My key message is that those engaged in the practice of alternative dispute resolution can benefit from learning the art of lateral thinking.
Edward de Bono is one of the world’s most celebrated exponents and teachers of lateral thinking. So, to get my point across here, I am going to draw on his writings to help me expound some key principles.
Here they are:
– Usual Thinking is based on analysis and judgment. However, when trying to resolve conflicts we often need to design a way forward rather than judge a way forward influenced by our personal beliefs and conditioning.
– Conflicts are often best resolved using creative thinking strategies and techniques. This means shedding our perceptions and conceptions and cultivating an open mind to seek fresh possibilities.
– Potential barriers to this will usually come from egos, emotions and adversarial and competitive behaviour.
– A skilled dispute resolver will try to find ways to get the players to contribute to an idea or proposal on the table using collaborative and parallel thinking.
– Complexity needs to be replaced by simplicity and effectiveness in the thinking processes applied.
– Seeking solutions is a collective exercise, and strategies like de Bono’s 6 Hats provides a structure for arriving at decisions by harnessing the focused thinking of the participants.
– The skill of the dispute resolver is to get people working co-operatively, thinking in parallel on an idea or proposal not in opposition or in a confrontational way.
– Lateral Thinking tools and techniques are designed to find alternative solutions and options for settlement that bypasses the more obvious choices and approaches to the presenting problems and issues.
– New angles will start to emerge that may at first seem illogical, but if the participants follow through with their thinking process, an aha moment may be just around the corner.
– Lateral thinking strategies are used to help break people out of their heavily conditioned responses that limit the options and possibilities for settlement.
– The dispute resolver needs to create an environment that will foster better ways for the participants to interact, in order to encourage their interaction.
– They move the players away from being polarized and stuck in their positions to being willing and eager to share knowledge and ideas with a common goal to find solutions that will work for both of them.
– The dispute resolver needs to be astute and alert to the need to redress gaps in the participants own knowledge and expertise by making use of neutral experts to fill those gaps.
– There is a need to unfreeze the brain from being too logical and stuck in linear conditioned and conventional ways of thinking. This is done by using techniques that will allow the participants to view the issue from new angles and perspectives.
Regrettably for those in dispute who trot off to their nearest lawyer, most lawyers are not skilled in creative and lateral thinking. They are examples of linear thinking.
Taking the time to find an expert in alternative dispute resolution who is skilled in the art of creative and lateral thinking, at the inception of the dispute, could well save the disputants much valuable time, stress, and heaps of money.
Lawyers have a useful role to play, but quite often their early involvement in the life of a dispute does more to exacerbate it and ripen it for litigation than to foster its quick, just and relatively inexpensive resolution.
Until my next post,
Christopher Whitelaw
Barrister and Mediator
Commercial Disputes Management Centre
www.chriswhitelaw.com.au
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