In formal mediation, you have an agenda, you have ground rules, you have parties agreeing to all of this. That was highly structured. Much of what we did never reached that level. Yet you had the same behaviors in bringing parties together and getting them talking around a table. Sure it was, but not by this formal standard.
Parties wouldn t come around the table.
So you did Mediation things and the definitions become blurred, but I don t want to get hung up on that. There were formal mediation that I did and there were informal mediation, or conciliations, call them what you want. That was when we had conciliators who were conciliators, and mediators who were mediators, and the differentiation was that I did the official hard-core mediation and they did all the conciliation work. Then I would come in. Then I would meet them once or twice just to get the feel.