Mediation can provide businesses in dispute with the opportunity for control, creativity and constructiveness.
Although people in business disputes often seem fixated on a monetary amount, there is often a broken relationship or broken trust lying beneath the breach of contract or failure to deliver.
Mediation is a problem solving process. In business, people focus on results and costs. Mediation can seem to be about people and relationships and therefore irrelevant to business disputes.
But what business operates without humans? What commercial relationship is conducted without humans? Business is founded on trust and relationships. Therefore, mediation is well suited to take into account the human aspects of disputes whilst providing a platform for problem solving.
Mediation provides an opportunity to solve the dispute creatively. Maybe instead of a simple monetary amount there is future business to be done. Perhaps instead of a winner-takes-all litigation, the parties should mediate to ensure that they can work together in a future project (e.g. Hong Kong construction industry).
Perhaps the dispute that seemed intractable is based on a lack of good communication. This is something that a skilled mediator can help the parties to understand and to construct a plan for communication together.
For those who seek the bottom line, mediations are typically faster and cheaper than litigating or arbitrating disputes.