David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has just posted six essentials for effective engagement, which is accompanied by a link to a great resource on public participation that he wrote ten years ago. David’s post trigged my own thinking on consultation.
Consultation is one of the backbone activities in my business. I simply love designing consultative processes that bring together stakeholders from multiple worlds to help co-create something. Most of my practice of course has centred on Aboriginal issues, but the lessons I have learned extend into any endeavour.
A few years ago I was asked to put together a think piece on my consultation philosophy. I chose to start with some stories that have informed my practice from the very outset.
It begins with two stories from my Elders.
Many years ago when I was embarking on my first serious consultation job with the British Columbia Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, I had an Elder staying with me, His name was Bruce Elijah, and in addition to being an Oneida chief he did a lot of work healing communities. A couple of nights before my first trip, to Chetwynd, British Columbia, we were sitting at my dining room table drinking strong tea and talking about this work.
Late into the night, as we were finishing up our conversation, Bruce summed it up by telling me that the first thing that he does when he goes to work with a community is ask to be taken to the community�s place of power. Sometimes it is a mountain, sometimes a school. It can be a natural place or an artificial one, it doesn�t matter. What matters is starting from there. If you start at the place where the community is most powerful, you can continually revisit that place in the healing work.
The second story was one told by Utah Phillips, the old anarchist folk singer at the 1996 Vancouver International Folk Festival. He told of a time when he was a young man in the 1940s and he had an opportunity to visit a cowboy who knew dozens of songs from the great cattle drives of the 19th century. The cowboy lived in a small house in New Mexico and was dying. It was a tremendous opportunity to get these songs from the mouth of a man who had been on these cattle drives so Phillips arranged a visit.
When he arrived at the cowboy�s house he was met at the door by a nurse who said that although the cowboy was in poor health, he was looking forward to the visit. It would take a few minutes to get him ready so Phillips was invited to make himself at home in the living room.
Phillips began perusing the bookshelves and was immediately struck by the huge number of books from the ultra conservative John Birch Society. His initial reaction was to ask himself what he was doing there, about to have a conversation with a man who was bound to feed him political babble that Phillips would find deeply offensive.
And then he caught himself and he realized that he wasn�t there to talk politics with the cowboy, he was there to get songs. He realized that talking politics with the cowboy would only result in a conversation full of canned ideas recited from a book. Phillips was after the truth, and in concluding the story he said, �if you ask people about what they truly know. They will always tell you the truth.� And what they truly know is not contained in the books they read, it is contained in who they are and what they do and what is close to their heart.
These two stories are the basis of everything I do with consultation, because the pose the two fundamentally most important questions that need to be answered in any consultation process:
- Who are these people really? And
- What is true for them?
The job of the consultation manager is to find the answers to these questions. And both these Elders give a very useful clue about how to go about finding out the answers.
Consultation is required when one group of people needs to know something about another group of people. It is not about selling ideas or concepts, nor is it about eliciting support for a position. It is fundamentally an investigation, an inquiry and an engagement. The selling, messaging and consensus building can come later, or can even be a sideline to the consultation process but those things have no place in consultation. On the contrary, consultation is often used as a tool in the service of those other activities.
So we can speak of consultation as a part of other processes, like building shared vision, developing consensus, creating new relationships, finding mutually beneficial solutions, mitigating impacts, demonstrating openness. Indeed none of these activities can be conducted well without knowing something about the �other� party. And the process of finding that something out is consultation.
So my job, as a consulter is to discover something about someone else that will help me to further my goals. How do I do this? And what is the job of the consultee?
My job is to know my stuff. I have to be intimately familiar with everything I am consulting on, because it is not the job of the consultee to know these things. My job is to know clearly what my motives re for engaging in consultation. My job is to communicate clearly to my consultee about all of the above. My job is to learn as much as I can about the consultee, interpret this information honestly and apply it to my work.
The job of the consultee is to tell me stories. They may know a little bit about what I am doing, and I may fill in some gaps, and they may be able to tell how they think what I am doing will impact on what they are doing, but I never consider this the responsibility of the consultee. The consultee needs only to tell me the truth about their life. The rest of the job is mine.
