A Breakout Room, a Boundary, and a Breath
My heart was beating so fast it felt like it would leap out of my mouth if I dared to speak.
We were in the middle of a client project focused on organizational restructure—and the project lead, someone with significant authority in the organization, had been consistently hostile in our meetings. I’d show up to facilitate a session, and he’d come at me. Loud, dismissive, questioning every method, every framework, interrupting and undercutting me in front of his team. And this behaviour extended to his teammates as well. The energy he brought wasn’t just resistance—it was aggressive. At times, it even felt abusive.
After one especially charged meeting, I sat at my desk after the zoom meeting ended, heart racing, trying to catch my breath. I wanted to walk. I absolutely loved the work I was doing with this team, but had serious doubts about my capacity to continue with things as they were. I considered emailing the client lead and say, “This isn’t working. I’m done.” And honestly, no one would have blamed me.
But I also knew: this kind of rupture is exactly the kind of moment I talk about in my work as a conflict transformation practitioner. And I wasn’t going to let it pass without trying to live my values.
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So many of us have been taught to fear conflict. To tiptoe around it, to swing back and forth between suppressing it or blowing it wide open (depending on the power we held in the moment). And when harm happens, when that inevitable rupture arrives, we’re often left with two options: to swallow it up in painful silence, or cause a tamasha (means to cause a scene in Hindi).
Call it what you will: call-out culture, cancel culture, accountability culture. The point is—we often get stuck in binary thinking.
But what if conflict didn’t have to mean the end of the story?
What if rupture is the moment when our values are begging to be practiced—not just preached?
Cancel Culture: A Symptom, Not the Root
We tend to talk about cancel culture like it’s a singular problem. But cancel culture is actually one of many responses to harm, a symptom of deeper systemic failures. As Fierce Vulnerability author Kazu Haga writes,
“We’ve created a world that is more prepared to punish than to transform.” When traditional systems of accountability fail us, HR departments, courts, institutions, we create our own. But without a culture of repair, we end up replicating the same harm in new ways.”
The Convergence Magazine series on cancel culture breaks this down clearly: cancellation often arises when people feel unsafe, unseen, and unheard—and when no other pathways to justice feel available. It’s a survival strategy in the absence of anything else.
But survival isn’t the same as liberation.
From Reaction to Design
My Master’s degree in conflict analysis and management deeply shaped how I approach inclusive process design. I’ve learned that when we take the time upfront to co-create clear guidelines, intentional processes, and space for reflection, we lay the groundwork for trust, accountability, and creativity.
Whether I’m facilitating a strategic planning process, supporting a team to reimagine a youth program, or guiding an organization through a complex merger, I bring this lens to help teams navigate tension, anticipate conflict, and turn it into a generative force for alignment and transformation. Just like carbon has to experience intense heat and pressure deep within the earth to become a diamond, relationships and communities often need to pass through tension, discomfort, and conflict to reveal their most resilient and brilliant form.
Without that pressure, the carbon remains ordinary. It’s only through the stress, the squeeze, that transformation becomes possible.
Conflict, too, is not inherently destructive. It’s a natural force, if stewarded with patience, from a resourced place, and rooted in mutual dignity and respect, can shape clarity, strength, and connection, only if we have the tools, time, and trust to stay with it long enough.
Inclusive process design means building the expectation of rupture into how we gather, organize, engage, and lead. It means creating structures that don’t just weather conflict, but actually help us grow through it.
Designing for Integrity
Conflict doesn’t always mean harm. And harm doesn’t always require exile.
But both require that we stay in integrity, with ourselves, and with each other.
Imagine if our workplaces, communities, and movements treated conflict as information? A sign that something in the system isn’t working, or needs care, not cancellation?
Imagine if customer service didn’t just follow scripts but practiced empathy, discernment, and repair.
Imagine if we trained not just facilitators and therapists, but everyone to meet conflict as an opening, not a threat.
This is what it means to design for rupture. Not to make conflict comfortable, but to create conditions that welcome hard conversations.
To move beyond cancel culture and toward meaningful conflict resolution, we must intentionally shape the conditions for dialogue, repair, and accountability. I offer that these conditions can be created with attention to three things: space, pace, grace.
Space.
