Mediation pioneer and master storyteller Eric Galton returns to tell two extraordinary stories about creativity, connection, and risk-taking. In one, a university president learns about accessibility by navigating a campus bathroom in a wheelchair. In the other, two feuding law partners who refuse to sit in the same room find themselves meditating together at a Buddhist temple. Eric’s stories explore the “magic” that can happen when mediators move beyond traditional processes and create opportunities for people to experience, rather than simply discuss, the conflict.
In this episode of Stories Mediators Tell, mediator and author Eric Galton shares two unconventional approaches to resolving conflict. In the first, he helps a university president experience firsthand the accessibility barriers facing students with disabilities, transforming a contentious legal dispute into a collaborative effort to identify solutions. In the second, he recounts taking two estranged law partners to a Buddhist temple to meditate, an unexpected turn that helped them reach an agreement after hours of stalled negotiations. Galton reflects on the flexibility and creativity required in mediation and the importance of fostering mutual understanding.
Lela Love
Welcome to season two of Stories Mediators Tell. This is Lela Love, and I am here with Robyn Weinstein. Robyn and I are mediators and professors, and we train people to be mediators.
Robyn Weinstein
At this point, most people know about mediation in the context of divorce, but mediation is happening in many contexts. It's happening between nation states, with countries like Qatar and Pakistan, mediating conflict between Israel and Iran or the U.S. It's happening in international businesses or inside a workplace, on construction sites or among school boards, it really can happen in any litigated case. The mediator's job is to work to increase understanding and to help guide the parties towards an outcome that is better than any result achieved through continued conflict.
Lela Love
And why stories? Well, we think stories are the number one educator and connector between human beings, taking us into other cultures, introducing us to new people, and offering religious insights and wisdom of the ages. Stories take us into other worlds altogether, with “Once upon a time,” or “In the beginning,” or “It was a dark and stormy night.” How exciting are stories, and we want to travel with you into new ones. You may recall famous court stories because there are cameras and reporters in courts. Brown v. Board of Education, when separate but equal was on trial, the Scopes Monkey Trial, when evolution and science was on trial, but mediation happens behind closed doors. It's confidential. It's private, and we think a light should be shined on what happens behind those doors, so we can all better understand how mediators promote understanding and resolution, particularly in this era of polarized and often bitter and vicious disputes and conflicts. We're here to shine that light.
Robyn Weinstein
And please note confidentiality. Lela mentioned it, and it's an important part of mediation. For this podcast, the storytellers have either changed the identity of the parties or obtained their permission to tell these stories.
Lela Love
Eric Galton is a pioneer in the field of alternative dispute resolution, as well as a master storyteller, writer, and speaker, so we are three times blessed. Since 1989, Eric has mediated over 7,000 cases, employing a variety of mediation styles. He is highly versatile. He mediates disputes ranging from a half day to two weeks in length in cities all over Texas, indeed all over the country, involving anywhere from two to 125 parties from a broad spectrum of ethnic, socio-economic, political, and business backgrounds. He mediates disputes in over 17 areas of law. He has been named an ADR Texas Super Lawyer from 2005 to the present, and is a past president of the International Academy of Mediators. Boy, I would personally name him a super person if I had the power to bestow such awards. As a writer, his books have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese. I was blessed, honored to be able to co-edit with him the book "Stories Mediators Tell,” and I'm so excited to hear Eric once again tell a story. Take it away.
Eric Galton
Well, thank you so much, Leila, for that generous introduction. So wonderful to see you, and so wonderful to see you, Robyn. One of the core elements of mediation and the process is its flexibility, which allows for creativity. And I'm going to let you be the judge about whether the mediator in this story was creative, or perhaps as our other wonderful friend and colleague Ken Cloak once said, "Did I mediate dangerously?” But you be the judge. Imagine a major university somewhere in the United States that's situated on a very hilly and rocky plain. 250 students with disabilities at that university have filed a class action Americans with Disabilities Act claim against the university, alleging multiple, multiple violations of the ADA. That lawsuit is now in federal court, and the federal judge was a little disturbed. There has not been really optimum communication between the university and the Students with Disabilities Council. It's resulted in a variety of motions, and so the federal judge did what only a federal judge can do: issued an order requiring the parties to attend mediation from December 15 through December 20, five straight days, not to be released until the mediator allows them to be released, either with a settlement or an impasse, and requiring 50 of the 250 students to appear every day from nine till five, along with the university president, the university comptroller, the university engineer, and two regents who will be fully authorized to resolve the dispute just days before Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. You can only imagine how happy they all were.
