Question:
Do you set the ground rules before you get to the table, or is that something that you do once you get to the table?

Answer:
I do a little bit of both. Some I will set rules beforehand, but then I will ask at the table if they have any more that they'd like to add. But the parties are relying on me to control the process. They really want that. Usually, these groups have encountered each other before and gotten absolutely nowhere, and both think it's because the other side was out of control. So an important piece of what I'm providing here, aside from any mediation skills, and my help identifying interests and the kind of things that you and I might talk about, is that I make sure that the process is not going to get out of control. "Trust me. They're not going to be able to roll you over. I'm in control." And I try to demonstrate that from very early on. That's probably just my style. I know there are other mediators who are much more easy-going, kind of laissez-fare from the beginning. I start fairly controlling; I hold the reins fairly tightly. As I see that progress is being made, I loosen up. It can get to the point where they almost don't need me anymore, and that's fine. It's almost like being a classroom teacher which I've never been, by the way but if you don't take control at the beginning, then it's going to be very difficult to get it later. So I start off controlling.

Question:
How do you do that?

Answer:
Oh, just things like not letting somebody interrupt, making sure that if one side has spent some time speaking, then the other side has a chance to respond to that, designating where people are going to sit, and then enforcing the ground rules.

Question:
And what are the basic ground rules?

Answer:
No. I would set the agenda for the negotiations themselves. That's not the first meeting though. The first meeting in the sheriff's office conference room was where they would meet each other face to face for the first time. There was about a dozen people there. The CRS guidelines for mediation would've been explained in detail when I made the recommendation for mediation. I urged them to discuss things, and I gave them a list of about a dozen to fifteen points. These were really my version of CRS mediation guidelines or conditions. I would answer any questions they might have on that. It would've been the time prior to that first meeting when I would've pointed out to the home owners, "There needs to be some kind of entity that the tribe can deal with, who do you want to be? Can we identify you as a particular group?" As I recall, the minister was chosen. They chose their own people, although I had probably been responsible for identifying those who were interested and urging. I frankly do not recall offhand if I met with them separately, prior to the first meeting. I would have met with two or three of them to explain the guidelines. But at any rate, by the time they got to the sheriff's office, they would've known what the guidelines were, and then in that first session, I would've explained what can be expected. One, we'd go over the procedures and the guidelines. I would repeat what I had said before, and hopefully I'm still consistent. I would answer questions they have. Now they know that the others know that they don't talk to the press. I ask them "Do you agree to these terms?" The others hear them say "yes" and vice versa. That's sort of the basic, the bedrock for the mediation has been laid at that point. No discussion of issues, background, or anything like that.

Question:
Are the parties able to give input as to how you're going to run the mediation session, or are you telling them?

Answer:
Perhaps in setting an agenda for the sessions as an area that's my responsibility. I might manipulate the agenda by putting say a particular issue last, on the assumption that, we wouldn't get to it, or if we got to it we'd be so tired we couldn't deal with it. That's agenda manipulation which is a prerogative of every mediator.

Question:
What if it was a key item?

Answer:
I don't know. This may not be a direct answer to your question, but I think I had mentioned sometimes I can anticipate pretty well how a session is going to go. How many meetings we are going to have and that sort of thing. And there are others like the one I was telling you about earlier, about the school district. I could not see how under the sun we could come to any agreement here, but in that case the parties themselves ultimately used the process that we were going through to create an answer that I simply had not seen. They came up with the idea bouncing off of each other which was the breakthrough. So, I can't claim any credit for it. I just managed the process and they came up with the breakthrough and what sure looked to me like an intractable issue that I couldn't see how to get around it. That's about as much as I can say on that. But I don't think we ought to sell the parties short. The mediator isn't the all knowing person. The parties themselves can discover and create things that we can't see.

Question:
So you never go into caucus and say, "You better drop that one because it's never going to be solved?"

Answer:
Oh, well I might go into caucus and give some advice. Or say, this particular issue that you've raised is going to be pretty difficult to get an agreement on and I would make some recommendation.

Question:
I'm wondering if you would advise parties saying, "I just don't think the other side would accept that?"

