A manager and an employee are sitting in my office, both completely certain of their own version of events, and I have about forty minutes to run a conversation that is meant to be fair to both. Most of the preparation people do for a moment like this is practical: re-read the file, check the policy, rehearse a calm opening line. Almost nobody does the one thing that actually changes how the meeting goes, which is stepping into the other person’s position before you are sitting across from them.
I call this the Three Chairs. It comes from a classic NLP technique called Perceptual Positions, one of the tools I still use constantly as a Certified NLP Trainer, and it sits behind the mediation approach I describe in my book ENGAGE. It takes about ten minutes before a hard conversation, and it does something your notes on the file cannot: it lets you feel the logic of every side before you are in the room holding the balance between them.
What the Three Chairs actually is
Most of us prepare for a difficult conversation entirely from our own seat: what we think happened, what outcome we want, what we are worried might go wrong. That view is necessary, but it is also incomplete, because the first time you properly hear the other person’s logic is often live, in the room, while you are also trying to stay composed and look neutral. The Three Chairs technique makes you do that listening in private first, by physically occupying three separate positions in turn before anyone else arrives.
The three chairs, and what happens in each
1. Your own chair. Sit where you would normally sit and be honest, just to yourself, about what you know, what you feel, and what you want out of the meeting. Naming your own bias here matters more than it sounds, because a mediator who has not admitted their own leaning is the one most likely to act on it without noticing.
2. Their chair. Physically move to a different chair or a different spot in the room. Speak out loud in the first person, as if you were them: “I feel…”, “From where I sit…”. The rule is that you are not allowed to argue back or judge while you are in this seat, only describe their logic as though it were completely reasonable, because to them, it is.
3. The observer’s chair. Step to a third spot, a few paces back from the first two. From here you are neither you nor either of the people in the dispute. Describe out loud what you now notice about the pattern between the two positions, with no side taken, the way a calm narrator would describe two people arguing on a park bench.
The mistake that undoes it
Most people who try this skip the movement and do the whole thing sitting still, imagining what someone might say rather than actually occupying their position. The physical shift matters more than it looks. Standing up and moving to a genuinely different spot changes what your brain will let you access. Skip that step and you are still in your own chair, just doing an impression of someone else from there.
Where this actually shows up
This is built for the moments People and Culture leaders live in more than anyone else in an organisation: mediating a grievance between a manager and their report, sitting between two department heads fighting over the same headcount, preparing to deliver a restructure decision to a team that is not going to like it, or coaching a manager through a conversation they have been avoiding for weeks. Do the Three Chairs beforehand and you walk in having already heard the objection you are about to get, which stops you being blindsided by it, or worse, unconsciously favouring whichever side you found easier to prepare for.
Try this
Before your next mediation or difficult conversation, set up three actual spots: chairs, or just marks on the floor. Move through positions one, two and three in order, out loud if the room allows it, before anyone else walks in. Pay attention to whatever surprises you about position two. That is usually the thing worth asking about once the real conversation starts.
This is one of a set of named techniques I teach and write about, alongside the Distortion Destroyers for defusing a vague objection, and the Rapport Triangle for opening a conversation before there is anything left to mediate. None of them require a personality change. They are skills, and like any skill, they get sharper the more deliberately you practise them.