I was appointed that mediator. When I arrived at the administrative building for the first day, I walked into the room where the 50 university students and their counsel were, and they were rather chipper and eager because they thought this was going to be an interesting experience. Their lawyers were much more skeptical, given the history of the case so far, about the university's potential to resolve all this. And then I walked into the university room. It was a very serious room. In fact, as I looked all the way toward the back, there was a big conference room table, and there sat the university president. And as I walked towards him, he got up, and he looked at me, and he said, "Well, you must be the mediator, then, aren't you?” And I said, "Yeah, I'm that person,” and he said, “I want to tell you one thing and one thing only. If I hear another thing about toilet stall dimensions, I'm just going to shut down. I'm just going to shut down. I just don't want to hear that.”
And I looked at the university president. I said, “Look, we've only just met a few minutes ago, and I've got a personal question to ask you that I think probably is somewhat inappropriate, but I need to know the answer to it. And I want to know just this: when you go to the toilet, do you like to shut the door when you're in the toilet stall?”
And he looked at me incredulously and he said, "Of course I do.”
I said, “Just give me a moment. I'm going to come back in a moment. I've got something else to do.”
I walked back into the room where the university students were, and there were two or three students in wheelchairs. And I asked one of them whether we could have an experiment and borrow one of their wheelchairs, because what I was going to do is ask the university president whether or not he would be interested in getting in the chair, we’ll go down to the hall. I saw a restroom down there, and we'll see whether or not the university president could get into the toilet stall and shut the door. So the university student gladly is going to loan the thing. I go back, and I ask the university professor, and now he and I are just dialoguing with all these serious people around whether or not he would engage in an experiment and get in a wheelchair. And I told him that if he could get that wheelchair into the restroom and into the stall and shut the door, I will never talk to him about that during the remainder of the mediation. He was a physics professor, by the way, and he liked experiments, and he readily agreed.
So now imagine the scene: we're going down the aisle with the university president in a wheelchair, students around, lawyers around. We get to the restroom door, and it's even difficult for him to get into the restroom to begin with. Now he gets into the restroom and he's trying to navigate the wheelchair into the toilet stall with great difficulty. Probably took him seven or eight or nine minutes, but now he's ready to launch the wheelchair into the stall. He gets it into the stall halfway, and he can't get it any farther back. He can't shut the door, and then the light goes on. It's not like a little light; it's a big light. At that very moment, he looks at everybody as he's going out.
He said, "This is wrong. We need to fix this.” And he looks at me, and he says, "No, write this down.” And all of a sudden, I realize I'm really not the mediator. I'm the scrivener. And I write down, "Well, we need to fix this. Let's talk about the solution.” Blah blah blah blah blah. We're walking down the hall. All of a sudden, he's interested in doorknobs. He hadn't been interested in doorknobs before. He looks at one of the doors and said, "Well, what's wrong with this doorknob?”
And one of the students goes up to the presence of Mr. President and said, “If you have a closed fist, you can't open that doorknob. It needs to be cantilevered.”
And all of a sudden, I realize what is happening is it's not a mediation any longer. It's a classroom, and the students are the teachers, and the university president is the student. And all of a sudden, it becomes patently obvious that what's been a war of numbers and words to him has suddenly become an interesting human problem because he's a visual learner and he's a kinetic learner. We didn't need to have a joint session. What we did was we had field trips. So, for example, we took a field trip to the stadium. He didn't understand that students with disabilities, even if they had access to seating in the stadium, had able-bodied friends, so how do we fix this? We looked at ramps. We looked at everything as groups together in field trips, and along the way every day, Mr. Mediator, write this down. Write this down. Write this down. At one moment, we went to a part of the campus where there was a hilly incline, and one of the students was an English major, and his advisor was up the hill, and the university president realized for the first time there was no way he could gain access to get to see his university professor. He was trying to advise her, and so along the way, all we were doing was having experiential learning in the context of a mediation that on Thursday wound up having about a 20-page list of agreements that they reach day by day by day by day by day that culminated ultimately in a suggestion by the president that they have a committee consisting of administrators and students with disabilities to form a committee and have an every twice a year meeting to determine where there are issues affecting the students that could be resolved through communication and filling that through mediation, and that was 25 years ago, and that committee still exists today, and that's how they resolve these issues. So, it was Thursday evening, and we had complied with the court order. We had a full and complete written agreement. We finished one day early. It was time for everyone to go with the holidays. I know that sounds like Hollywood, but the snow actually was beginning to fall where we were. And while there was a lot of holiday spirit in the air, there was great mediation spirit in the air, and all because of a ride down the hallway in a wheelchair to see whether or not you could get in a toilet stall, and then the light went on and everything changed. So, was it dangerous? Was it creative? Was it out of the box, was it appropriate? All I know is that it worked, and the experience is something that I remember even decades later.
