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 Surrounded by a dazzling array of electronic gadgets in her ‘office with a bed’ in St John’s Wood, mediator Amanda Bucklow is torn between revealing her settlement rate or not. In the end she relents: in over 650 mediations (excluding a handful of co-mediated cases) just four have failed to reach settlement.
‘But if you’re going to print something about settlement rates, make mine lower,’ she says. Why? ‘People will think I’m lying,’ she says, now laughing. And besides, she doesn’t want her good fortunes jinxed.
Among mediators, it’s somehow become bad form to talk about settlement rates, but percentages and probability underpin almost every strategic manoeuvre along the lifeline of a dispute. It would churlish to ignore Bucklow’s consistency and reckless to bet against her.
Conventional wisdom says that if you’re not failing every now and then, you’re not getting the quality of work. In Bucklow’s case, the argument is unconvincing. In November the World Bank appointed her to mediate a US$5bn dispute in Fiji. The dispute was about telecoms deregulation, but cheap long-distance phone calls in a country of some 300-odd islands aroused sufficient popular interest to give the interim government some hope of legitimising itself after the coup the year before. Against this politically charged backdrop, over the course of four days, Bucklow guided the myriad different parties to a settlement signed between Christmas and the New Year.
Bucklow’s approach to mediation is part intuitive and part the result of painstakingly accumulated academic research and analysis. Her motivation is not just to find a commercial resolution, but to heal the relationships damaged as a result of the dispute. This psychology-based approach sets her apart from many mediators, especially those with a legal background. ‘What I’m interested in is how to get the best out of people when they’re in the mediation room,’ she says. ‘If they’re a lawyer and that’s what they’ve got to add to the mediation, I will make sure that they have their role, but I won’t be sitting on them or pushing them into a corner.’
Likewise, she says, ‘If I assess as party as being very timid or non-contributory and I think it’s important that they contribute, I’ll use my intellectual and academic framework and my understanding of psychology in an effort to engage that person.’ Foremost in her mind in preparing for mediation is how to get the best out of people on the day. And she regards preparation as key to her success. Prior to a mediation, she reveals, she is uncomfortable if she’s not spoken with and tried to engage all of the parties and their advisers.
Bucklow has come a long way since 1995, when in desperation she picked up a copy of the Yellow Pages, called an arbitrator at random and asked him if there was a name for the process in which she was already involved. She described it and he said it sounded like mediation. Prior to that she had worked as a trader for RTZ, becoming the world’s first female zinc broker (‘there were 1,300 men and me at the London Metal Exchange dinner,’ she recalls). When it was time for a change she took a job at a tannery near Oxford and discovered that the business was so riven with conflict that it was close to collapse. Healing these wounds and getting the company back on its feet became Bucklow’s priority (there was no alternative), and to do so, she started by talking to people on the shop floor.
Born in Kenya and raised in Yorkshire, Bucklow has found a way to be comfortable in, seemingly, any company. (‘I’ve sat on a toolbox at the side of a railway track talking to maintenance contractors at 3am; I’ve even worked on a building site,’ she says.) Armed with these insights from the shop floor, and the confidence of the employees, Bucklow began a process of transforming the tannery. Her imperatives were commercial but to achieve these goals meant resolving some bitter interpersonal strife between the employees. In unlocking disputes in the workplace so that employees could focus on what they were there to do, Bucklow realised both that she had a gift for this type of work and that that is what she wanted to do professionally.
Unlike some mediators operating within a law firm, Bucklow has never been in a position to pick disputes off a conveyor belt. To reach the position she is in today, has required more than talent. It has required extraordinary dedication, tenacity and ambition. Bucklow is driven, but has the good grace to conceal it. She concedes that she once wrote a list of 12 personal goals she wanted to achieve over a five-year period. She moved house, mislaid the list and forgot about it. When it resurfaced some years later she noted that she’d achieved all but two: play the saxophone and fly a helicopter. ‘Flying a helicopter was out for medical reasons,’ she says, waving towards her right ear, ‘but I took saxophone lessons and in three months performed at a concert for an audience which included Prince Andrew. Don’t print that,’ she adds.
Professionally her big break came in 1999 when she took a call from Railtrack. Post privatisation, the Railway Act forced sweeping changes on the industry at every level. ‘They got rid of all the talented and experienced people,’ Bucklow says, and left the industry exposed to ‘massive safety issues and massive risks.’ A new system of rules needed to be implemented and communicated to hundreds of thousands of employees. And almost every new proposal was met with resistance. They called Bucklow in, she says, when they realised ‘that safety and maintenance on the track was all about communicating with people and resolving their issues.’
For the next five years Bucklow worked on 36 safety projects handling disputes ranging from bullying by commercial managers, to whistle blowing, to acting as the interface between Railtrack and the Health and Safety Executiv e in the aftermath of the Paddington rail crash.
And for Bucklow it meant putting on a safety hat, a high-viz jacket and walking the railway lines with the workers. ‘It’s not easy for somebody like me - I look like I do, I speak like I do – to go and sit with guys who frequently can’t read awfully well. But that’s a mediator’s skill. It’s essential to be able to engage with anyone at any level.’
And engage she did. They even made her an Honorary Railwayman. By 2005, it was time to move on – ‘I was never full time,’ she says, ‘although it felt like it. I wanted to go before I turned native.’
Subsequently she has built a more conventional commercial practice, which is nevertheless imbued with her own distinctive style. She describes herself as ‘spiritual’. ‘I do believe in a power bigger than we are. I’m not quite sure what it is,’ she says, ‘but I do believe that it’s totally and utterly important. I think it’s a foundation for hope, and hope is absolutely vital for mediation.’
Alongside this intangible spiritual dimension, more so than many other practising mediators, Bucklow has a thirst for the rational, empirical and concrete. Among friends and colleagues she is known as ‘the thinker,’ and has undertaken at her own expense some groundbreaking academic research into mediator competence. As a result Bucklow has at her fingertips data and statistics to justify what characteristics, aptitudes and behaviours make some mediators succeed and others fail. She conducts peer review exercises for mediators and is scathing of those mediators who fail to examine, review and critique their own performances. ‘The complacency is astounding,’ she says.
Despite her command of the details, now aged 49 it’s the bigger picture which inspires and motivates Bucklow. ‘I believe a good mediator can mediate anything,’ she says. ‘Sod the law! People create problems and people can resolve them, and the key to that is psychology,’ she says. Human dynamics are central to Bucklow’s view of dispute resolution and she believes it is no co-incidence that mediators are often creatively inclined. Bucklow herself is a talented linguist, a photographer whose work has featured on the cover of National Geographic, and a committed geek (she codes websites. For fun.)
And yet, she chooses to mediate. ‘When I’m mediating,’ she says, ‘I’m in the zone. I’m being the best I can be. I can let go of all ego-driven things. I’m focused on others and all me needs are met.’ Long-term, she sees scope for mediation to resolve some of the bigger conflicts in the world. ‘Over the next 30 years,’ she says, ‘we are going to be seeing wars spring up in places we never dreamed they would. And if I could play a role, however small, in preventing some of that, for me, that would be a great place to be in ten years’ time.’
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