RPG for Your ADR: A New Perspective on Reflective Practice

When I first expressed curiosity about author Michael Lang's reflective practice groups, or RPGs, as he calls them, he offered to give me an orientation before I sat in on a session as an observer.

I had just started in May as an intern at the CPR Institute, an organization dedicated to advancing dispute prevention and resolution (and which publishes this blog), after completing my first year at Northeastern University School of Law.

In my short time at CPR, I had already become familiar with a range of alternative dispute resolution topics through research and writing projects, and I was looking forward to learning from an experienced mediator.

Michael has worked in the field of conflict resolution for more than 40 years, and is well known among mediators for his contributions to the concept of reflective practice.

Reflective practice is the process of learning through deliberate reflection on experience. Rather than focusing solely on outcomes, it encourages professionals to examine how they think, react, and make decisions in order to better understand their own practice.

As reflective practice continues to gain traction within the legal profession, Michael recently published "The Guide to Reflective Practice in Conflict Resolution" (available on Amazon here), which introduces the concepts underlying the RPGs.

I was meeting with Michael as part of my work with the CPR Institute to understand and discuss the state of reflective practice and why an idea that once occupied the margins of the field is receiving growing attention from conflict resolution professionals, including commercial/business practitioners. Rather than launching into a lengthy explanation of reflective practice, Michael told me a story from early in his career.

He had volunteered to roleplay as a mediator at a conference and, afterward, was told that he had done an exceptional job. The problem was that he wasn't entirely sure why. It was only later, after reading Donald Schön's "The Reflective Practitioner" (available on Amazon here), that the answer clicked.

What had made the exercise successful, explained Michael, was not any particular advice he had given, but the questions he had asked--questions that promoted self-discovery and encouraged people to learn from examining their own thinking rather than from being told what to do. That same principle underlies the RPGs.

In Reflective Practice Groups, a small group of mediators meet to explore real dilemmas from practice through questions. After the dilemma is explained, participants conduct "reflective debrief," in which they reflect on what stood out and how the discussion may influence their future work.

While topics often relate to commercial and business matters, the majority of the sessions I attended happened to involve family cases. Still, the underlying skills, such as the ability to examine one's own assumptions and reactions, are transferable across any practice area and type of dispute.

Advice is not permitted. Instead, one or two mediators present a dilemma they have recently encountered, and Michael and the other participants respond with questions. Before I began my observations, Michael left me with two questions of my own: What are you noticing? What are you curious about?

In the week after meeting with Michael earlier this spring, I observed two RPGs. The first group consisted of Irish mediators who had been meeting regularly for years. Michael warned me that he had recently met the group in person during a trip to Ireland, so the first few minutes might consist of chit-chat, and it did.

Then, one of the mediators took the floor. She described a recent mediation in detail, spending 15 minutes setting the scene. Afterward, Michael took the lead with a series of questions that did not focus on the parties in the mediation, but rather the mediator herself:

• What do you want to get from the conversation that would help you?
• Why did the issue that one party brought up cause you concern, and was the issue express or implied?
• If the agreement was successful, then why is it still bothering you?

While the mediator was on what appeared to me to be the “hot seat,” there were many pauses, indicating to me that she was considering each word before answering. Michael didn’t just hear one answer and call it a day, but pushed on. In the last half hour, the other mediators chimed in, asking her questions about her internal conflict regarding the mediation.

I remained an engaged observer, trying my best to practice active listening by focusing on what I was hearing without immediately jumping to conclusions or offering advice.

But I also found myself struggling to get out of my own head. I wanted to unmute myself and offer the forbidden–my own two cents of advice. While I understood that this was not the goal of the exercise, I couldn’t help it.

Maybe this is a knee-jerk reaction for any law student. All I wanted was to contribute to a discussion and get a proverbial pat on the back for arriving at the correct conclusion.

The next session was with a newly formed Latvian group that was meeting for the second time. The groups themselves are largely international, numbering around a dozen in total, which meet on a monthly basis, and range from six to 21 participants.

This particular session featured nine mediators, a colleague of Michael, and a translator. In addition, the simultaneous translation feature of Zoom allowed me to follow the Latvian language portion of the discussion on my own, with an artificial voice dubbing the sentences into English.

While nine mediators were on the call, no one, at first, seemed to want to volunteer. The translator and Michael’s colleague encouraged someone to start, and I could tell from this, contrasting it with the Irish group, that there was a tenseness. The type of tenseness I could remember from my undergraduate days during the Covid pandemic, when professors would randomly assign students to breakout rooms, and someone would eventually have to be the first to turn on their video and unmute.

Eventually, one mediator volunteered and shared a particularly fascinating dilemma at length. Afterward, Michael’s colleague started with the questions before giving Michael the floor.

This time, Michael only asked a few questions before telling a story. He mentioned a situation involving a similar difficult element and the impression it had left on him. Next, the colleague asked the mediators: What stood out to you? as part of the reflective debrief.

During the reflective debrief, several mediators described how the story prompted them to revisit their own experiences. One said she could clearly imagine herself in the mediator's position. Another said she was beginning to understand that RPGs provide a way of revisiting experiences that continue to occupy space in your mind without you fully realizing it. Others commented that the slower pace gave them room to reflect on situations they had never fully processed at the time they happened.

These comments were especially interesting to me as an observer because they seemed to capture something I was beginning to understand myself: that the value of RPGs lies not only in reflecting on past experiences, but in learning how those insights can inform future practice.

The Irish group was experienced and moved through the reflective practice exercise naturally, so certain nuances went over my head as I simply tried to keep up.

The Latvian group, by contrast, was still figuring out RPGs in real time. Although participants were initially reluctant to begin, by the end, almost everyone had contributed. It was as though the practical value of the exercise had begun to click as the session progressed, both for them and for me.

In attending the RPG sessions, I found myself considering how I, as a CPR intern focused on ADR and a rising 2L—someone not yet in practice—could benefit from the process. I now believe the answer is that RPGs challenge my instincts. They do not ask participants to give advice or announce their finalized answer to a dilemma. Instead, they ask the group to sit with uncertainty and examine an experience to better understand their own reactions.

For law students, especially those who have gone directly from kindergarten through law school and are now colloquially called “K-JDs,” cultivating this habit of reflective inquiry may be especially difficult when there is little experience to draw upon.

But it is still worthwhile. Rather than rewarding certainty or quick conclusions, reflective practice offers a different way of developing professional judgment, skills, and techniques that are becoming increasingly important as the profession evolves.

Reflective practice does not teach us what to do, but encourages us to examine how we think. This is an essential skill for any learner, be it in the classroom or in practice.

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Author Caroline Hillier has collaborated with Reflective Practice innovator Michael Lang on article on RPGs for the CPR Institute’s Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation that will appear in the fall.

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The author, who completed her first year at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, is a 2026 CPR summer intern.

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