Lela Love
I think it was creative and dangerous to ask someone what their habits were when they went into the toilet, but Lord, Eric, was it brilliant. It was because it put the person in the space, and then to get everybody on board. Wow! My question is, had you thought of it before you went to the mediation? You certainly knew what the issues were, and probably that the dimensions of the toilet cubicles were an issue. Did it just pop into your head, or was it there?
Eric Galton
Well, it's an excellent question because no, I had not thought of that before I got there. I have been disciplined to think about mediation and my role broadly, which means even though I had been besieged with tons of documents to read about everything that had transpired before I got there, all the claims, all the issues, everything we were there to address, the only thing I knew was they were not communicating. The court was tired of it, and somehow there was a complete disconnect. I suppose I'll give credit to the university professor of assaulting me almost at the outset by saying, "If I hear another thing about toilet stall dimensions, I'm going to shut down,” because it was in that moment where the idea came to me. To me, mediation is a lot like how some of the greatest rock songs of the '60s were created. They were created on an impulse, and many of them written in under 10 or 15 minutes because it just came. And I thought this might be interesting, but there were a lot of things that had to go right. The student would have to loan me the chair. The president would have to agree to the experiment, and the experiment would have to go as planned. But of course, there always is a plan B for mediators, which is you go in with an idea about something that's going to work, and if it doesn't work, you go to something else. And what I thought in this instance was, well, if he can't get in, and it's a lot of difficulty, but he still can sort of shut the door, he'll get the point. It just happened to work out perfectly. He only got in halfway, and at that moment, everything seemed much different to him. And it was astonishing, watching that transformation. I have very little to do with it. He was just ultimately committed from that moment forward to learn everything he could. And during the course of the day or days, there were things that were structurally impossible for the university to exactly fix, but instead of arguing about it, we created workarounds and we found alternative ways. And by this time, we're having group discussions about everything. It wasn't shuttle diplomacy. It was a community classroom where people were looking for solutions and they found them. So all credit goes to them in the process.
Robyn Weinstein
Eric, I think the mediator's highest ideal or the highest ideal of the process is to create mutual understanding and have the parties connect with each other to do that exchange, and so you pitched it. But I'm curious about how you worked with the lawyers or how you convinced them to do this. Was it that quick, or did it take some time?
Eric Galton
It didn't really take much time. The president was in control of his room, and the lawyers were willing to go along with whatever the president was willing to do, and I think, as impolite as my question was to the president, I think he pretty much sized me up as a doer, and so as a result, I think we actually bonded in a rather curious way. The lawyers for the university students were really just interested in helping the students get some of these things worked out, so they were pretty much game from the beginning. I think everyone was tired of the way things had been going. I think they were looking for something different, and I think this was something very different. The trip down the hall. I wish I could have videotaped it. Was pretty amazing.
Lela Love
I wish so too. I wish we could show it. Just one other thing: one scheduling is always a nightmare. One has to be creative. Perhaps dangerous sometimes in terms of Scheduling scenarios one creates Eric. You were given incredible power to bring together a huge group for a long time. That would make me nervous, but it's wonderful power, and it sounds like you used it well. I'm giving a speech instead of asking a question. As a mediator, I wish we all had that power. Maybe just comment on that. That was incredible.
Eric Galton
I found, Lela, it was unusual and extraordinary to have a judge give me that much power for a mediation and specifically identify who needed to be there, and specifically identified if they were not to be released, and specifically tell them it was going to be two or three days before Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Only a federal judge could do that, but I didn't really have to wield that power once they got into the mode of problem solving, I don't think anyone was conscious. I think they saw me as a facilitator and scrivener, and they were willing to do the work themselves. And one of the things mediators have to understand is when you're fortunate enough to create that kind of environment, get out of the way. Just get out of the way, and really, I would suspect over a four-day period, I might have had only one or two instances where I had intervened a little bit, and it wasn't because there was an argument. It was clearly people weren't understanding each other, and I was just channeling that communication to make sure that they did, but the momentum sustained itself, and I think they forgot about the fact that I was in charge. I think they were in charge, and they did a really great job.
