drive under the heat of conflict and was not at all sure she could trust it. But she thought, "This is already a total loss, it can't make anything worse."
She filled in the blanks of the model: When you do ___, I feel ___, because I need ___ Would you be willing to ___? Her mother stopped, tears filled her eyes, and she reached for her daughter with an "Oh.....Yes, I can do that."

Stuck - This story shows up in a lot of mediations, even mediations that work out. People come to mediation, they say they want to work things out, and then they put most of their energy into attacking the other person instead of focusing on what they want to have happen. I recently watched this happen with a disputant who was on the verge of getting exactly what he wanted. This was not a relationship that needed to be restored, it was simply closure on a dispute and so we finished the mediation in caucuses to keep the person from undermining his own best interest.

Success - One of my favorite success stories has been described as "pizza diplomacy." It involved the two lead research projects for mapping the human genome. For years the project leaders had been involved in a vicious and fully publicized feud over data exchange, credit, accuracy and a variety of other issues around this major scientific accomplishment. They were working at cross purposes when they could have been moving the projects ahead for the common good through some means of collaboration.
A respected colleague offered to bring them together on neutral ground. They agreed and met in his home with pizza, beer and his ability as a neutral. They met several times over the course of a couple of months and were able to iron out enough of what stood between them to further this historic moment in science.

Stuck - A few years ago I was called into a situation of two brothers who were business partners in a third generation family business. They had reached impasse over the strategic direction their business would take. They believed they had to engage in a battle about placing a valuation on their business. Each hired a lawyer and each lawyer retained a forensic accountant to place a value on the business. By the time I was called they had stopped speaking to each other based on their respective lawyer's advice. In just the preliminary stages of the "battle" they had spent over $60,000 on professional fees and they were just at the beginning.

Success - Many years ago I acted as the default facilitator to a conflict involving students at a boarding school. They had drawn themselves into factions, with one side constantly picking at the other. Tension was high. The school promoted community building but didn't have any protocol or training in facing conflict. As a group we decided to have an air-clearing meeting, to get whatever was stewing, off the burner and on the table.
We set some groundrules and started talking. We held a discussion for a while, but gradually the primary players in the conflict took the floor. One was quiet, calm and accusing; the other was steamed and clearly hurt. Finally there was a brief whirlwind of insults and finger pointing. The rest of us sat, simply witnessing. And then it was over. The accuser could see the hurt her views were fueling. The angry one could see the accuser "get it" and that seemed to make it possible for him to hear her concerns. They were hugging by the time it was over. It taught me the value of simply creating a safe space and letting conflict emerge within the support of caring community.

Stuck - I was invited in to talk with a project director about doing a communication skills training for their staff. They said they had to do something because there was so much tension within the group that nobody enjoyed coming to work anymore. People constantly talked behind others backs and assumed the worst rather than talk about it. And - it had been like that for over a year! The director thought about quitting everyday. After careful consideration they determined they didn't have the time or budget for a training.

Success - A woman in a workshop was struggling to determine what needs her teenage son had that she was not recognizing. Life had become the typical parent/teen struggle and she was at a loss for what to do. A week later I asked her how things had gone. She said there had been a wonderful change. She and her son were communicating and enjoying their company again.
I asked if she had been able to come up with a good guess as to what her and her son's needs were. She said, "Oh, no, I gave up trying; I just spoke from my heart." She had learned the most important part of communicating well - it's not doing the model "just so"- it's opening your heart that opens doors with people.

Stuck - I had a staff member describe to me a conflict she had had with a co-worker. The conflict didn't seem to be particularly important and she staunchly refused to say anything because she didn't know what to say and didn't think this person would listen anyway. She was going to "drop it". But that wasn't what was happening - she said she hadn't slept for the previous 3 nights rehashing it in her mind. A lot of energy was being lost to what seemed a pretty small, resolvable matter.

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