Gustave Flaubert once wisely observed, “There is no truth. There is only perception.”

Dispute resolution professionals know only too well how much perception contributes to conflict. We see what we want to see and tune out the rest, or become so focused that we lose sight of what lies in our peripheral vision. Our senses can mislead or fool us, while our assumptions lead us to see what was never there at all or blind us to what is right before our eyes.

Over the years numerous studies have been done of perception and its implications for human behavior and cognition. For example, recent studies demonstrate that we have a propensity to see only the good in outcomes.

One of my favorite studies, hands down, is this one described here in this article from the Daily Telegraph, which reveals just how much we utterly fail to see. Researchers showed subjects a video of two teams of people playing basketball, one in white shirts and the other in black, and instructed the subjects to count the number of times the team wearing white t-shirts bounces the ball. A person in a gorilla costume walks through the players, stops in front of the camera to thump its chest, and then walks off.

Incredibly, half of all subjects failed to see the gorilla, so intent were they on following the movement of the ball.

(Incidentally, I recently worked with a colleague who showed this video to a class she and I were teaching together. In a group of about 60 people, only 20 of them saw the gorilla. When we went back and replayed the video to prove to them that the gorilla in fact was there, no one could believe their eyes.)

To test your own powers of observation, visit this link for a whole range of video demonstrations. Or, to see the gorilla yourself, click here. (The gorilla video takes time to load, so you may not want to attempt this with a dial-up connection.)

Trainers and educators can order online “Surprising Studies of Visual Awareness“, a DVD that collects the videos used in this study.

Technorati tags: Culture and Society, conflict resolution, mediation

“Hacking” is a word tainted by controversy. While it often evokes images of teenaged malcontents exploiting security vulnerabilities in computer networks, it possesses other more affirmative meanings.

Hacking also means “the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations“. It stands for an ingenious way of solving intractable problems or providing new functionality to an object different from its intended purpose.

Anything can be hacked. Software applications and Department of Defense databases–that goes without saying. But also video games, consumer goods, religion, and, well, life.

And, would you believe, even urban and industrial landscapes. Consider parkour, an urban sport that combines physical and intellectual agility. In parkour, the only direction is forward as participants creatively maneuver and strategize their way past obstacles in their physical environment. It’s as much about quick reflexes as it is about quick thinking. Participants in a sense must grasp the solution at the moment they perceive the challenge. It’s about reframing the material world by transforming barriers into passageways.

Fortunately mediation doesn’t require physical strength (or we’d all be in big trouble). But it does depend upon the skill of the mediator to help disputants limber up brain cells and keep minds open to possibility and potential.

Mediators, who mediate between the past and the present, experience and hope, uncertainty and optimism, can draw inspiration from metaphors like these.

Although conflict and impasse are age-old, we can use the language of today to revolutionize the way we think about our practice as mediators to see our craft in a new light. We aid disputants in hacking the narratives of their own conflicts. We push them to alter the code of the past to pareto optimize their way beyond the limits of their own ingenuity. And we can use technology to revolutionize the resolution of disputes and to transform dialogue itself.

Welcome to Mediation 2.0.

Technorati tags: conflict resolution, mediation, online dispute resolution, technology