This might be a good segue now that I'm kind of feeling the vibe of all of this to go into story number two. This is a lot more out of the box, and I'm open to criticism, so feel free to extend it if that's what you think that you should do. I will certainly not be offended.
Two law partners who had celebrated 25 or 30 years of very successful partnership, very successful lawyers, are having their business divorce, and it gets ugly. In fact, it gets really ugly. They retain two very prominent lawyers in town to represent them, who are so, so concerned that this battle between two very identifiable and well-known lawyers could actually go to court with the name calling and all of the stuff that they're now saying about each other, despite their decades together. Somehow they convince their clients that they should go to mediation, and their clients agree that they'll go to mediation, but they are never going to be in the same room. And I wind up getting appointed to be their mediator because their lawyers select me. The lawyers they represent know me. I've done mediations with them in the past, and so we're going to all assemble at my office, and one lawyer is going to be in one room, one all the way in the back, and they're never going to see each other. That's the agreement that we have, and their lawyers are so concerned about what's going to happen, they simply drop their clients off. They don't even want to be there during the mediation, so they basically are putting it in my lap.
So, we start out in a very conventional way. I'm in Bill's room, and Bill spends the first 45 minutes telling me everything wrong about his former best friend Abe, and then I go into Abe's room, and Abe spends 45 minutes doing the same thing. And I go back and forth for about three hours. It's a little before 11. We started early that day for some reason, around eight, and we're going absolutely nowhere.
And I'm in Abe's room, and I look at Abe, and I don't know why the question hadn't occurred to me before, but I hadn't. And I looked at Abe, and I said, "Look, you and Bill were together for 25 years. You were always friends. Was there anything at all that you guys liked to do together while you were friends? “And Abe looks at me and he said, "Yeah, there were two things we'd like to do.”
I said, "Well, what were they?”
He said, "We liked to smoke dope, and we liked to meditate.”
Now, at that moment, we talked about this in the other matter because this had never occurred to me before that comment was made. I kind of feel like I've got a little angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other. And at moments where I have an idea about something that might work, the angel usually talks me out of doing something.
But at this very moment, when I heard they like to meditate and they like to smoke dope, this demon is saying, "Do what you're thinking before you talk yourself out of it.” And so I do. I go and I grab my car keys. I take Abe out of his room. I said, "You're coming with me.”
I go to Bill's room. I said, "You're coming with me.”
I tell them on the way up the steps, "We're going for a drive.”
I put one in the front seat, one in the back seat. I put a Dave Matthews CD in the car, and we start driving for 25 minutes, and no one ever asks me anything. Abe says nothing. Bill says nothing. Nobody says where are we going, and ultimately I pull off by the side of a highway, in front of the only Buddhist temple in Austin, and I say, "Give me your cell phones, give me your notepads, get out of the car, go up those steps and meditate, and I leave them by the side of the road and I pull away, and I drive home, which is fairly close to where the Buddhist temple is. Well, when I get home, the iconic and well known to both of you, Kim Kovach, is in the house working on a arbitration order, and she looks at me and she said, "Eric, I thought you were mediating,” and I said, "I am.”
And she looks at me and she said, "What did you do?”
I told her the story and I told her I left these guys off without cell phones in front of the Buddhist temple, and she says, "You can't do that.”
And I said, "Well, I did.”
She said, "You got to go back and get them.”
I said, "No, I don't really have to go back and get them right away.” And I spent a very uncomfortable hour and a half in my house with Kim Kovach leering at me for what apparently she thought I shouldn't do and couldn't do, but was continuing to do. And so I drive back to the Buddhist temple, and I start walking up the steps, and I don't see them. And from the tranquility pond, I hear one of their voices, and they say, "Eric, come over here.”
And these two guys are meditating around the tranquility pond, but they don't want to leave. They want me to sit there and meditate with them, and they advise me that they've reached a full and complete agreement, and that what we'll do is when we're done meditating, we're going to drive back to the mediation center. We'll get the lawyers there. We'll paper everything up, and we'll resolve it.
