Greggonomics 17: Echoes of Experience

Yesterday evening, after some business meetings in Cambridge, my wife and I went to the Corn Exchange to see one of my favourite bands – Echo and the Bunnymen.

We had been warned that legednary lead singer Ian McCulloch doesn’t hit every note now. To be honest, he is still a proper front man. He was almost perfect, later on in the set he did miss the odd note – and nobody cared. If anything, it made the whole thing feel more grounded. The crowd weren’t judging, we were with him (especially me when he said about the Scouse accent being the greatest of them all!).

McCulloch and co were there to entertain, they didn’t have anything to prove. That’s very very different to watching someone still trying to prove something – in any profession. Early on, a lot of what you do is about range. You focus on technique, timing, getting things right. There’s a lot of proving yourself wrapped up in it, whether you notice it or not.

With time, things change. Not because standards drop, but because you get clearer on what actually matters. You no longer need every note to land perfectly for it to work.

That feels familiar in mediation. The early instinct is to get everything “right” – questions, summarising, reframing. All useful, but not necessarily the point.

The better work tends to be quieter. Reading the room properly. Knowing when to leave something alone. Letting a slightly off note pass you by if fixing it too quickly would do more harm than good.

In disputes, people don’t arrive clean and polished. They bring history, frustration, their own version of how things got them here. If the process expects everything to be neat and ordered and prescriptive, it struggles. If it can hold a bit of imperfection without losing direction, it usually gets somewhere.

There’s also something about familiarity. Everyone in that room last night had their own connection to those songs. I had mine, some from 40 years ago some more recent and what was happening on stage was only part of it.

You see the same dynamic in most mediations. (At least) two versions of the same story, both of them real from where each side is sitting. As a mediator you don’t resolve that by forcing precision. You resolve it by creating enough space for something workable to emerge. Nothing dramatic – just experience doing its job.

It’s less about hitting every note and more about knowing which notes matter. Last night felt like a good example of that.

The Last Word

“Conquering myself Until I see another hurdle approaching Say we can, say we will Not just another drop in the ocean” Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cutter

That line fits perfectly. It’s continuation, getting on with it. You see the same thing in mediation. People don’t arrive in a perfect state and they rarely leave with a perfect outcome. What matters is that something moves and it’s enough to get past the next hurdle.

That’s usually where the real value sits.

See you next time, Gregg