Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
A braided river delta in Alaska, image courtesy of NOAA
Not as the be-all and end-all of their organizations and teams, but a good leader will hold a container in the workplace in which disagreement is productive, generative and honouring of different perspectives. The best leaders will also hold coherence.
I’ve often said that organizations need to be a bit like rivers, in that there is a coherent direction of flow but many back eddies. If you think about the way a large river travels through an estuary, it creates side channels and cuts of corners and bends while still channeling across the land. Life lives in these eddies and its even possible to productively travel in the opposite direction from the river flow efficiently using these back eddies. Organizationally speaking, sometimes you need to retreat from a well established course of action, and having disagreement and dissent within the organization can sometimes show you the path back to another way of doing things.
Peter Levine and Dayna L. Cunningham have a link-rich piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review today that discusses this, and its implications for civil society beyond just organizational or movement-based settings. The final paragraphs are good:
Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.
Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.
Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.
If we cannot practice disagreement in places where we also have an incentive to collaborate together, we will be hard pressed to do it in the looser fields of community and broader society. And that enables those who would like us divided to use disagreement to generate separation.
The Eternal Flame at the King Centre in Atlanta which I visited in 2013
I was born in Toronto two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were as distant to me as was apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War. Even as I grew up through my first 16 years, the heightened social justice actions and liberations struggles of the 1960s were mere whispers across time and borders. Neither the Globe and Mail or the Star, the CBC or CTV, offered us much in terms of what was really happening in the world. No internet. No videos. No social media.
On October 20, 1984 I participated in a huge anti-nuclear march in Toronto and that day met dozens of people who handed me pamphlets, bent my ears to their causes and opened my eyes to what was happening in the world from Kurdistan to South Africa, to the revolutions in Nicaragua and the resistance in El Salvador, and to issues at home, the recognition of Aboriginal rights, the pursuit of justice and equality for women and queer folks and people of colour. It was a carnival of struggle and hope.
A few weeks later the US held an election in which Ronald Regan won a second term. Jesse Jackson ran in that election, for the Democratic Party nomination, but it was Walter Mondale and Gearldine Ferraro who were on the opposite ticket. Nevertheless, Jesse Jackson had become a voice for the continued struggle for civil rights, turning his prophetic attention to the damage that Reaganomics was already starting to do in the world, decades before that economic philosophy had been debunked. (Even today, after 45 years of wealth inequality and economic violence, people seem to believe that trickle down economics is still worth a go – “cut those taxes!” they say, plunging us further into despair).
Jesse Jackson was my generation’s Martin Luther King Jr. His era as THE public face of civil rights and racial justice has been over for some time, due in part to his illness, but also due to the new faces of the struggle that have emerged in this century, speaking to and meeting this century’s challenges and needs. Nevertheless, reading of his passing today sent me to a state of nostalgic gratitude for how his work and voice and presence brought the spirit of Martin Luther King to a new generation of social change activists like me. We could see and hear him speak. We could catch the cadence of his voice and the relevance of his message to the times we were living in. When you heard him speak, you could look around yourself and confirm the truth of his observations, and take inspiration from his calls to action and his “perfect mission.”
I liked this obituary from the Guardian this morning. It contains some quotes that resonate.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
You work with what you have, and you play the field in front of you.
“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds…[in these times] he would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use [these times] not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
I think that teaching is the one for our times, one for all of us, and one for the legacy that Jackson, King and others have delivered to us all along the long arc of the moral universe.
Rest in power.
There is a very weird thing happening Canada right now. If you spend any time on the algorithm driven social media and you live especially in western Canada you will have noticed that there is a tremendous amount of out of proportion outrage being generated around issues like “western separatism” and residential school denilaism.
It’s the reason I left Facebook and Twitter permanently. What was coming through my feed was pure poison. It is poison for democratic deliberation, it is poison for community cohesiveness and it is undermining governance and it is harming people.
And it’s serving someone, driven by a clear agenda which seeks to reduce government regulation, and do the bidding of large foreign corporations and investors. This isn’t new, but the capture of social media algorithms by these companies and their strategic initiatives are driving our communities and countries apart. RAPIDLY.
Craig Turner has a great piece on this and it’s worth a read if you want to get a grip on reality.
