A terrific book about mediation and negotiation that is aimed at the general public is Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, by Robert Mnooken, Chair of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. The book explores disputes in a variety of contexts where the relationship between the parties in conflict has grown so hostile that at least one side views the other as immoral, even evil. Thus, the title, Bargaining with the Devil. I will say a word about Mnooken's advice in such situations at the end of this post, but my real interest in mentioning Bargaining with the Devil is that, at the end of this book's last case study, Mnooken offers an important gem of advice relative to proactive, preventative communication in the estate planning context.
The case at hand involved three siblings’ inheritance of a large and valuable vacation property. The conflict had escalated to the point that two of the siblings were no longer talking to each other. If nothing was done to change the situation, the parents' gift to them threatened to permanently injure all the siblings’ relationships with each other, which certainly was not their parents' intention in making the gift.
Read more: The Value of Proactive Mediated Dialogue Around Estate Planning
Perhaps one of the aspects of mediation that makes it so effective is its diversity of forms. Mediation is not pursued just by lawyers or just by therapists, for example, but by both, and also by a wide variety of others with different professional backgrounds. The mediation field is fertile with experimentation and new sources of inspiration. Over the past four decades, there has been a tremendous amount of energy devoted to advancing new mediation techniques. As a result of all this energy, a growing number of people have found more empowering, more economical, and more durable resolutions to their disputes than they would have otherwise found in an adversarial process such as litigation.
However, the diversity in the mediation field is also cause for caution and an indication that there may be significant disagreements about what mediation should and should not be. These disagreements can lead to confusion by people wondering whether mediation is right for them. For people in such circumstances, it is useful to take time to consider a number of people’s perspectives on mediation in order to gain awareness of the variety of opinions about mediation and the various experiences informing those opinions.