Some people believe mediation is about fixing a problem. Others think it’s about guiding people toward agreement. And yes, this is how mediation has often been sold and practiced. But when mediation revolves around outcomes, solutions, resolutions, or the “right” next steps something important shifts.

 

It stops being about the people in conflict and becomes about the person in charge—shaping the conversation to meet their own goals, preferences, and comfort.

 

And from my perspective, this can be harmful.

 

Mediation, at its core, should be about the people in conflict—their stories, needs, pace, cultures, and the meaning they make of their experience. Not the mediator’s assumptions. Not the mediator’s desire for neatness or clarity. Not a checklist of “good questions” designed to lead people somewhere they didn’t choose.

 

Yet many mediation models center the mediator. The mediator becomes the expert who sets the agenda, asks the questions they believe matter most, and steers the conversation toward outcomes — sometimes the ones they think are best.

 

But here’s the truth:
As a mediator, you don’t know their lives.
You don’t know their histories, traditions, relationships, or the weight of what they carry. How could you possibly know the right next step for them?

 

The Myth of the “Right” Questions

Many mediators are taught to search for the “best questions.” But in reality, there isn’t a universal best question. Often, the questions we reach for are the ones that help us as mediators feel informed, organized, or in control—not necessarily the ones that support the people in conflict.

If a question serves the mediator more than the people in conflict, we’ve already lost our way.

This is where transformative mediation takes a different approach. Instead of centering the mediator, it centers the participants and their experiences, choices, and understanding.

 

Transformative Mediation: A Person-Centered Approach

As a transformative mediator, my role is to flip that focus. Questions become interventions that support participants’ clarity, not the mediator’s. Often, the most powerful question is the simplest:

“Where would you like to go next?”

 

Real Dialogue Makes Space for Everything

Many mediation methods try to control tone and language, hoping people will have a “civil” conversation. Transformative mediation, by contrast, invites the full range of human experience. It makes space for silence, reflection, grief, anger, uncertainty, disagreement, and tension. It honors curiosity and connection without shutting the door on discomfort.

Its promise is simple:

All of you is welcome here. Let’s work with what’s real.

 

Our Role Isn’t to Lead—It’s to Support

Transformative mediators hold space for the conversation participants need to have with each other. We don’t direct; we support. We don’t drive; we witness. Our work is to help participants see themselves and each other more clearly—at their pace, in their way.

 

We use four core interventions:

• Reflecting: Showing participants their words so they can hear themselves clearly.

• Summarizing: Capturing where people align and, more importantly, where they differ.

• Checking in: “Where would you like to go from here?”

• Silence: Space for thought, emotion, and integration.

 

These tools don’t steer the conversation, they keep the focus where it belongs: on participants’ agency, confidence, and understanding. This is not easy work, but it is the commitment we make so people can have the conversation they need to have, in the way they need to have it.

 

Transformative mediators support participants to make their own decisions, at their own pace. Our role is not the outcome, it’s the process. Mediation is about confidence, understanding, and voice, not tidy agreements or quick resolutions.

 

When participants experience themselves as capable, clear, and grounded in their own voice, the conflict transforms—not because the mediator asked the “right” question, but because the participants found themselves within the process.

 

It Should Always Be About Them

Mediation should never be about the mediator.

As mediators, we’re here to support people in conflict—two humans trying to understand themselves and each other, and finding a way forward that truly belongs to them.

 

To learn more about the work of Conflict Revolution check us out at www.conflictrevolution.ca. To learn more about Transformative Mediation go to the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation.