legal sanity

As a professional mediator, I regularly visit mediate.com to catch up on dispute resolution reading. On my most recent visit, I came across this great article about the “close parallels between approaching and training a horse and mediating with people embroiled in a dispute.” According to the author, lawyers and other conflict management professionals can learn a lot from horse trainers because the animal training “is little more than a form of negotiation.” Just as savvy legal consumers are demanding that lawyers shed the mantle of authoritarian gospel dispensers (“we’ll do this thing my way or the highway”), more sophisticated horse people and trainers are shifting away from spirit-breaking to a more gentle way of taming horses. Trainers using this approach – which is sometimes called gentling or horse whispering – carefully observe the “natural fears, rhythms and behaviors of an animal who is typically frightened and on unfamiliar ground, and [use their observations] to develop a rapport and trust.” The author asserts that conflict managers dealing with anxious clients or their representatives can learn a lot from this approach since “managing conflict may be less about words, rational analysis and the use of logical argument, than it is about sensing and using the natural instincts and responses of the parties’ constructively.” In the author’s opinion, conflict resolution is essentially all “about human ‘whispering’.” I couldn’t agree more.