Answer:
Oh, well I might say that. Meeting with parties in private caucus can be risky because presumably, they need to be consulting among themselves and really digging down and exposing their best thinking to each other. And for the mediator to be there and then leave and go over to the other caucus, at least the thought passes through the minds of most people, "What's he going to tell them that he's just heard? To what extent? How's he going to help them? Or maybe he won't?" That is I think a fairly risky area.

Question:
So I gather you don't caucus much?

Answer:
Oh yeah. Like the fishing rights issues I would share with them how another community in a conflict situation resolved it. That in effect is suggesting something along this line or asking the question, "Can you adapt some of this to your benefit?"

Question:
Do you do this early on or do you let them grapple with it themselves for awhile and then present it if they run into trouble?

Question:
How much do you read when you're trying to delve into this with these groups? Do you let them explore on their own, or do you ask them leading questions? How directive are you?

Answer:
I'm really not directive in the content. I'm directive in how they interact, as far as not letting them take each other on. I try to get to talk about their own issues without talking about the other groups. I don't try to lead them into discovering their issues. Before I got into this, I was finishing up a PhD in Adult and Continuing Education. The philosophies of adult and continuing education are very compatible with peace making. The core value there is the adult knows what the answer is, and it's the teachers responsibility to help them discover it. And I had students in class with me say, "We really are the experts, right?" The teacher will correct them and say, "No." You're an expert helping them discover. And I believe that, I believe whole-heartedly in education. I think my role is to help them discover, and I'm good at that. Part of that is because as strong as I feel about my own answers for my own questions, they will not be helpful to them. It may be a great answer, but it's not their answer. And whatever answer they come up with is going to be better then mine. I believe that. So I think those two disciplines really have cemented my commitment to the fact that my job is to help you discover and to create a safe environment. That is a critical element, I think. You can't discover and you can't explore if there's not safety. We shut people down real quickly when there's not a safe environment. So I try to honor that. I will give guidance and ideas when people are having trouble formalizing.

Answer:
People realize that everybody in this situation can be empowered and nobody is going to be diminished by it. They realize that by involving the minority community in decision making, it's not going to diminish the power of the establishment, it's going to enhance that environment. To me there is nothing more exciting than to see people actually start to believe it, because that's what keeps them from cooperating, everybody believes they're going to lose control. You have to create an environment where they can see that cooperative efforts enhance everybody. They want that. It just takes such a burden off everybody.

Question:
So what do you do if the person says, "We want to fire the superintendent?"

Answer:
That's not our role. We'll look at that the problems your having with the school district, why you think the superintendent needs to be fired, but the decision about whether of not the superintendent keeps his job is the board’s decision.

Question:
So do you try to get them to define more exactly what the problems are and then try to propose some other solutions?

Answer:
Yes, to some extent. Certainly, I did, during those first meetings and I brought them together in the first place.

Question:
Did you help to set their agendas?

Answer:
No. There's just almost no way of doing that.

Question:
If you say to them, "I'm going to go to the superintendent, what should I tell them?" and then they continue to vent, do you try to correct them? Do you tell them, "Well, we need to specify some particular issues." Do you try to get some organized thoughts?

Answer:
It all depends on how prepared they are and what type of history is behind it. For example, with a school issue, we may find that they've already written letters and outlined those issues. Maybe the letter hasn't been responded to, so they had to force the issue onto the superintendent, and that in itself hurt. The fact that the superintendent wasn't meeting with them did a lot of harm. That's when we put in the idea that we could talk to the superintendent. We put it as an "if" question. "If we're able to talk to the superintendent, how much do you want me to tell him?" That sort of thing.

Question:
Do you try to help them frame their issues at all?

Question:
How do you decide when to stop dealing with them separately and bring them both to the table?

Question:
So I gather that if one side, like the Native Americans, accuses the other side of doing something, you hold off before the landowner makes a rebuttal statement.

Answer:
The other party is not expected to give any answer to what's being said by the other party.

Question:
Did you ever have a problem where people wanted to rebut? Did you have to control that?

Answer:
I'm sure I did. I can't remember specifically.

Question:
How would you handle that?

Answer:
Essentially, after making some kind of a statement, saying, "Okay, you will have an opportunity to answer this a little bit later. Just hold off. The important thing is to get this out, and then we want you to give your side of this."

