Impasse As a Turning Point, Not a Failure

Every mediator, and every attorney who has sat through enough mediations, knows the moment. Four hours in, positions haven't moved much, the room is frustrated, and it feels like the day is about to end without a deal. The instinct — for negotiators and often for mediators too — is to push harder: change tactics, swap who's talking, raise voices, apply more pressure.

Earlier this year, Professor Laura Frase of the UNT Dallas College of Law gave a presentation to the Dallas Bar Association's ADR Section that made the case for doing the opposite. Her argument, grounded in cognitive psychology rather than negotiating folklore, is that impasse isn't a failure of the process. It's frequently a pivot point in the process that actually produces a resolution.

Why Getting Stuck Is Part of Learning, Not a Sign It's Broken

Frase's presentation drew on nearly a century of research into how people solve hard problems, going back to psychologist Graham Wallas's four-stage model of creative thought: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The core idea is unglamorous but well-established — genuinely new thinking often requires a period where the conscious, effortful mind stops working the problem directly, so that background mental processing can restructure it.

Applied to a stalled negotiation, that reframes what's happening at an impasse. Both sides have done the preparation stage; they've argued their positions until neither is moving. What standard mediation practice treats as the end of the road, cognitive psychology treats as the setup for the next stage — incubation — provided the parties actually take it.

The Two Takeaways Brian Pulled From the Room

Robison, who chairs the Dallas Bar's ADR Section, distilled Frase's presentation into two points immediately afterward, and they hold up as the practical core of her argument.

First: an impasse is not a failure. It's frequently the point where tension finally dissipates enough for both sides to reflect honestly on their own priorities and take stock of where their case actually stands — something that's nearly impossible to do while still mid-argument.

Second: the mediator's job at that moment isn't to force a resolution. It's to get both sides to set the dispute down, even briefly — during the same session if time allows, or over the next few days if the impasse hits late in the day. Time away from the problem, rather than continued fixation on it, is what tends to produce the fresh angle that actually breaks the logjam.

Why "Just Take a Break" Isn't the Whole Story

The mechanism matters here, because "take a break" on its own is not the insight. Frase's presentation was specific about what kind of break works: low-cognitive-load activity, unrelated to the dispute, that lets conscious effort step back without shutting the brain off entirely. A walk outdoors. A snack downstairs. A phone call to the family. Anything that isn't more argument.

That's the incubation stage doing its work — unconscious processing continuing to turn the problem over in the background, which is a different thing from either grinding forward or giving up. The payoff, when it comes, tends to arrive as a genuine "aha" moment: a solution that surfaces with a felt sense of rightness, not something reasoned into existence through another round of positional bargaining.

There's a wrinkle Frase's research addresses directly, and it's one that matters especially for experienced litigators: expertise can make this harder, not easier. The same depth of knowledge that makes a good lawyer good can also produce a kind of cognitive tunnel vision — being so certain of the terrain that genuinely new angles get filtered out before they're considered. Stepping back doesn't abandon that expertise; it lets it operate at a level where it isn't actively defending a position.

What This Looks Like in Practice

None of this requires either side to concede anything. It requires patience with a moment that feels, in the room, like the day is failing. Frase's framing — verified, in the final stage of her model, by testing whether the new idea actually holds up once both sides look at it again — gives mediators and counsel a reason to sit with that discomfort instead of forcing a premature push.

For litigators bringing a case to mediation, the practical takeaway is to build room for this into the day itself. If a session is heading toward a stall in the afternoon, that's not necessarily the moment to escalate; it may be the moment to propose a genuine pause, rather than a coffee-fetching pretend-break where everyone keeps rehearsing arguments in their head.

From the Mediator's Chair

Brian E. Robison is a mediator and trial lawyer at Brown Fox PLLC in Dallas, Texas, and chairs the Dallas Bar Association's ADR Section. With nearly 30 years of experience in complex business litigation, he offers both legal judgment and practical knowledge to resolve disputes during mediation. Visit here to schedule an appointment directly.