What could the Wolf teach mediators?

The Wolf I have in mind inhabited Wall Street, not a fairy tale.  During lockdown I made a point of watching negotiation movies and this got me thinking – what can mediators learn from their theories, their teaching and their methods.

My favourite is Bridge of Spies, in which Tom Hanks plays the part of a real-life hero who negotiated the release of a US airman shot down over Russia and a student caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.  My second favourite is Thirteen Days which examines the political wranglings during the Cuban missile crisis.  The fact that they are about real events I recall makes them particularly appealing.  However, to my surprise I picked up more practical advice or learning from Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of Jordan Belfort’s true life rise and fall in The Wolf of Wall Street and the fictional story of Glengarry Glen Ross.

The ABC of negotiation

Glengarry depicts two days in the lives of four real estate salesmen which are turned upside down when head office sends a trainer, played by Alec Baldwin, to ‘motivate’ them.  The trainer is abusive and brutal.  He tells them that in a week all except the top two will be fired but he goes on to give them a lesson in sales that resonates with my experience as a mediator.

His lesson is built around one core principle, ‘Always Be Closing’.  The same principle, expressed differently, also underpins the sales technique that Jordan Belfort used to build his stock broking firm Stratton Oakmont. Belfort describes it as ‘Straight Line Persuasion’, the idea being that throughout a meandering conversation the salesman will constantly be focusing on securing the sale.  Every objection to the sales proposition is seen as an opportunity to move the conversation forward in the direction of closure.  As Baldwin says, the only thing that matters is to get them ‘to sign on the line that is dotted’.

As a mediator, it’s easy to get caught up in all of the arguments in a dispute.  Who did what to whom and why?  What’s the evidence, where does this take us and what’s the legal analysis?  While the final outcome will, of course, be influenced by the evidence and legal position, it is important for mediators to always be thinking ‘How are we going to settle this and what are the elements for settlement?’

Mediation and straight talking

One of my very first experiences of mediation was when I was practising as a commercial litigator and we appointed the late David Shapiro as mediator. He was an American lawyer by background who developed a very successful mediation practice in London. He was renowned as a bit of an eccentric and for his straight talking.  To everybody’s surprise he began the mediation by calling for a white board and demanding that we tell him what issues had to be addressed in ‘the settlement agreement’. This threw us all off balance but resulted in a long list that turned into the agenda that we used to work through the issues and, because of the way David had set it up, the conversation was always about how do we reflect this in the settlement agreement.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time but I see now that David was adopting a well-known sales technique by asking the question at the outset, put in Belfort and Baldwin’s language – how are we going to close this deal?