I'm not sure that the Buddhist temple move is something that would be a common move by a mediator. It might be a dangerous move, and it's not something that I would advocate in any case. But it felt right in this case. Now I will tell you that the two lawyers were so proud of how it all happened that almost every lawyer in Austin heard about the Buddhist temple move, and I thought I probably was going to be put out of business because somebody must have thought I had lost my mind when I had done that. But apparently the resolution was so positive, no one was offended, and I kept my business, and I continued to be able to mediate. But I'm fond of the story because of the creativity, and I'm not sure that acting on the impulse it was exactly the right thing to do. But it sure felt like it at the moment, they did not ask me to smoke dope with them, by the way. That was the other thing they liked to do. So I stuck with the meditation.
Lela Love
Scary! It was dangerous. It was definitely dangerous. But you know, when something works so well, it's hard to be anything but amazed, proud, congratulatory about it. Maybe I'm thinking maybe you had an instinct based on your knowledge of these people, based on their past, perhaps based on their intelligence and something you knew about their generosity, that it might work or that it would work—is that true?
Eric Galton
I didn't know them socially or personally, but I had developed a fairly good trust relationship with them professionally, so I think that probably helped. I think they probably had no idea what was about to happen. I guess the import of this story, along with the other, at least to me, is that I think that we often look at mediation, especially these days, as it has become more commercial, too narrowly and too transactionally, and there is a lot more that is going on. I mean, when I think about books like “The Promise of Mediation” the great Bush Folger book, when I think about Cloke’s book “Mediating Dangerously” when I think about a lot of those sort of things, I kind of think that there is magic in the mediation process, if you're open enough to sort of look for it and feel it, and to some extent, when you're in that modality, it requires some degree of acceptable risk taking. It was risky with the wheelchair maneuver. It was risky taking these guys and dumping them off in front of the temple by the side of the road. I approach most mediations in a more moderate fashion, but what I love about mediation is that there is an opening for doing things more creatively and differently, and that's something that I immensely love about the mediation process. Some of the best moments of mediation are spontaneous moments where there is some type of connection that is happening, and you just got to trust it. You know, you just got to trust it, and sometimes it involves taking a leap of faith and hoping for the best. But I didn't really feel like in either instance I had anything to lose. I really didn't. I'm much more concerned about the participants having an opportunity to find a resolution than I am how it's going to necessarily impact me. That's really not part of the equation.
Robyn Weinstein
I feel like you invented a new school of mediation, Eric. It's called mediating adventurously.
Eric Galton
I like that better. I like that better.
Robyn Weinstein
I mean, each of these stories to me, you're just taking people on a journey with you. It seems like you're connecting with them and finding that spark in the moment, and having them trust you to guide them on whatever adventure you're taking them on.
Eric Galton
Well, I appreciate you saying that. The participants in the process are always the priority, and I think the thing that we limit ourselves to is thinking that even with active listening, there are different ways of connecting people, and these were just different ways of connecting people. I got them doing something they really loved. They really did love to meditate, and when they were sitting there meditating, it allowed them to reflect on all of the times that they really were very much together, and there was a shared sense of regret. Their relationship had splintered into this, and neither of them really wanted that. But the meditation environment allowed them to rethink that and reset that. With the president in the students with disabilities matter, he wasn't a bad human being. He just wasn't processing the information he got in a way where he could understand it, and he needed a different way of visualizing and experiencing that, and that's how that trigger sort of worked. And so I guess the way I kind of globally look at it is, mediators were kind of process architects. We're designing a process that's going to work in a particular case, and every case is going to require some modification of that. And so, being open to alternative ways to help people connect is a worthy thing to think about.
Robyn Weinstein
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Stories Mediators Tell.
Lela Love
Whether you are listening as someone involved in a conflict, or as a mediator, or an advocate, or just because you're curious, we hope you will take away from this story and others featured on this podcast, that great things are possible in mediation, and when people sit down to talk and work things out.
Robyn Weinstein
If you'd like to hear more stories and conversations like this one, be sure to follow the podcast and explore additional stories in the Stories Mediators Tell books.
Lela Love
I'm Lela Love
Robyn Weinstein
and I'm Robin Weinstein. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to being with you next time on Stories Mediators Tell.
Lela Love
Opening a window into the magic of mediation.