It's always difficult to resolve a conflict between historically adverse parties. In a recent post at "In Forum News", Helmut Schmidt reported that the Fargo school board and its teachers union reached a compromise on a teaching contract. The article gives a lot of praise to the mediation process for helping the parties reach an agreement. It also illustrates two important aspects in having a successful mediation.

The first is that the parties came to the table with conciliation on their mind. While the article doesn't describe why the school board and the teachers came to the table with this attitude (perhaps because both did not want a third party to make decisions for them), the article does make clear that a "sense of collaboration" made the mediation successful.

The second point is that the mediation panel was, apparently, able to break down smaller issues from the larger ones, so that the overall structure of the teachers' contract would not be destroyed. By reducing the issues, the parties were able to tackle those issues without opening the door to other issues that had already been decided. The mediators were able to allow the parties to continue their momentum toward resolution.

These are two very important lessons to be learned. Unfortunately, we can't always have both sides come to the table with a conciliatory attitude, but a good mediator can work hard to promote that philosophy. A good mediator can also analyze the issues so that the parties can continue to work towards a result that satisfies all of them.