I’ve been a strong advocate of this starting position for my whole career, and it has served me well. Listening to people’s stories about who they are and what they love to do gives you the context that the stats and studies can’t give you. Ultimately whatever you are doing will hinge on this context, and all the numbers and objective data in the world are no substitution for being out on the land with a logger or an Elder listening to them describe their connection with the place.
Share:
A new Hubble deep field photo
From the Hubble Space Telescope comes this view of the very early cosmos:
In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.
The description notes that this slice of sky is comparable to looking through an eight foot long soda straw.
Sometimes, it just helps to know that there is a bigger universe out there.
Share:
Two new websites of interest to Open Space Technology practitioners and friends. First, my friend Lisa Heft has finally got her consulting practice website up and running. After being in business for 30 years, she really knows what she is talking about and she is one of my all time favourite space openers. She has taught me, more than anything, how to model enthusiasm and cherish participants.
Also, my other California friend (and close friend of Lisa) Jeff Aitken, has just launched his own weblog which is going to rock you. Jeff’s blog impresses me with his ability to hold a multiplicity of worldviews all spinning together at the same time. Jewish, Celtic, Hopi, Buddhist, Hindu, Grateful Dead, all swirl together in a stew of emergent meaning. Dig it:
buddhist meditation. breathing from the belly for years. (don’t forget to do situps or the abs get soft, if you care.) koan practice: the ten thousand things return to one; to what does the one return?
recovering indigenous mind. here’s a boggling ride. walk back the migrations of your ancestors, literally, right back to the center of their tribal ceremonial worlds, leaving their traditional prayers and offerings all the way, asking permission from the ancestral spirits of every land you walk upon. learn their creation stories, follow their ceremonial cycles, speak their languages; find yourself re-woven (always were woven) into this original medicine. honor their migrations, grieve their colonizations, take a new name, stand around the fire with your new friends who never left this “immanent conversation” (kremer). the vast sweep of progress melts into the good mind of balance, here and now, our relations all around us. dew re-sonno dhys! shalom!
guru devotion. da is brilliant, but the devotional path is not my path. i did follow jerry garcia around for thirteen years, but we all knew that it wasn’t jerry, it was the fountain of fire that moved thru him and transported us thru strange and compelling worlds. no, i prefer the zen master who shows the truth — is the truth of course, but kinda steps aside from that dynamic. until saniel bonder came along. “lots of teachers want to make meditation popular… i want to make realization popular… to lift a sublime (my word) baby out of the murky (my word) bathwater” of the guru path. friends, this guy is onto something. waking down in mutuality: realizing our true nature as simultaneously infinite and finite, both Consciousness and our messy, embodied, quirky, neurotic individual selves. i’m on the bus; stay tuned.
He’s one of my very favourite embodiments of post-modern identity – holding open the reality of living within a multiply paradoxical identity. I’m tuned in. Welcome Jeff and Lisa!
Share:
Canada’s Best Blogs has just released the March list of the Top Blogs. These don’t mean anything other than the fact that the blogs have been nominated and judges liked what they saw.
But the fun part is that Hockey Pundits, a group blog I am a part of, got picked this month. Congrats go out to all the Pundits who keep that group blog a fun place to write about hockey.
Share:
I’m off again on another business trip, this time to Fort St. John, British Columbia, located on the praries EAST of the Rockies. Yes, BC has praires too. A whole different kind of scenery than the Skeena Region. Following that, I’ll be in Kelowna.
So in the absence of any meaningful blogging, here is my latest list of linkage, featuring 10 sites worth spending time on:
- A collection of Anarchist writings via plep
- Queen of Suffereing: A spiritual history of Korea via MetaFilter
- Grow…a game. via Bifurcated Rivets
- The Winning ways of Alinsky and Gandhi via Wealth Bondage
- The Nobel Prize, including lectures and articles by laureates
- Chapter 11 of Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene from (the now bilingual) Tesugen
- An interactive version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook from the British Library.
- How stories affect human action in organizations, a great paper via Plexus
- Italo Calvino via Wood s Lot
- The Tyee, a British Columbia online current affairs mag, celebrates 100 days.
I’ll expect a full report on each link when I get back.