LABBS Harmony College 2026: Initial Thoughts

What is the collective noun for Harmony College Faculty?

The weekend saw about 300 members of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers gather together in Nottingham to nourish each other by learning together, making music, and fostering friendships old and new. You can tell by the terms of that headline description that it was a richly satisfying experience in many ways: if you were to analyse it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you’d be ticking boxes all the way up from Safety to Self Actualisation.

As a result I have piles of notes to sort through and it may take me some time to digest and organise all the ideas the event generated, so for today I’m just going to reflect on some of the things that helped the event leave us with such a glow.

First, the event was very well organised. That sounds a kind of bureaucratic rather than touchy-feely thing, which of course it is in some ways. But what it means is that uncertainty is minimised and thus everyone feels more secure. If you all know what’s going on when and where, and have a reasonable idea of what to expect when you get there, it reduces anxiety and allows you to use your adrenaline for being excited rather than for panicking about details. Competent organisation directly supports Safety needs.

Second, the schedule (which ran on a tried-and-tested model) has a great balance, in multiple dimensions. There’s the balance between plenary sessions that give everyone the chance to feel they are sharing the same experience and stream sessions that provide a subject-specific focus and thus allow depth of learning and the formation of common interest groups, and pick ‘n’ mix sessions that give an opportunity for doing other random stuff and thus alleviate the potential for FOMO you get when choosing your single stream.

There’s also the balance between formal session times and break times – that is, between opportunities for formal and informal learning. You need structured learning activities to deliver content, but you also need time for people to process the content, whether by going for a walk in the sunshine or by talking it over with their friends (old or new).

The social structure of the event is also very enriching. As a multi-stream event open to the whole national organisation, you get both a large pool of people to hang out with, and opportunities – both structured and unstructured - to interact with different interlocking subsets of that pool. Many clubs had contingents of delegates, from just a couple to over 20, in attendance. This meant people arrived with a sense of ‘home’ social circle – people to travel with, to share rooms with, to have meals with – so they had a ready-made sense of belonging.

But these groups often had people signing up to multiple different streams, so they immediately got to meet people from other clubs, in situations that guaranteed they had something in common to facilitate their interaction. So the organisation gets more integrated as people form bonds of shared interest and experience, and the culture within individual clubs gets more versatile and multi-faceted as people bring back these experiences to share with their ‘home’ group.

There is something very socially enriching about being part of something where there are lots of intersecting relationships. I have often thought that the perfect party invitation list consists of people all of whom know somebody else other than the host, but nobody knows everyone.

I experienced this in a specific way with my team for the Directors Stream, which consisted of two people I have known for many years, and have worked with both as fellow educators and in various coaching relationships. They also know each other well as fellow contest judges in the same category. But we had never worked as a team as a threesome before, and we found we all enjoyed the sense of novelty and consequent creativity underpinned by a solid foundation of trust.

All of these structural benefits were brought together and focused into a shared ethos by our guest educator’s keynote address. There’s a lot to be said about that in its own right, so it will get its own blog in due course. But for now it’s worth noting that setting out an agenda of shared values at the outset gives a context that binds the whole event, with its miscellany of activities, into a shared endeavour. The new polecat to celebrate LABBS’ 50th anniversary also played a part in this experientially, but the keynote itself set up a mode of discourse and pool of ideas that then resonated throughout all the subsequent activities.