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Features
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 It's a sharp autumn morning and sunlight hitting the vast classical façade of the British Museum fills Russell Square. Directly opposite in an ample first-floor office, the newish Director General of the CIArb in shirt sleeves and braces is bashing out an email. 'Almost done,' Michael Forbes Smith announces without looking up. The room is large, with three sets of floor-to-ceiling French windows, but less than grand: a functional desk sits at one end, a circular table in the middle and cheap-looking chairs fill the gaps in between.
Facing the desk at the opposite end of the room are framed official photographs of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair (Blair's is autographed in thick marker pen) - mementos Smith variously swiped or was given during a Foreign Office career which started in the late seventies.
Seated at the circular table he talks about how his background as a diplomat informed his interest in mediation. 'At a governmental level, it's a different milieu,' he says, 'but I don't think the techniques are much different. The techniques are: what is it that you need that you're posturing about? What is it that is preventing you negotiating in good faith with the people you're at odds with?'
'If you want to stop a war,' he continues, 'much the same process applies: have you realised how much you're going to damage yourselves by this? Are you sure you can win this? Is it really what you want to be doing? Why is it you can't stop and take stock? They're all the same sort of questions [as posed in mediation] except we're talking about life, death and ruin for lots of people as opposed to the company, or the party.'
'In the diplomatic world you don't think of yourself as mediating,' he says. 'And it wasn't until I came to this job I realised that I'd actually been being a mediator,' he says, laughing. As an unwitting mediator, Smith has experienced his share of the world's hotpots: he was Deputy British Ambassador in Ethiopia at the height of the Cold War; he was the first ever Foreign Office Political Adviser in the Falkland Islands immediately post-conflict; later he became Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan during and after 9/11 and latterly he was Britain's first resident Ambassador to Tajikistan. (He considers Tajikistan to be 'one of the UN's great unsung successes' having negotiated the end of a civil war and produced a government with a degree of integration from competing sides in the conflict.)
With such experience behind him, one might expect Smith to have breezed through the Institute's mediator accreditation assessment. Not so: like 40% of entrants he failed first time round. 'Now that I am accredited,' he says, 'I think that this is a positive thing; our system suits the kind of institution we are with a very strong emphasis on the rigour of our progression training.'
At present he has also done the basic adjudication training and is halfway through the legal training to become an accredited arbitrator. 'I feel it doesn't make sense to sit here as director general not doing it,' he says, though he admits it's taking up more of his spare time than he would have liked. Mediation, however, has really captured his interest and although he is not actively seeking work, he is keen to do an assistantship. He refers to mediation as a profession and sees a role for the Institute in its development: 'We believe mediation has all the necessary elements of a profession: theoretical knowledge, practical application; what it needs is an ethical code and continuous professional development,' he says. And naturally, the Institute has experience of this, albeit in another discipline. 'Being a home for mediators is something we can do because we're here, we're established, we have the necessary disciplinary elements to give people confidence that there are ethical codes and that those mediators accredited by the Institute know that they have a code they must abide by.'
Having been Foreign Office spokesman in London and led the government's public affairs team in Germany, Smith is an unusually skilled interviewee. While delivering full and lengthy answers, he runs down the clock, pausing only briefly on occasion to imagine how his quotes will look in print. Exuding charm and affability, he unravels pointed questions: 'can I offer some context?'; 'perhaps if I set the scene a little?'; 'maybe the more serious question is…' Then, against a subtly more favourable landscape Smith tees himself up for another full and lengthy answer to a question he has posed himself.
Nevertheless, he values transparency and doesn't duck questions about the Institute's troubled relations with other service providers. The Institute suffered a setback in 2004 when its application for the right to be able to confer Chartered Mediator status on members was shot down by competitors including CEDR and the Academy of Experts. Smith, appointed in February 2006, takes the view that, 'the whole thing was caused by a lack of understanding, and in hindsight we perhaps ought to have discussed in more detail what we were actually intending to do.' Having a new director general, he suggests, at least put the Institute in a position to move forward. He later dismisses the spat as 'water under the bridge,' and, having had several 'interesting discussions' with Karl Mackie (CEDR's CEO) over the last six months is now concerned with building 'reasonable relationships with all the mediation service providers and training organisations.'
Even so, the service provider market is competitive and the Institute faces challenges to the idea of being friends with everyone. The first regards training: Smith has 'concerns about the standards of a large number of organisations.' Of the forty or so the Civil Mediation Council (CMC) has accredited, Smith believes that only 'three or four provide training of a sensible level for commercial mediation', which is the Institute's core area of focus. Elsewhere in the interview he refers to the CMC as 'taking the common lowest denominator as the entry qualification,' adding, 'I'm not sure that that's entirely helpful for people looking to be trained.' The Institute now recognises courses provided by CEDR, the ADR Group, MATA and CMA in Hong Kong, but cross-recognition - recognition of the Institute's training by these and other bodies - is, Smith admits, a work in progress.
Another issue which has irked competitors arose as a result of an open meeting in July 2007 from which it emerged that the Institute was aiming to become the home for professional mediators. What they meant to say was 'a home.' 'We don't aspire to be the home,' Smith says. 'We'd like to be a professional home for mediators and we'd like to think we can offer things that no other organisation can provide, but I'm not suggesting that only by joining the CIArb can you become a mediator - that would be daft,' he says. 'It was just one of those unfortunate phrases which we should have thought about before we put it on the street.'
Internally, Smith has overseen changes which have given the Institute a strong position in the mediation market and clear a focus on its core objectives. Hiving off the Institute's service provider arm into a separately located autonomous limited company, now called IDRS Ltd, has cleared the decks while still providing the Institute with a revenue stream in the form of charitable donations. These changes, among others, have been a significant shake-up in the Institute, and haven't always made Smith popular.
There is no denying his impact on the mediation community as a whole, however, and he aims to continue in his role as mediation's mediator: 'I hope I have helped to partly heal some scars,' he says. 'Certainly there were scars when I arrived, and there's no gain-saying that. My hope is that all the main mediation organisations can work together in the market happily. Obviously there's a strong competitive element to the mediator community, but that's a fact of life,' he concludes.
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