What do Zebras have to do with Mediation Anyway?

Someone asked me about the zebra again last week. Why that animal, on everything, the website, the card, the cover photo? I gave the answer I always give. Life isn’t black and white. My specialty is reading between the lines, and that’s where the actual solutions live, not in the bold black stripe, not in the brilliant white one, but in the space beside them. That answer is embedded in my logo. But what’s missing is a second layer of meaning I was conscious of on a biological/game-watching level, but suddenly it dawned on me that there are the meaning in using that animal as my brand mark contains more than one layer. My brand mark contains a deeper meaning!

So, let’s get a bit into the biology before I tell you about the new layer of meaning I just discovered: The Burchell’s zebra, the one native to southern Africa, the one I grew up around, isn’t only striped in black and white. Between the bold stripes there’s a fainter one, pale brown, sandy in tone. Zoologists call it the shadow stripe. It’s the detail that marks a Burchell’s zebra apart from other subspecies of zebra.

And true to all zebras, no two of them are striped identically. Distinctly, animal to animal, the way a fingerprint is distinct, person to person. The theory is that it helps the zebras identify each other. When a new foal is born, the mother blocks its view of other zebras by imposing her stripy torso between her baby and the others. The pattern is imprinted in the brain of the baby. As the baby’s pattern is on the mom’s.

The point is, no two zebras are alike. Mathematically, at some point, that point might be disproven, but it would take a very determined researcher with lots of money and a patient thesis supervisor to ascertain that. The stripes themselves do more than that one job. Yes, there’ is the mom/baby scenario, and then there’s this: On a hot day on the African plains, the horizon shimmers, the heat lifts off the ground and everything at a distance goes wavy. A herd of zebra grazing in the long grass in that shimmer becomes almost impossible to pick out. The stripes disappear into the distortion, and you genuinely cannot tell whether you’re looking at the hot landscape or at a herd of animals. I know this because I’ve experienced it.

And then one of the zebras moves, and suddenly the whole herd becomes visible because the shimmer pattern has been disrupted. So, the stripes plus distance plus heat shimmers serve to hide the truth of the herd in plain sight.

Until someone moves and breaks the pattern.

What I see is camouflage at a distance (stripes + heat shimmers), and identity up close (mom and baby recognition). The stripes both hide and identify, depending on where you stand; what your point of view is. I think that’s true of conflict too. From a distance, every family rupture looks like the last one I saw. Every falling out between business partners follows the same shape I’ve traced a hundred times before. It’s only up close that the pattern turns out to be nobody else’s. Up close everything, from personality to history to needs, desires and emotions, is unique to the individual. We each have our own fingerprints too, like the zebras have their stripes.

Distance is where things blur together. 
Proximity is where the difference shows up. 
Proximity is the only place where the work actually can get done. 

When we rebuilt my website recently a new free assessment tool was added, around that word, Shadow Stripe. The developer (my son) seems to have understood my logo at a deeper level than I had. He named something I’d been doing intuitively without a name for it. Naturally not deliberately. Reading between the lines is a formula, yes, but as a mediator I need agility: I follow the distinct fingerprints of the conflict so that I understand where the black ends, the white begins, and what’s lurking in the shadows. I learned that lesson without realising it, when I first read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at about 15. The opening line is

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That rule applies in family mediation as it does in community, corporate, and any other mediation I do. The histories are different. What each is protecting is different. The sandy-coloured line I need to read runs somewhere specific to that mediation space, on that day. That’s a harder discipline than it sounds. Frameworks are useful, I use mine constantly, but a framework becomes a liability the moment it’s mistaken for the answer instead of a way toward one. The shadow stripe is a reminder built into my own logo not to skip that step. Read the specific pattern in front of me. Don’t assume it matches the last one just because the surface stripes look familiar.

I still tell people my logo is about not seeing things in black and white. Now I explain the rest too: Your situation is unique. It is my job to honour that in helping you find acceptable solutions.