Question:
Did you ever find yourself assisting one party to try to understand the other party's position?

Answer:
I think it's the role of the mediator to restate for purposes of clarification. Sometimes, it's needed to clarify, and even, "Is this what you're saying?"

Question:
Did that seem to help, or were there times when the party who was speaking said, "No, that's not what we mean?"

Question:
What were some of those issues, just generally?

Answer:
I'll just take it from the beginning, the recruitment process, which people are recruited. The allegation was that there was no way to attract minorities, or recruit minorities. Assignments, the argument was that assignments were made based on who you knew, as opposed to your skill level, and whites had almost all the good positions even though blacks needed these positions. Promotions, there were no blacks above the rank of sergeant. blacks were not given the opportunity to go to outside training. So we got with all the parties, they agreed to it, I then drafted out the ground rules that were going to guide the mediation and gave those to everybody. I got a tentative agreement from all of the parties, and then we set the date for the first get together. It was that first meeting that would be introductory, everybody was going to introduce themselves to everybody else, go over your ground rules, and get everybody to sign them, as well as make any changes that are necessary, present the issues and put them on the table. What we ended up doing was putting them up on paper on the wall. We met at the city hall and everybody said that was fine. One of the things that was interesting was that all these people had been together on another occasion in the past, because these were the same groups of people who negotiated. You could leave the contract in the department, and everybody knew everybody else. They knew each other real well. Actually Fred and I were the outcasts. The first meeting when everybody was together, we went over the ground rules, everybody signed off on them, we went over the issues, and then we decided that we needed to set up a schedule. When we were going to meet and what the process was going to be like. I explained what the process should look like. They said fine, we'll go with that. So we instituted a process about how the whole thing is going to flow and we set up a schedule. Basically the schedule was that we would begin meeting the following week, we'd start meeting in the afternoon, or late afternoon. We would go until 9 o'clock or 8 o'clock, something like that. But we could go longer, if there was a consensus, or if we were on a roll and the mediators said we need to keep going. I'm consistent about this. The mediator is the final word, on the logistics, on the ground rules-- you know anything that has to do with the process.

Question:
So, they don't have any input into the process?

Answer:
That's through the assessment phase, because I have to learn who I need to be talking to, and learn who and what we need to deal with.

Question:
Okay. Once you do the assessment then you decide who gets to be the representatives?

Answer:
No, the parties decide who their representatives and leaders are. I ask them who are the players, and they'll tell me we need to have this person, we need to have that person.

Question:
But you need to have one person out of all the key players who's convening the meeting, or do you convene the meeting?

Question:
Would you talk about how you designed a plan to handle this case? What did you do at what point? Did it work as you had planned?

Question:
If they nominate somebody to be at the table who you already know is probably not going to be good -- they're too hostile, they're too outspoken, they're likely to cause more problems than benefit -- will you make a general suggestion that maybe that person wouldn't be so good?

Answer:
Most of the time, I'm going to let it all hang out. Because you want people ventilating as well as anything else at this table. I become the problem when I start structuring who should be at this table. Most of the time, you're going to find that the people sitting at this table don't want those individuals there anyway. You know, they need somebody loud, but sometimes they don't want them there. A lot of times they don't want them there. On the other hand, there are times when one side or the other side wants that person there because they perceive, in minority communities, for the most part, that the loudest and most robust will be listened to. So they want that person at the table. It's called "shaking the bastards up." And they want the bastards to be shaken up. So a lot of times, the loud mouth serves a real purpose. And that purpose, a lot of times, is to throw you off. It's to shake you up.

Question:
Would you try to push them in a direction that looks to you like it would be profitable to move?

Answer:
I think you don’t worry about that, because you don’t know what’s profitable for them, always. You may have some ideas about that, but the most that I’m comfortable doing, usually, is to say, "Have you thought about these issues?” I’m strongly tempted sometimes to say, "Hey, I live on this planet too. I’ve been around for a whole lot of years, and I think I know.” But you never really know, and you take a risk when you tell someone with some degree of evaluative certitude, "You need to be doing this.” That’s not a good idea. So, if I can simply say, "Gee, have you thought about this? What would this look like? If you do this, what are the consequences of this?”