For those of us who facilitate for a living the question of online vs virtual dogs is constantly. The surge of good online technologies has enabled participation across massive distances at very little financial and environmental cost. A good online facilitator (and they are NOT common) can create a warm and effective dialogic container using virtual tools. Online tools are useful and online spaces are a brilliant option for accessibility. They help in all kinds of ways. Since well before the pandemic I have offered courses and workshops online but I have to admit that I still prefer face to face especially if I know what we are doing requires building a strong and enduring relational field.
Yesterday a prospective client told me for the first time that they no longer do zoom trainings for their staff. It is not a good use of their training budget because staff don’t like it, it’s is not effective and by now most folks have figured out how to be online with as little participation and attention as possible. As a teacher I too find this state of affairs to be pervasive and I expressed my admiration for this policy.
This person is pointing to the biggest problem I have with online: it doesn’t seem to build the enduring relational field that face to face meetings do. For transactional outcomes I suspect online is fine but if you spend all of your time relating to people mediated through technology, I suspect that it has an enduring negative effect on relationality, and therefore long term sustainability of a team’s culture and intangible outcomes.
I’d welcome research on this. Today I came across an article in my feed that reports on a court case from Ontario that ruled on the question of whether online was the appropriate forum for a settlement conference. The judge ruled it was and the article summarizes his findings this way:
Spiegelman does not state that mandatory mediations should presumptively be virtual, nor does it elevate technology over judgment. Justice MacLeod was careful not to replace one rigid default with another. None of this will surprise experienced mediators or counsel. But the decision carefully probes the lingering assumption that physical attendance is inherently superior and reframes face-to-face presence as a question of process design, evidence, and proportionality.
For mediators and counsel this confirms the reality and post-COVID experience that virtual and hybrid processes are no longer provisional. They are part of how mediation in civil justice now operates and they will be evaluated by courts by considerations of function, not nostalgia.
This case provides a clear message. Courts will have little patience for procedural skirmishing over mediation logistics unless a genuine process concern is identified as the issue. What drives settlement is not the room, but the readiness of the participants, the authority at the table, and the quality of the process design.
Spiegelman is a reminder that, in every mediation, form should follow function and disputes about form should not be allowed to derail the goal of resolution.
The article points out that there is little evidence to suggest that there are differences in outcomes between online vs in person settlement conferences. My observation is that this is probably true depending on what you consider the outcome to be. If the outcome is simply “a settlement” then perhaps this is the case. But alternative dispute resolution, practicesd more broadly, can also be about conflict transformation, relationship repair, and enduring accountability.
To that end I looked for some research that discussed this further. To my surprise there was very little. I would have thought over the past five years that justice system researchers might be interested in this question. but perhaps they were simply not asking the RIGHT question. Also, it should be said that I didn’t scour the entire internet for answers!
But I did find this paper from Paul Kyrgis and Brock Flynn at the University of Montana: The Efficacy of Mandatory Mediation in Courts of Limited Jurisdiction: A Case Study from the Missoula Justice Court.
The authors examined a number of landlords-tenant disputes to see if virtual conferences were effective in not just settling a case but creating an enduring settlement. To do that they simply looked at whether cases returned to court.
Finally, remote mediation appears to have mixed results. Remote mediation has undeniable benefits in facilitating participation and program scalability. But those benefits come at a cost. The ultimate settlement rate for remote mediations was a full ten percentage points lower than the aggregate ultimate settlement rate. That lower ultimate settlement rate suggests that remote mediation may not foster the same level of accountability or engagement as in-person sessions.
Their full paper is worth reading for the literature review and their methods. They alos spend a lot of time discussing all the various factors that may or may not contribute to enduring settlements and the cases that make up their sample. And I am definitely extrapolating from their conclusions a bit when I say that something happens face to face that builds relational accountability.
But still, this is one useful way to look at what else happens in face to face meetings vs online because in dispute resolution I surmise that some forms of relationship repair helps to make the settlement enduring.
Those of us responsible for designing and hosting meetings of all know in our bones that something different happens when we are all in the room together. We know that relationships come into play much differently. we know that strong fields are built and these are essential for building enduring results.
Six years after our pandemic started do we finally have data to be able to look at this question? If you know of good research in this field drop it in the comments.