Having Tea with Your Demons and Creating in the Tension: A Tribute to Christina Sickles Merchant

• Date: 01 December 2015
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Cathy A. Costantino
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21141

C R Q, vol. 33, supplement 1, Winter 2015 S129

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the Association for Confl ict Resolution

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/crq.21141

Having Tea with Your Demons and Creating in the

Tension: A Tribute to Christina Sickles Merchant

Cathy A. Costantino

 is article describes the process Christina Sickles-Merchant and Cathy

Costantino used to write Designing Confl ict Management Systems.

 e article explores the interplay of organization development (OD),

alternative dispute resolution (ADR), and dispute systems design

(DSD), which the authors used to create an approach to interest-based

confl ict management systems design (CMSD) that develops systems in

concert with the stakeholders.

The fi rst time I met Chris, she was delivering a session on organization

development (OD) at the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolu-

tion Annual Conference in San Diego. No, delivering is the wrong word.

She was channeling her knowledge about OD, a discipline that was com-

pletely foreign to me at that time, to the audience by pointing, writing,

cajoling, prancing, inviting, drawing, scribbling, and creating an energy

that was palpable, vibrant, and exciting. I had no idea what OD was (hav-

ing a lot of friends in the medical profession, I thought it meant “over-

dose”), but I knew I needed to learn more about it and the fascinating

person named Christina Sickles Merchant.

It was 1991 and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) was all the rage

in the federal government.  ere were ADR steering committees, ADR

oversight committees, ADR subcommittees, and ADR working groups.

Everyone in the federal government was talking about “doing” it, “institu-

tionalizing” it, and making ADR “part of the culture.” I was an attorney at

the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an agency tasked with cleaning

up the thousands of lawsuits and millions of assets left in the aftermath of

the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. As supervisory counsel in the

ADR Unit, I had attorneys, paralegals, and legal technicians ready to use