Space is about structure. It means building flexibility into agendas, processes, and meetings. Not packing them so full that there's no room for real human moments to emerge. Space is what allows discomfort to surface, questions to be asked, and truth to be spoken. It’s the difference between checking boxes and creating containers where trust and honesty can grow.
Without space, we miss what's unspoken. Especially when there may be language differences. With enough space in our journeys, we can tend to what matters most.
Pace.
Pace is about rhythm. It speaks to the speed at which we move through dialogue and decision-making. A slower pace allows people to process complexity, consider different perspectives, and respond—not just react. It creates time for the emotional and relational aspects of conflict to unfold with care, instead of being rushed through.
Pace honors the depth of the work. It says: this matters enough to take our time.
Grace.
Grace is the ability to hold imperfection—our own and others’—without immediate judgment. It’s a posture of compassion, humility, and self-awareness that invites us to stay in the work, even when it’s messy or painful. Grace allows us to make mistakes and make amends.
Grace is not softness—it’s strength rooted in care.
When we tend to space, pace, and grace we make conflict navigable—not by avoiding it, but by designing for it. This is how we shift from reactive cancellation to intentional transformation.
Mapping the Spectrum of Responses to Harm
What might it look like to move away from the cancel/forgive binary? Here’s a fuller spectrum, inspired by the work of Mariame Kaba, adrienne maree brown, Fumbling Towards Repair:
So coming back to the story I began with, I knew I couldn’t continue with this client unless I was resourced. I asked myself “under what conditions could I stay on with this client?
I decided to reach out to an associate I work with and trust, someone not involved in the project, and asked her to join the next meeting, just to sit in. Not to intervene. Not to fix. Just to have someone in the (virtual) room who had my back, someone whose presence reminded me I wasn’t alone.
It helped.
It helped so much that the next time he offered a harmful statement, I asked for a 15-minute pause in the meeting and pulled the project lead and my associate into a zoom breakout room I had created.
I let him know, calmly and clearly, that the way he’d been showing up in our sessions wasn’t working. I shared that it was having a negative impact, not just on me, but on the team, and that I couldn’t continue in the same way. I named that the intensity and dismissiveness were creating harm, not just tension.
Then I shifted gears. I said, “If we’re going to keep moving forward, we need to shift the dynamic. I’d like to work with you to figure out what that could look like. What would make this feel more constructive for both of us?”
My associate stayed silent, simply bearing witness. Her presence was steady, allowing me to stay grounded while opening the door to a different kind of conversation—one rooted in shared responsibility and repair.
He paused. The defensiveness I had seen in previous meetings flickered for a moment, but then softened.
He said, “Honestly, I didn’t realize how I was coming across. I’ve been under pressure, but that’s no excuse. I can see now how my tone, and how I’ve been responding, might have shut you down or made others uncomfortable.”
Then he added, “I’m open to doing this differently. If you have suggestions, I’m listening. And I’m happy to check in with you after each session to make sure I’m not repeating the same patterns.”
It wasn’t a perfect resolution. But it was a start. An opening. A signal that he was willing to look at himself and collaborate on a shift. And that gave me enough to keep going, not because the harm had disappeared, but because the conditions for accountability and repair were finally on the table.
To his credit, the dynamic shifted somewhat. He interrupted less. He began deferring more to his team. And I could see his team members beginning to take up more space, to contribute with more ease. In asking for greater accountability, I had given myself, and the team what was needed to move through the situation with clarity and strength. Perfect doesn’t exist and I did have to offer feedback again before the project concluded.
In a future post, I will write about personal and family experiences (no one knows how to push your buttons like family :)) that did not go nearly as well, and where I chose estrangement/exile.
For now, knowing that I don’t always have to cancel someone to honour my boundaries feels like power. Like choice. That we can choose the conditions under which we stay. That we can confront with integrity. And we can do so with support, on our own terms.
Choosing to stay doesn’t mean tolerating harm. It means creating the conditions where we can meet conflict with integrity AND still take care of ourselves.
Staying in relationship, choosing mutual belonging over isolation and banishment, requires care and a commitment to community.
I offer some prompts for you to reflect on and notice where you may be operating with a false binary (forgive/cancel).
What systems or relationships in your life have made space for rupture without exile?
Where have you seen a repair effort work? And what made it possible?
What would it mean to practice your values in conflict, not just in calm?