Getting the "Whole" story

I find it interesting how a night at the Utah Symphony often teaches me something about the work I do in mediation. It happened again. On Saturday night I attended the much lauded final performance of Keith Lockhart as the Music Director for the Symphony. I bought the tickets at the first of the season with my regular season tickets and had not thought much about it since then. I have had a hectic month or so and so my connection to the newspaper, news, the world in general has been limited (this I like!) so I missed all of the stories about the performance scheduled for that night.

The perfomance was "Leonard Bernstein's Mass" and this meant nothing to me as we drove to the Symphony that night. When we arrived I took care of the personal essentials - a cookie and the restroom - and got to my seat about 10 minutes before the perfomance began. I looked at the program notes, but did not have my glasses and the print was too small, so I didn't read anything. As the program was beginning I leaned over to my partner, who had read some of the program notes, and asked what was this about. She responded "you should have read the program notes, I cannot explain it to you now."

I sat there for the next two hours, there was no intermission, totally bewildered by what I was seeing, hearing and feeling. You see, I love the Symphony and this night I did not. I won't bore with you all the details, I'll just say that at the end I could not understand why the Musical Director had picked this performance as his last and I was disappointed.

The next morning I was headed out on my daily walk with my dog and I was listening to podcasts. I came across one from the week before which was an interview with Keith Lockhart and others on the upcoming final performance. My first instinct was to hit delete... but I didn't and I am glad I didn't. Over the next 40 minutes I listened to an amazing explaination of what I had seen and experienced the night before. As I walked and listened I found a new appreciation for what I had witnessed and been a part of the evening before. All of a sudden something that was confusing and unpleasant became something moving and interesting.

So, how does this relate to mediation and conflict resolution? Many times when I am working with parties who are unable or unwilling to talk with one another, I find it frustrating that they each have compelling stories about their side of the issue, yet they are unwilling to sit in the same room and share them. I fear that as a mediator, when I carry those stories back and forth between the parties, that something important is lost. I am not able to carry the "Wholeness" of what the parties need to hear and experience with one another. They may leave my office feeling like I did when I walked out of Symphony Hall that night, confused and disappointed. I think one of the challenges for us as mediators is to find ways for the parties to have these experiences and see the other person in context, in their "whole" story and expereince.

There is one more part to this story. One other element the guests on the podcast talked about was the difference between listening to a performance on a recorded device versus being there in person. I also relate to this. I LOVE the Symphony, but I do not enjoy listening to classical music as a recording. There are some things that you have to experience, be in the middle of, to appreciate fully and for me classical music is like that. I love it when I am sitting in Symphony Hall and the music washes over and through me. I don't have that same reaction when it is on my home stereo or ipod.

There are things that people have to experience in context and in person for them to fully understand them. Often, conflict falls into this category. For conflict resolution to happen the parties have to understand the back story of the other and to listen to the experience of the other in person. They need to allow the story and experience of the other to "wash" over and through them. It is my experience that when this can happen in a mediation, transformation begins.