I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.
Everywhere.
I’m at an Open Space conference in Grande Ronde, Oregon which is a summit of Tribal leaders and federal government agencies from around the Pacific Northwest of the USA, and Alaska. The subject of the meeting is improving relations around environmental issues.
As we were wrapping up our action planning session this morning, a young man walked into the room who I hadn’t yet met. He apologized for being late. He got delayed on the way in.
“No problem,” I said. “What was the delay all about?”
“Oh, I live near Nome Alaska and we were out hunting. Got a bearded seal and a walrus. They’re about 45 miles offshore on some ice floes and it took us a while to get them back. I’ve got to get back and get it dried and frozen and then go out and get a beluga. Some good open water now and the whales are only a mile off shore.”
I just looked at him. What can you say to that?
“Yeah, and on top of that, I’ve never been out of state before and I can’t believe how cheap things are down here. These sunglasses I just bought for 13 bucks would cost me 50 at home. I’m going to pick up a laptop and a necklace for my girl.”
Cool.
It happens on every scale. A community, a nation, a people becomes bitterly divided on an issue and the civic conversation deteriorates to become nasty, rhetorically or physically violent and entrenched. Suspicion arises on every side and distrust, camps, territory and accusations fly. Perhaps someone launches a lawsuit, someone else accuses someone of unethical behavior. People who come forward to help are shot down if they can’t be pinned down.
It feels like we are going through that on my little Island at the moment. Yes it is a #firstworldproblem, and in more ways than one, for what we are going through is happening all over the place at the moment.
Groups go through this kind of thing all the time. But this breakdown of the public conversation creates difficult problems and has real costs. When the public conversation is throttled by power or bullying or other non-dialogue behaviors we pay a real price.
So what to do? Well, for one I like Peter Block’s take on things: transform the conversation starting with how you meet and then what you talk about. You cannot have a new conversation in the old format, so let’s get rid of the talking heads and the power points and the raised tables. It’s time to all come to the same level and discuss declarations of possibility that would inspire us all towards some action.
We need to find common purpose together, to open ourselves to each other and to host our own stuff so that we can hear other people and offer advocacy of our positions and ideas that makes us easy to be heard in return. We need to start from a place of renewed trust and good faith, even in people that might take advantage of our naïveté in doing so. We need to do that because restoring quality relationships is the only way to reboot the democratic conversation so that we might engage in some truly beautiful community building, nation building.
So, what declaration of possibility for your community can you make that joule inspire us all? What opinion, attitude or behaviour do you commit to letting go of so that a little more space can be opened? The work of cultivating possibility starts with all of us, and the burden is on skeptics. Transform your doubt into clear and legitimate dissent but keep your hope strong. Find someone across the aisle with whom you can reboot this precious space of democratic engagement, and don’t let the cynics drive you apart. In the end, only they will gain.
It sometimes boggles my mind, how easy it actually is to cross an entire continent.
Yesterday I woke up at 6am in the Beaver Valley, on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario where a beautiful crisp spring day greeted me. I set off to Toronto, now knowing what condistions the roasd were in on the high country between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. In between thos Great Lakes is the Niagara Escarpment and the oak Ridges Moraine, two incredible heights of land that received a lat winter beating this week from a cold front that scoured the whole area.
All was well with me though, on a good drive along Highway 26 which hugs to Bay from Thornbury to Collingwood and on to Wasaga Beach and Stayner. From there the road turns south becoming Airport Road and takes a bee line across the rolling countryside, up and down the esacarpment, and over the 700 foot high folds of glacial till that are now covered with farmland, pine forest and maple woods. For two hours, the bright sun, spring bird song and beautiful southern Onatrio countryside fill my senses.
Once through Caledon, the country changes radically. The land flattens out and all around are the sprawling McMansion suburbs that litter the edge of Toronto. Along Airport Road, whole sections of farmland have been converted to a monoculture of boring, treeless housing. Nothing is human scale. A small sidewalk is hardly ever used and the four lanes of road feeds commuters to the city and large transport trucks to the distribution centres, warehouses and factories of Malton and the other northwestern suburbs. A large Sikh community lives near the airport, and so the few commercial plazas in the area are devoted to saris, curries and Bollywood video rentals. Here and there, old Victorian famhouses stand surrounded by all of this development, a last echo of the previous wave of immigrants that lived there.
I dropped my rental car, boarded a plane for Vancouver and instantly fell asleep. I woke up over Kelowna just in time for our descent into Vancouver. The coast was grey and cold and pouring rain. Grabbed my bag, jumped on teh Canada Line, stopped long enough at Granville and Georgia Streets for a La Brasserie Chicken Sandwich and then caught the Express bus to Horseshoe Bay. The 330pm ferry delivered me back to Bowen Island.
It is odd standing on the deck of a ferry crossing a small channel in the Pacific Ocean having woken up a mere 12 hours earlier some 4300 kms away. This is a journey that until the last century would have taken years of my life. Instead, I walk off the ferry, shaking a little of the remaining Ontario rain from my suitcase, home before my kids arrive back from school.
Magic.