The Mediator’s Institute of Ireland, Annual Conference 2015: The Future of Mediation – Global Trends and Challenges
Three members of our group – Deirdre Curran, Treasa Kenny and Mags Bouchier – presented an interactive workshop at the MII 2015 Annual Conference.
The workshop - ‘Using Cooperative Enquiry to Bridge the Gap between Mediation Research and Practice’ – focussed on the importance of research in the development of workplace mediation and specifically the co-operative enquiry approach as adopted by our group in an effort to inform the development of workplace mediation training, practice and standards in Ireland.
Close to 30 delegates participated in the workshop including mediation practitioners, HR managers, researchers and public and private sector stakeholders. The workshop included an interactive piece of work which drew on the outcomes from the Workplace Mediation Seminar of January 2015 and resulted in the delegates identifying priority mediation issues for research.
There was a striking level of agreement between the break-out groups which prioritised issues for research focus and identified ‘engaging participation in mediation’ as the top priority research item.
The identified issues included:
- Engaging participation in mediation (Identified by three of the five groups as their top priority item and by a fourth group as their 2nd priority item)
- Experience of mediation
- Mediation outcomes
- Cost-benefit analysis of mediation
- Conflict competence
- Mediation practice
- Barriers to mediation
Additional items of note included:
- How organizations deal with conflict?
- The decline of ethics in business – how can mediators maintain ethical standards in such circumstances?
- Investigation/fact-finding [versus] mediation.