What will it take for ADR to reach a real tipping point in broad adoption by the public? While tempting to place the answer to this question squarely on the shoulders of national and regional professional associations, the more effective answer instead places the responsibility on the collective shoulders of all individual mediators.

There are five critical characteristics that affect the rate at which a new idea gets adopted broadly in the marketplace. Know the five — and how to address them in your marketing efforts — and you have a powerful key not only for your own success, but also for helping professional conflict management and resolution gain traction broadly. More work for any good mediator means, ultimately, more work for all mediators.

Alan AtKisson, environmental sustainability expert, the powerhouse behind the Sustainable Seattle project, and writer on the “diffusion of innovation,” says this about spreading innovation:

Researchers have discovered that the adoption of an innovation in any given population follows a fairly predictable pattern. An innovation starts with an innovator, often a single individual with a new idea. (”New” here means unknown to the culture, even if the idea is very old.) After its conception, an innovation spreads slowly at first — usually through the work of change agents, who actively promote it — then picks up speed as more and more people adopt it. Eventually it reaches a saturation level, where virtually everyone who is going to adopt the innovation has done so.

AtKisson identifies five critical characteristics for increasing the rate at which a “new” idea — like professional mediation — gets adopted by the mainstream. I’ve described each and how it’s relevant to your mediation marketing.

Characteristic 1: Relative Advantage

An innovation will spread more quickly if it’s perceived as better than the status quo – that is, its advantage relative to the status quo is quite clear in the potential adopter’s mind.

For mediation to gain market traction, the market needs to see it as better in some way than these other common options:

• Doing nothing or handling it yourself. This remains the most widely adopted option in conflict situations in virtually every market.
• Intervention by someone with authority. In commercial and business settings, this might include human resources or senior leadership.
• Litigation. While mediation marketing commonly makes the case for mediation by contrasting it to litigation and the accompanying financial and emotional tolls, only a very small number of business disputes escalate to litigation. The status quo isn’t litigation for most conflict and disputes, including those in the business arena.

Until mediators collectively do a better job of contrasting mediation’s relative advantage over the above “big three” options, adoption rate will rise slowly.

Characteristic 2: Compatibility

To spread, an innovation needs to fit well with people’s existing values, past experiences and present needs.

If you want to increase your ADR marketing success, you need to figure out what your target market values, what problem-solving approaches they already know and use, and explicitly connect your value offer to those.

For instance, if your market values direct dialogue for resolving disputes and preserving the business relationship, they’re apt to be more attracted to a style of mediation that doesn’t rely solely on caucus to negotiate a resolution. If your market distrusts neutrality, then they may be more attracted to working with a negotiation coach who’ll figuratively “step to their side” and advise them, than a professional mediator.

Characteristic 3: Complexity

The easier it is for people to understand and use the innovation, the faster the adoption rate.

This is a particular challenge for mediators. The public still doesn’t really know what mediation is because the term is often used interchangeably with negotiation and arbitration in the media, and because mediation conducted by one mediator can look quite different than mediation conducted by another. The public doesn’t yet know how to find the kind of mediator who will be a good fit for their particular situation and values, and too often assume that one size fits all, sometimes leading to disillusionment with all of mediation. And court-associated mediation carries some of the same procedural and systemic complexity that litigation carries – hardly a way to make mediation simpler to adopt than litigation.

Mediators who de-complexify the process of getting to the mediation table will help diffuse mediation faster. This translates into re-thinking the procedural maze associated with some court-associated ADR. And for mediation outside of the legal arena, it translates into minimizing the hoops mediators require parties to jump through to get to the table.

Characteristic 4: Trialability

If people can try out an innovation in some form, without first having to commit to it all at once, the adoption rate will increase.

Trialability is not an unfamiliar idea if you’ve ever walked by the product sample lady in the supermarket.

The challenge for mediation, of course, is that its confidential nature makes sampling difficult. Videos of roleplays (even unscripted ones), while informative, don’t achieve trialability in the true sense because the viewer knows what they’re watching isn’t fully real. They’re not really sampling; they’re watching someone else sampling.

The answer to this challenge may well be in the time-tested process of networking. Networking, online and in person, allows your market to sample who you are instead of what you do. The most effective networking builds trust and gives your market the opportunity to experience how you think, what you’re like, and how credible you are. It’s a shorter leap to buy your services for a market that already knows and trusts you as a person and as a professional in your field.

Characteristic 5: Observability

If people use an innovation and the good results are visible by others, the innovation will spread more rapidly.

Observability is tricky stuff for people whose product is invisible. Self-promotion by talking about your successes at networking events, on blogs, and via social networking sites doesn’t rise to the level of observability. Credible observability comes from others talking about your work and the good results they achieved because of you.

Add to this challenge the real possibility that consumers of mediation may not really observe that the mediator is helping the dispute or conflict get sorted out. In Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman’s Bringing Peace Into the Room: How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution, Peter Adler describes this small research project:

Several years ago, Kem Lowry of the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning did an analysis of some thirty successfully mediated cases that had been in a program I directed…First Lowry asked the mediators in our cases to explain what they did to bring about success. Then he asked the parties in those same cases what they actually observed the mediators doing. The mediators – myself included – gave elaborate explanations of strategies, timing, and tactics. We identified how we went about conducting our conflict analyses and circumscribing issues to be worked on. We deciphered the breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the windows of opportunity both lost and found. The participants in our cases had a very different view. What they recalled us doing was opening the room, making coffee, and getting everyone introduced.

So how to build credible observability for both the ADR field and for individual mediators? Some ways include:

• Testimonials. Not just any testimonial, but ones in which the writer or speaker explicitly describes what you did that helped.
• Tapping people with courage. Some folks who’ve used mediation won’t discuss it with others, even when they’re happy with the results. It’s the dirty-laundry thing. But the blogging, cell phone generation may have fewer inhibitions. You need to find the people with courage to talk – again, very specifically – about what you did that helped.
• Tapping people affected positively when the parties work things out. If successful observability is about making the good results visible to others, you may have more success getting people who weren’t directly involved in the mediation to talk about the successes. People like HR directors, managers, CEOs, and legal counsel.

To integrate these ideas into your mediation marketing, answer each of these questions for your own practice and use your answers to design your approach:

1. What is the conflict status quo for my particular market and how can I demonstrate to them that my services are a vastly preferable alternative?
2. How do my services speak explicitly to the values, past experiences and present needs of my market, and how will I convey that to my market?
3. How can I make the adoption and use of my services as straightforward and simple as possible and how can I best alert my market about that?
4. What will I do to give members of my market the opportunity to sample me and/or my services?
5. How can I make the good results I’ve had with my clients observable by my prospective clients?

This article was originally printed in the ACR Commercial Section Newsletter, December 2009.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.