A Tribute to O.D. Legend Don Cole: A Conversation with a Socially Responsible Pioneer at a Castle in Vienna

Gus: When was the 1st International Conference held?

Don: I think it was about 1978.

Gus: So what happened next?

Don: Well, the next big event occurred around 1981. I was at an OD Network Conference in Snowmass, Colorado and there was a guy there who introduced himself as being a behavioral science consultant to the British police in Northern Ireland. I was very interested in conflict, so I asked him how things were going in Northern Ireland and he said 'not very well'. He said there had been more than 500 cases of kneecaps and elbows being shot off. And I asked him what the chances were of solving the problem - and he said he didn't think that the problem would be solved until the violence got worse.

I realized I was talking to a behavioral scientist and I had difficulty in believing what I was hearing, so I asked him if what I heard was correct - and he said, 'yes'. He was a behavioral scientist and he didn't believe that the situation in Northern Ireland would get better unless there was MORE violence. I thought that was a terrible conclusion for him to come to - and he agreed - but nevertheless, that's what he thought. So I asked him if he would be willing to meet with other behavioral scientists to talk about other possible options. He said 'absolutely not.' Lord Mountbatten had just been killed by the IRA and he said that if the IRA found out who he was, that he would be killed as well. So with that I dropped the subject.

But I saw him at breakfast the next morning and asked him how he had slept last night - and he said 'not very well'. He had been thinking about what we had talked about and he had come to the conclusion that he would be willing to come to such a conference if I could guarantee that he would be anonymous. I said 'OK' and began searching the world for behavioral scientists who would like to come to such a conference - and one of the first people that I contacted was Leonard Doob at Yale, who had worked in Northern Ireland and who has worked boundary disputes in Africa. He said he would come.

Next, I contacted Terry Prothro, who was head of the behavioral science center at the University of Beirut in Lebanon. There was a lot of conflict in Lebanon at that time - and he said that he'd be delighted to come. So I recruited about 70 people from around the world to attend a conference on Conflict Resolution Technology in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1982. I wrote a book about that conference and the papers presented there -- plus papers from other well-known conflict resolution personalities. It was available from the OD Institute - it's now out-of-print - but I'm hoping to get it reprinted.

The group that met in New Hampshire was a very interesting group. One of the members of the group was a fellow by the name of Dr. Josip Obradovic from the University of Zagreb in Croatia. He suggested that we meet in Dubrovnik. So the following year we did - we went and met in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia - a beautiful walled city, one of the most beautiful in the world. The year after that we went to the University of Southampton. The year after that we went to a castle in Zeist, Netherlands. We went to Israel. Then we were scheduled to go to Poland, but Poland was still under the Communists and the people in Poland appointed a committee that was headed by a Communist and was loaded with Communist people who did not know OD. (I didn't think that was a proper setting for an OD conference - so I cancelled it.) Instead, we held it on a riverboat on a 10-day trip down the Volga River. People liked the riverboat trip, so the following river I arranged for space on a boat on the Yangtze River in China - and we spent a week sailing down the Yangtze River. The following year we went to Saalback in Austria, high in the Austrian Alps. Then we went to Maribor, which is part of Slovenia. We went to Berlin and we went to Lithuania. Then we went to Volgograd, Russia. Then we went to Oxford University in England. Then we went to Nepal. Then to Cairo where we met with the parties to the conflict on Cypress. From Cairo we went to Mexico to talk with somebody from Chiapas. Then we went to Dublin, to Zimbabwe, to Goa, India and of course this year, we're in Vienna, Austria.

Gus: Those international events were all what we know today as the OD World Congress?

Don: Yes.

Gus: How has it evolved over time?

Don: I think the evolution over time is related to the accumulation of a base of information, some of which gets carried from one conference to the next. There is a core group of people that comes and the Congress is highly participative, so there are opportunities to input information to this conference from earlier conferences. This is not a conference where we emphasize what's come out in the literature. My own feeling is that the half-life of OD knowledge is about six years and it usually takes at least six years to write a book, so if you've got a book hot-off-the-press, it's already half out-of-date. We don't encourage a whole lot of input from books or articles. We like to get input from people who are actually doing things and learn from the very latest knowledge being practiced - rather than what's being written because knowledge is go quickly out dated.

Gus: Today's meeting structure is such that when people show up for the conference, anyone is invited (and encouraged) to make a presentation and it is a very fluid type of environment. Has that always been the case?

Don: Yes - that's been our pattern. It's a colleague conference, rather than an academic conference. Rather than just a few people being on the program, and being publicized - we put everybody on the program. It creates an environment which is very rich and fosters lots of learning.

Prev | Next