Mineau Media provides three types of mediation services:
Educational Seminars and Conflict Coaching
Type of disputes handled
Mineau Media can assist in a variety of dispute situations: the flexibility of our approach can be highly effective for a wide range of issues encountered in communities:
- Conflicts between neighbours;
- Conflict between family members;
- Conflict between coworkers;
- Conflicts surrounding land-use decisions and decision-making processes with collective impacts such as Public Health, infrastructure and development projects.
Mediation Facilitation
Mineau Media can assist clients in learning something new about each other, shifting from positional interests to deeper understandings of needs, cares and experienced threats. In our experience, achieving this deeper mutual self-recognition can enable parties in conflict to come up with more effective, long-lasting and mutually-agreeable solutions.
Our mediators run processes based on the insight model of mediation, developed at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, which attempt to help participants uncover how their understandings have been shaped by experience, deeper cares, and interpretations of threat, as opposed to working with individual stated interests: this is based on . In this way, parties are given the opportunity to adjust their understanding of the other parties involved, and of the issue at hand, and in so doing participants may be able to think differently about the issue, in a way that leads to a more imaginative and varied generation of options and solutions.
By attempting to uncover and take into account deeper cares, values, and interpretations of threat, we hope to assist parties in evoking self-questioning regarding what is truly important to them in this conflict and why and in so going help them develop solutions that address these issues, leading to self-determined and mutually-satisfactory, and thus more stable, outcomes. Where the goals of this type of communication are empowerment, increased recognition and respect, and greater social consciousness, this type of mediation is referred to as being “relational” – and though this model of mediation was initially developed to facilitate discussions between two parties, the process and skills involved translate well into the field of multi-party governance, with some adjustments.
Educational Seminars and Conflict Coaching
Creating favorable conditions for effective and integrative governance and decision-making can also be facilitated by providing targeted educational seminars to parties involved in potential and actual community conflict situations. Specifically, we offer seminars and courses in conflict and communication theory and practice, based on established practice as well as recent research on communication, cognition and learning. The goal of these sessions is to lay the groundwork and prepare parties for engaging in difficult conversations, including key skills for effective communication, active listening, questioning and understanding, and achieving new insights. By preparing parties in this way, we helps develop clients’ conflict-related understanding, interaction strategies, and interactions skills, all key aspects of successful conflict coaching. We believe that this helps parties be better equipped to deal with potential conflict situations proactively and to the satisfaction of all parties involved, and produces a strong commitment to productively and ethically manage conflict.
Collaborative Systems Design
Creating favourable conditions for good decision-making often involves engaging in deep thought regarding how stakeholder engagement is taken into account in the decision-making process, and to what end. Based on extensive research and practical experience, Mineau Media can provide recommendations on how to increase the accountability and transparency of governance systems. Recent theoretical work and analyses of national and international organizations has placed an emphasis on establishing clarity regarding: who is accountable, what is the role of the agents and organizations involved in the governance system; to whom is this agent accountable to; about what substantive decisions does this system apply; through what process is accountability to stakeholders upheld; what are criteria and standards that can be used to assess the effectiveness of this system; and what effects does this system have on agents?
By studying and establishing clarity on these key points, Mineau Media is able to provide substantive recommendations for tweaking or establishing the necessary building-blocks of transparency and accountability: processes for efficient stakeholder engagement, as informed by the theories of insight and multi-party communication, processes for transparent decision-making to reflect clearly-defined objectives, processes for fulsome monitoring of actions, and processes for redress and dispute-resolution, again as informed by the processes articulated in the insight mediation model.