Among all the other crises in which we find ourselves, local, national and international, economic, environmental and political, we are in the midst of a conflict crisis.

What do I mean by a “conflict crisis”? The conflict crisis is our inability to effectively work and problem-solve together regardless of setting, whether within our families, our workplaces, our classrooms, our communities, on the street or in our governments.

According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, 152 of 163 countries are presently involved in armed conflict. Many of our governments are unable to pass legislation and effectively deal with domestic and international affairs; international trade deals are at an impasse. The Harvard Program on Negotiation’s annual list of notable negotiations repeatedly reports failures, fumbles and missed opportunities in political and high-profile business negotiations.

As Albert Einstein stated, “[w]e cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” The traditional negotiation processes and dispute resolution methods of the past are not working. Despite this knowledge, we doggedly apply the same mindsets, metaphors and models that have failed us for generations, hoping for a different result. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, it is time we truly stopped and seriously questioned what we are doing and how we are doing it when it comes to negotiation and problem-solving.

There has been a call to explore new and varied ways of approaching the multilayered and complex nature of contemporary conflict in an increasingly interconnected world (Lederach 1998; Galtung et al. 2002; LeBaron 2002). It is not simply a matter, however, of learning or applying new processes or better formulas and strategies for resolving disputes and tackling problems. The issue is more fundamental than mechanical. What we need to tackle the conflict crisis is to re-examine our underlying relationship to and attitude towards conflict and disputing. We need to create a new conflict culture.

In our Western world, our dominant culture metaphors around disputing and negotiation are war and games. In our competition-driven society, the object of almost all of our life activities is to “win”, to defeat those we perceive as our enemies or to best our opponents as we engage in our day-to-day battles and contests, petty and profound.

As linguist Deborah Tannen states, “[c]ulture, in a sense, is an environment of narratives that we hear repeatedly until they seem to make self-evident sense in explaining human behavior. Thinking of human interactions as battles is a metaphorical frame through which we learn to regard the world and the people in it” (Tannen 1998, 13). What we say shapes what we think, how we feel and ultimately how we act and the choices we perceive as available to us in so acting (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Fauconnier 1997; Morgan 2008, 483). War and game metaphors define our roles and goals within negotiation and conflict situations, and how we seek to achieve our ends. In a war we are warrior, soldier; the “other side” is our enemy. Our goal is to defeat, at least to diminish or at worst to annihilate our enemy with some form of power or force. In a game, we are strategist, schemer, contriver; the “other side” is our opponent. Our goal is to win, to outsmart and outmanoeuvre through a series of clever and cunning moves and countermoves.

This is the adversarial and competitive mindset that permeates our lives, reinforced through systems of punishment and reward, through images relentlessly generated by the media and through the perpetuation of age-old human and social myths. The adversarial mindset reinforces and further develops our instincts of fight, flight or freeze as primary reactors to conflict and disputing.

Scholars and practitioners in the field of conflict management and dispute resolution , however, are increasingly encouraging us to shift our approaches from confrontation to collaboration, from competition to cooperation, in an effort to improve process and product. Teachers and trainers are increasingly turning towards approaches that involve more than traditional “neck-up” rational-logical formulas and strategies. Recognizing that conflict, like life, is a whole-body experience, leaders in the field of negotiation and dispute resolution are exploring teaching modalities and process design that encompass whole-brain reasoning and whole-body expression in an effort to access the multiple dimensions of conflict and its resolution (Alexander and LeBaron 2013).

One of these modalities is the arts. In its myriad forms, the arts are being used to assist in grasping concepts, engaging with ideas, developing emotional and social intelligence capacities, and in invigorating and innovating process. More and more we are realizing the power of the arts to inform, illuminate and inspire us—in the words of Edgar Schein—“to hear more, see more, and feel more” (Schein 2013, 1).

Looking to the arts for assistance has become increasingly popular in education and is part of a larger trend towards interdisciplinarity in learning. In many areas, the post-Enlightenment “hierarchicalization” of knowledge and segregation of disciplines is giving way to a “flattening” of the fields and cross-pollination between them. There is a growing realization in education of the importance of the arts to inform and enhance theory and practice in other fields.

Over the last 30 years, in particular, there has been a proliferation of research and scholarship related to arts-based teaching and learning at all levels of education and in a variety of learning environments, especially in professional schools including management and medicine. Within the wider field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, teaching, training and practice incorporating the arts has grown significantly over the past decade. There is, however, little use of the arts as a teaching modality in the field of negotiation specifically. Negotiation training using “first generation”¹ methodologies (Honeyman et al. 2010) remains the dominant approach in law schools and schools of management. The continued application of these methods, in turn, contributes to a lack of evolution in negotiation practice. As Lee Shulman (2005) notes, an inert pedagogy breeds an inert profession.

Our dominant culture negotiation and disputing mindset are firmly rooted in Western values and beliefs. The fact that we are living in a multicultural world-society, however, requires that to be relevant and successful, the new professional must operate, both at home and abroad, in an environment that does not necessarily share Western-style approaches to negotiation and conflict. The reality of an interconnected global community and the critical need to build and maintain relationships requires less “naming, blaming and claiming” (Felstiner et al. 1980) and more tending, mending and ending.

Embracing new mindsets requires us to break traditional frames. Recent developments in the field of neuroscience have indicated that we are capable of changing, of “unlearning”, even the most deep-seated beliefs and concepts. Through the phenomenon of neuroplasticity (Doidge 2007) we can change the structure and function of our brains and, in essence, “reprogram” ourselves.

The challenge in the area of conflict and disputing lies in how to accomplish this “unlearning” when the dominant frame is rooted in an individualistic “me” mindset, and “us versus them” polarity and not in a collaborative, collective problem-solving mentality. In the “us versus them” world, problems are traditionally framed as “your problem” not “our problem” and the way to fix them is to “prevail over” another in some manner. Problems, however, rarely reduce themselves to a two-dimensional field. “Either/or”, “black/white”, “right/wrong” dichotomies, are seldom the sum total of the challenge at hand. Moving from “me” to “we” and from two-dimensional to multidimensional thinking requires a paradigm shift.

How, then, do we combat the conflict crisis and create a new conflict culture? How do we shift our thinking, break free of outmoded mindsets and develop the new skills and abilities to succeed in the twenty-first-century global economy? How do we learn to work effectively with others to build, maintain and, if necessary, end associations in ways that preserve relationship or do the least harm to reputation and brand? This book is about an arts-based approach to negotiation and problem-solving that responds to these questions. It proposes the introduction of a new negotiating and problem-solving metaphor—the musical ensemble—in the place of war and games, and the use of a music-based pedagogy to expand how we approach teaching, learning and resolving conflict, generally, and how we acquire the skills necessary to optimally function in this new negotiating and problem-solving environment, specifically.

The research study described in this book came to life, essentially, because I looked at a problem with the eyes of a musician, not the eyes of a lawyer-negotiator. It reminds me of the story of Tal Golesworthy, the boiler engineer who designed a revolutionary heart repair surgery, initially for himself, because he looked at the problem with the eyes of a plumber and not the eyes of a doctor (Golesworthy 2011).

I have the good fortune of enjoying two careers: one as a classical pianist, the other as a conflict resolution practitioner. As a classical pianist I have performed around the world as a soloist and duo pianist in recital and w...