Last week, I wondered aloud (or whatever the blog equivalent of “aloud” may be) why I had so few experiences in which mediation parties said “thank you” to each other upon arriving at a settlement.

 Geoff Sharp indicated that his experience in New Zealand was different—that he routinely sees parties thanking each other early and often in the process.  And for a few days, I imagined that his geographic explanation, with its implicit suggestion of a cultural difference, might fully explain the difference.  I have only done a handful of days of mediation-related work in Wellington, and the folks sure were nice.  So it seemed plausible to me that there’s nothing more complicated at play than the fact that I’ve been dealing with grouchy Yankees more recently.

 But I wonder whether the bigger difference might be that in recent years, I’ve started doing more labor mediations.

 The negotiation literature suggests that disputants with ongoing relationships have helpful opportunities for issue expansion, fractionation, and differentiated timelines.  (If we’re going to keep dealing with each other, maybe we can add in new issues, or take some issues off for consideration later, or come up with solutions whose implementation addresses some issues now, some issues tomorrow, and some next year.)  

 And I suppose I may have been assuming that an ongoing relationship might also make social lubricants like expressions of thanks more commonplace.  (If I’ll never see you again, perhaps I wouldn’t take as much time to say, “thank you.”  But the near-certainty of seeing the same people at the dinner table night after night seems to counsel “PLEASE pass the peas” and “THANK YOU for passing the peas.”)

 I’m now wondering if that assumption holds true in contexts in which the parties know that their relationship will be ongoing and that more negotiations will come.  

 Imagine that the negotiations leading to the settlement were difficult.  Imagine that despite encouragement to the contrary, they followed a traditional (and tedious) haggling style of negotiation.  Imagine that each side had, at various points, professed to be “at their bottom line,” only to go still further some hours or days later.  Imagine that each side had characterized their own situation as comparatively dire, at least in part in an effort to suggest that the remaining distributive issues ought to be resolved in their favor.  If you have a hard time imagining any of this, I suggest spending some time in labor mediations.  Not all of them, to be sure.  But what I’m describing is surely not idiosyncratic to one or a couple labor disputes.

 In such a context, maybe it’s not so strange that neither party’s instinct would be to say “thank you” at the end.

 To do so would mark a staggering shift in the mood, for one thing.  (“We’ve spent this long fighting, and you expect us to just kiss and make up?”)  At the close of one mediation I did some years ago, in which the parties were contractually destined for a prolonged, ongoing relationship, I suggested to the parties that they might spend another hour or so together, just processing what had happened, so that they could let go and move forward productively.  This had been a bitter dispute that had dragged on for almost two years of active back-and-forth, much of it in the public.  Both sides were taken aback.  They really didn’t want to do it, but I think each felt ashamed to be the one to reject the idea of relationship repair.  They acquiesced, and afterwards, each side (privately) came to me and said it was the most productive thing they could have possibly done.  One called it “more important than the settlement itself.”  But maybe one reason I see few thank yous is that it’s emotionally hard to turn on a dime.

 Maybe parties also intuitively fear that “thank you” to the other side could make the other side feel WORSE about the agreement, rather than better.  Those with a narrow, zero-sum conception of bargaining may believe that if the other side isn’t in agony, that’s a signal that it can still give more.  Maybe saying “thank you” would be seen almost like turning up your cards in a poker after successfully bluffing the other side.  And maybe each side feels like an expression of gratitude would jeopardize its NEXT round of negotiations.  (“If I look anything other than angst-ridden, they will assume I could have gone even farther, despite my protestations to the contrary during bargaining.  So I’d better walk out the door looking unhappy, even if I’m marching straight for a bottle of champagne…”)

 It’s not that I’m arguing against gratitude.  Indeed, if anything, I’m trying to work this all through because I think we just don’t have enough of it.  How much more functional might the relationships of former disputants be if they acknowledged some degree of gratitude for the contributions each had made, not only to the problem, but also to its solution?  But getting some form of meaningful gratitude, must involve more than merely making space for it.  It must involve understanding and addressing the reasons why it’s not happening today.  This is my start at that inquiry.

 Of course, I’d be delighted if the end product of my inquiry is a conclusion that I just need to spend more time in New Zealand.