We all recognised what was going on. This was the mediator or neutral. He had been trained. He had mediation techniques and jargon. It was, in short, a fully developed mediation process with techniques and procedures and rules.
Mediation is quite unlike Arbitration or Litigation or Adjudication.
Those latter three are almost always operated to decide legal rights, and impose a binding decision on the parties. But mediation is non binding. Anyone can walk away at any time and go to a tribunal to get your rights. In construction disputes the difficulty has not been people walking away from mediation. Rather it has been a devils own job to get people to walk towards Mediation.