Reseña
| Autor | James A. Graham |
| Páginas | 89-90 |
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MADONIK (Barbara), I hear what you say, but what are you telling me?, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco, 2001 (287 p.). Some months ago, I was invited by a large Mexican firm to talk about
ADRs. They already had some experience with judicial mediation in Texas. At one moment, I
pointed out that a mediator should not necessary be a lawyer, but could also be someone trained
in communications like a psychologist for instance. Somehow, the Senior Legal Advisor was
amazed about such a statement, as in Texas mediators do much more early trial evaluations than
real mediations. To him it was clear, that a mediator should always be, at least in commercial
matters, a trained lawyer familiar to the object of the controversy. He heard what I said, but what
was I telling him?
Mediation is not a legal art; it is a human art. It is the art of making people talk – talk that leads to
understanding – understanding that leads to a solution. And if a lawyer has got for tools his codes
and statutes, the mediator also has got his own ones. The most generic one is surely Bandler and
Grinder’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming that focuses on communication structures1. People like
Dobson and its other-than-conscious communication later completed this primary work. Barbara
Madonik’s book joins the list, dealing with nonverbal communication, an essential part of our
interaction with other individuals, as less than 20 percent of all communication is related to
words.
More precisely, her I hear what you say, but what are you telling me? intents to describe the
strategic use of nonverbal communication in mediation. Her starting point is that most people can
be roughly divided in three categories: Auditory, Visual and Kinesthetic. If someone is visual, the
mediator should adapt his language using expressions like “I see what you mean”; if he is more
auditory, the same phrase should be worded in another way like “ I hear you”; expression that
changes into “We are on the same page” for someone who is kinesthetic (p.88-89). And how do
we know which kind of person we face? Well, looking, among others, into their face and more
precisely observe their eyes cues. People making mental pictures have their eyes moving upward
or stare in a focused manner; those who are hearing internal sounds move their eyes to one side or
the other or move them downward and to the person’s left. The eyes of people who are
experiencing the sensation of touch, taste, smell, or emotion move downward and to the person’s
right side (p. 24). A typical Mexican litigation lawyer will probably laugh; its job is to focus on
the legal rules, not to play “shrink”. What a mistake. And the author to give us one single
example that says more than a hundred pages of discourse. Once, Barbara was called “to read”, as
she says, a judge in court; to profile him. Prior to attending the trial, she obtained a copy of a
previous decision handed down by the judge. By the time she had read the second page she could
advise her lawyer client that the judge’s language showed a 95 percent visual predisposition. That
meant that the lawyer went into court equipped with pictures, colored charts, and a strong
vocabulary of visual predicates (p.80). Nothing to add…
Once the language is matched, other techniques ought to be used to make the mediation
successful. The author dresses a very large, complete list. One of the most important, at least in
our opinion, is profiling the attendees to the mediation session (p. 49 sq). but sophisticated
techniques do not replace some common sense. Indeed, it is amazing to see ( I guess the
expression reflects my visual predilection) how we may sometimes forget about those little things
that nonetheless could have some important impact on others. For example, we are all used to ask
1 See e.g. Bandler & Grindler, Frogs into Princes, Real People Press, Utah, 1979. For an introduction into
NLP in Spanish, see: Harris, Los elementos de PNL, Improve, Madrid, 2002.
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