Question:
Would you say, "I think I heard some consensus around x”?

Answer:
You’re talking about formal mediation now when you talk about ground rules. Yes, there would be, but they didn’t come into play very much because, in all of these cases that we are talking about, a lot of them were not formal mediation so you wouldn’t have ground rules. Sure, ground rules are when we talk to each other with respect and try to do this or that, but we didn’t make a big point of it. There weren’t that many formal mediation. Some of them might have lasted a long time. I can think of strategies, but I can’t really think of too many instances where this occurred. M1030>

Question:
Do you teach people how to listen?

Answer:
Well you model behavior. I have counseled people to "try to listen and let them know you care,” but I don’t lecture them. I think if people aren’t listening, they pay the price and they learn that way.

Question:
So when one side says, "No I won’t sit down with them, they won’t listen,” you don’t go to the other side and say, you need to listen?

Answer:
No, no, that’s not my role. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do that, but I didn’t experience that.

Question:
If one side said that they wouldn’t meet with the other side, did you let it lie?

Question:
You mentioned coaching. Did you coach everybody together, or did you coach some groups individually?

Answer:
In the initial contacts, part of that would occur with the individual groups, talking to them about what's going to happen. Certainly you have some rage, certainly you have some interest in sharing that feeling that you have. But what is it going to get you? You need to be very clear about what your concerns are and they need to be definable. They need to be stated in a way that they can be resolved. Saying you're angry at the administration because they're not responding to you, doesn't tell the administration anything and there's nothing they can do to respond to that. So coaching them to really clarify what their concern is. That's definable, something you can respond to. Not being treated fairly in student government is a valid concern, but what does that mean? You can't be elected because it's always at large, so you can't have representation at student government, that's specific. So I coached them in being prepared to sit at the table. I think that's always a big part of it. Not diminishing someone, is making sure they are prepared for what's going to happen. If you put somebody there and they're not ready, then they feel like they've been put down by the other parties that can talk more easily. The other party is more prepared with the response, then you haven't done them any favors. My coaching there would be getting them ready to come to the table and feel confident. The student had as much power at that table as the vice president of student affairs. There was no power and no rank. And that was part of my process, my responsibility. And everybody had to agree to that, the tenured faculty included. They had no more influence on the group than a student did.

Question:
Did you do any coaching of the faculty or the administration?

Question:
Are these ideas things that the community people developed?

Answer:
Well, on one side (this was again surprising to me), recognition of the fact that I brought some expertise to the table, that I had immediately before been a manager, and managed an operation within the media. I was able to speak their business language.

Question:
Did you do any arm-twisting, by saying, "Look, it'll be better for you to do this because you will get these benefits down the road"?

Question:
You mentioned early on that when the community got together they really didn't know what their issues were. Did you help them in any way formulate those issues, or did they just muddle through on their own and come with these?

Question:
How far did you have to lean?

Question:
Do you ever give people ideas of things that maybe they haven't identified? Do you ask leading questions?

Answer:
Well, I have on occasion. For example I might ask, "what do you mean by harassment, what did he do?" Then they'll tell me so that's an example. "Well what is it that they did, was it within the law or not?" They may be thinking that something is harassment, and it really isn't. Therefore at the same time you're educating them, that that really isn't harassment. This is what he had to do. But maybe the other point they brought up, perhaps that is harassment. You're trying to distinguish what is harassment and what isn't, so they lessen their hostility. They can be pretty hostile to something the police have no control over. But maybe something else is harassment.

Question:
What about even going further, if they really focused in as harassment being the problem, and they haven't said anything about the problem of not having Hispanics on the police force would you say, "Well, how many Hispanics are on the police force?" To start them thinking about that as another issue?

Answer:
I think I have expressed that on occasion, in some of the meetings we had. We did that with the media. The question was brought up, "How many people do you see on the tube?" We'd tell them how often the license must be renewed, which they had not been aware of, and I was aware of that, so then I asked the question. I have done that, yes.

Question:
Was that procedure was typical of all of the cases that you dealt with? Getting on the telephone, making those initial contacts, knowing someone in the city. Did you use that technique often or did it just happen to be helpful in that particular case?