If you are involved in a conflict there are several ways how you could deal with it:
- You keep quarrelling until you either go separate ways forever or end in a war against each other.
- You leave the conflict unspoken below the surface of everyday routine until it erupts with often devastating effects.
- You go to court. There one of the involved parties is ‘proved to be right’. This means that as a result there might be one or several winners and one or several losers. Maybe even every party feels afterwards to have lost after the verdict! But this does not necessarily mean that the conflicts will end with the verdict.
- Or you try a mediation.
A mediation has several advantages to offer compared with the other mentioned possibilities:
- It aims for finding a common and consensual solution for the conflict that all involved parties agree upon.
- Thereby, the involved parties will deal with each other in a constructive and harmonious way again if the mediation is successful.
- It is possible that problems appear during a mediation that some of the involved parties were not aware of. They are solved incidentally during the mediation.
- By taking a close look from several perspectives at a problem, solutions evolve very often that one of the participants alone would never have imagined.
- Besides the solution for the actual conflict it is quite probably that new concepts and ideas are developed, that can be realized by the conflict parties to everybody’s advantage.
- Courts are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of disputes to be settled. Therefore, it can take a long time, before the process even starts and before it is over. A mediation can be usually done very timely.
- Court processes are often much more expensive than mediations.