Text of an address by Kim Pearce to the Western States Communication Association Annual Convention, Albuquerque, 2025

It’s an honor to be here to say a few things about my long-time friend and colleague, Stephen. I begin my reflections with a gift that Stephen and Karen gave Barnett and me many years ago when we moved into our new house. It’s a beautiful stone vase, the natural stone imbued with a variety of subtle color and texture differences. It’s artistic in and of itself and yet quite functional in showcasing another form of artistic beauty — flowers. This vase sits in a prominent place in my house and is a reminder of you.

The vase is also a metaphor for how I have experienced Stephen over the 15 years of working together. Stephen was extraordinarily artistic and creative. And yet his creativity in our work together was always functional. So, I’d like to spend my brief time telling you a few stories that highlight the kind of creative, yet very practical work Stephen dedicated his life to, and that also helped advance CMM as a practical theory.

The work that that I’m about to describe occurred in the decade of the 1990s and 2000s and grew out of a deep desire to contribute to better sustainable social worlds, particularly the messy and complex social worlds of communities.

Our work began in 1994. Stephen, Barnett, Shawn Spano and I spent the academic year experimenting with and refining an event design begun at the University of Massachusetts, called the kaleidoscope project. The kaleidoscope events were designed to help change the pattern of communication around hot button issues. At the end of the year, we had two overarching reflections: 1. The events were successful in helping to create new and different ways for participants and the audience to experience difference in a much less polarizing way; and, 2. Although successful as an event, we didn’t think it moved the needle much in terms of any lasting change. It was this second point that the 4 of us took quite seriously.
I remember as we talked about what we thought was necessary for more sustainable change we landed on organizing, forming a non-profit, and working at the community level. It was Stephen who suggested the name of our organization. He had taken a mediation course and suggested we become The Public Dispute Consortium or the PDC.

There were about 12 of us when we formed the organization: Stephen, Barnett, Shawn, Victoria Chen who was a grad student of Vernon and Barnett’s in the 80’s and was teaching at San Francisco State University, Kevin Barge who at the time was at Baylor University, and a number of Shawn’s and my students who were interested in applying CMM in a community setting.

We learned quickly that the name Public Dispute Consortium conjured up images of warring parties and wasn’t really a name that would easily get us in the door of a City Manager of Mayor’s office. It was Stephen again who suggested our new name the Public Dialogue Consortium. That was in 1995. Thirty years later, the PDC is still in existence under the leadership of Shawn Spano.

I want you to imagine what it must have felt like for a group of professors who were quite knowledgeable of CMM but had never used the theory in a large-scale system to begin conversations with the City Manager of Cupertino, CA where De Anza College (which is where I taught full-time) is located. And now imagine being a City Manager with a small group of Communication Professors in your office pitching an iterative process using the lens of communication and the tools of CMM to enrich your community. Needless to say, it took 6 months of conversations with Don Brown the City Manager to convince him that this was a good idea.

We ended up working in Cupertino for about 6 years in a community-wide action-research project the City called, The Cupertino Project: Voices and Visions. In the early years, Barnett and I would host weekend retreats where the 12 of us would apply the lens of CMM to critique and learn from our recent events, develop the next iteration of event designs, and do role playing activities to practice our own facilitation skills. At the time, Stephen was writing humorous short stories from his childhood. So, at the end of the day we would gather around the living room floor while Stephen, in his very animated voice, read one of his short stories. Some of his stories were so funny we were laughing until we cried.
Stephen wrote facilitation manuals for a number of groups in the community that we were teaching and training. As in any community, we were working with some difficult and challenging people. Stephen coined the very creative and useful phrase “look for the wisdom in the whining.” Very good advice, I think.

Our work in Cupertino emboldened us to think about other projects that might make a difference. We decided to bring an international group together for a retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California to share ideas, learn from each other, and develop a supportive network. There were approximately 50 participants from around the world, all using different methods to improve the quality of public discourse. What we all had in common was a commitment to create environments where differences are explored openly, constructively, and humanely. Those of us in the PDC convened the event and Stephen played a big role in the creative design of our days together.

I think the success of our work in Cupertino and the international conference emboldened Stephen and Barnett as they wrote their book on Moral Conflict. Part 3 of their book describes examples of transcendent discourse that they knew firsthand made a difference.
In the early 2000s, Stephen, Barnett, and few other colleagues and I were having drinks in the hotel bar during a WSCA convention. We were asking ourselves questions about how our discipline can be more effective in our classrooms, curricula, research, and practice in utilizing the lens of social constructionism in the co-creation of better social worlds. We landed on the idea of an NCA Summer Institute. In 2006 Karen and Stephen with the help of UNM hosted a four-day Summer Institute in Albuquerque. titled, Catching Ourselves in the Act: A Planning Session to Enrich Our Discipline through Social Constructionist Approaches. Sixty participants attended representing approximately 40 universities and 5 communication practitioner organizations. Among many other things, NCA’s interest group Communication as Social Constructionism grew directly out of this conference.

In 2010, Barnett was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We convened a small group of our closest friends for a weekend retreat in our home to explore the question of CMM and its future. Stephen was part of that group and by weekend’s end the consensus was to create another non-profit organization. The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution is now in its 13th year. Stephen was a founding Board member and helped us get our legs before he resigned.

The stories I’ve told only scratch the surface of the breadth and depth of Stephen’s contributions to the work we did together. Like the vase, he combined artistic creation with very practical and productive functionality. To use another metaphor, there are many pebbles in the pond that have rippled out far and wide thanks to Stephen.
Margaret Mead reminds us, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”