I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what I heard:
1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating? Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design. Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness. Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?
2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done. We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love. What is it you can’t NOT do? Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances. Are we working on the issues that people really care about?
3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.
4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots. Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract. If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation. If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted. Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well. What if your became the mentors to adults? What if clients directed our services?
5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting. That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere. Who is surprising you with their leadership?
6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy. Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented. Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed. Who is already changing the way services are provided? Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed? What gives us energy in our work?
7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us. Rather, the angel is all of us together.” Experts can’t do it, folks. They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us. It has to be.
8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?
9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh. But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure? Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.
10. Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?
11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next. Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates. The time for apologizing for relationship building is over. We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.
12. Generosity, forgiveness and love. These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work. If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness. This is NOT soft and cuddly work. Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact. Love and power are connected. One is not possible without the other. Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening. Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable. But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?
We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!). But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.
A beautiful extended reflection on the methodology of study in a coast Salish context from author Lee Maracle:
The object of ‘study” from a Salish perspective is to discover another being in itself and for itself with the purpose of engaging it in future relationship that is mutually beneficial and based on principles of fair exchange. We study from the point of view, that there is something unknown to be discovered, that all life contains something cherished, but hidden from us and that if we observe from as many angles of perception that we can rally, engage one another in exchanging observations, and consider the internal dynamics governing the behavior of the being observed from the perspective of its perfect right to be, we will understand it in relationship with ourselves. We do not believe we can fully understand the being under study, but we can come to see it clearly enough to engage it in relationship.
This process is a collective process, requiring many different sets of eyes, many different points of view. This is because if we examine something from one subjective angle [and all human observation and thought is subjective] then we will only understand an aspect of the being under study and we are very likely to engage in huge errors, leap to absurd conclusions based on subjective assumptions and so forth. We engage one another in this process on the presumption that all points of view are valid, but they must be POINTS OF VIEW, not biases. The points of view are accepted. They are never right or wrong, just different. No argument, attempt to persuade one another is useful here and thus we do not need to compete to see who has the best eyes, the clearest vision. The process of discovery requires different points of view, different sets of images, and different perspectives about the being under examination in order for the collective to be able to discuss it’s possible internal dynamics. We first see how it moves, see how it conducts itself, mark its sense of movement, its sense of time and being, we connect its conduct to its own being and then we connect its movement to its desire, its sense of time to its longevity and its behavior to its condition and its history.”
When we do this, we come to see that the end result is a powerful story, a long lasting relationship and this fosters, beauty, hope, heart and song.
via transCanada.ca / Keynote Speakers and Other Participants.
This is a gorgeous inspiration for the power of collective harvesting.
Jessica Nagy captures why it is I can work with skeptics but not cynics. Much of my work has to do with at least having a sense of possibility. You can doubt the outcomes or the effectiveness of something, but if you are turned to possibility and hope then you can at least make a contribution. Cynics have both doubt and hopelessness and unless they offer some alternative, then they become corrosive to processes that are just beginning.
I find in general many people who declare themselves cynical are actually skeptical. They want some thing to work out, they hold out hope for things, but they hedge their bets. The trick in doing transformative change work is to work with cynics to unleash the skeptic within. And if you can’t do that, then you have to jettison them from the process. I have had several projects where cynics have had a dominating influence on our work, and we usually get what they are looking for, which is a grinding halt.
When I am working with core teams to host the core of a process I welcome skeptics but try to establish a principle early on that cynics aren’t welcome in the core process. Once we build a process and a container for our work that is robust enough to hear from everyone and to move forward, cynics are more than welcome, but only when the container is strong enough to hear what they have to say without their influence destroying what is being built.
Having said that, there are times when things need to be taken down, and THAT act of discernment is one that is a practice. For example, does it pay to be cynical or skeptical about last year’s Copenhagen process? I was cyncial about Stephen Harper’s participation in that gathering and said so on my blog here. So my call to embrace skepticism and cut loose cynics is not a polyannaish call to embrace only the positive and ignore the shadow. A moral compass helps determine what it is you lend your hope to.
Where do you draw the line between skepticism and cynicism? How do you work with both?
Here are three resources which have recently crossed my path that involve using fun and games for social change. Some of these work with groups and some work across social spaces – demographics, communities or organizations. What I like about these games is that they provide a built in set of measureables that can be used to gauge progress and evaluate behaviour change. Sesms like combining fun, visible change and simple yet powerful standards for noticing shift is the holy grail in this kind of work.
Games for Change: Games for Change (G4C) is a non-profit which seeks to harness the extraordinary power of video games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, education, human rights, global conflict and climate change. G4C acts as a voice for the transformative power of games, bringing together organizations and individuals from the nonprofit sector, government, journalism, academia, industry and the arts, to grow the sector and provide a platform for the exchange of ideas and resources.
The Fun Theory: I’ve blogged this before, but The Fun Theory is “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”
The FreeChild Project: Lots of games and resources at this website dedictaed to youth engagement around social change. FreeChild has been working for almost eight years to promote the idea that when engaged in meaningful ways throughout society, the knowledge, action and wisdom of children and youth can make the world more democratic, more non-violent and engaging for everyone. By working with adults as allies young people learn, teach and lead democracy throughout society!
Hosting an Open Space gathering in Kamloops today with about 40 people who work hard around issues of child and youth health. We are exploring ways to connect differently and do our work at the next level. The conversations have started and the topics are rich. I thought I would put the list here and see if any of you readers in blog land have resources to offer that we can forward to the folks meeting here today. And if you are in Kamloops and do this work, come on up to Thompson Rivers University and join the conversation.
Session 1
11:00 – 12:15
- How to develop intergenerational programming (ie seniors and youth)
- How do we engage children who come from families dealing with addictions?
- How can we drastically improve reading instruction in your child’s school? These top 5 items from research can be supported in a half-hour daily routine in the classroom.
- How do we start the process to develop a children’s charter in Kamloops?
- What opportunities are out there to use youth wilderness programs to engage youth in meaningful community development?
- How do we better connect youth/schools to the local food system? For example: engaging shcools to start gardnes or increasing local food sold in schools?
- How to create a culture to encourage families at perinatal stage to have access to services and supports which are integrated with traditional service providers?
Session 2
12:15-1:45
- Wow! Statistics!
- I would like to better understand our needs and gaps so that I can better support the community.
- How do we develop and sustain our networks? What are the possibilities of our networks?
- How to create service for parents with disabilities?
- How can we reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases in sexually active youth?
Session 3
1:45-3:00
- How to develop fitness/physical literacy program for 2.5 to 5 year olds?
- How to keep children and youth engagement authentic, original and fresh so they have the agenda and don’t get bored?
- How do we better connect school and community centres and programs for collaborative work?
- How do we reduce stigma attached to social programs to include more children youth and family?
- Teachers and youth workers as gardners, hiking guides and community development professionals.
- How do we collectively support and empower parents in our communities to recognize that they have such a crucial role?